April 25, 2008 08:24 am
—
By Jim Atwell
You already know that, in
what now seems another lifetime,
I was once academic
dean at a big community college.
Besides the standard
English courses in composition
and literature there, we
also taught non-credit remedial
courses for enrollees
who, though high-school
graduates, weren’t ready for
basic freshman English.
We even had a special remedial
sequence for immigrants,
“English for Non-Native
Speakers.” One faculty
wag said we ought to add a
parallel course: “English for
Native Non-Speakers.”
That quip drifted back recently
as I was discouraged
to read about a piece of
quackery that is still earning
money for charlatans on the
national speaking circuit. It
was and is an example of
California Dreamin’ that offers
a solution for inner-city
students’ problems with
standard English. Ebonics
(that’s the scam’s name) says
to solve the problem by recognizing
teens’ slang as a legitimate
language, one they
have an inherent right to
use.
The educationist’s world
(I know it well) is always
prone to slapping a political
or rhetorical Band-Aid on a
running sore — and then
calling it cured. Lord knows,
lost skills in language is such
a sore. And yet theorists,
perhaps because they’re
stumped and scared, are still
willing to cob together a new
pseudo-cure — or even break
out an old one: That Ebonics
con has been around a long
time, at least since the
1960’s.
But the sad fact remains:
The country is full of young
Native-Non-Speakers. And
not just in cities. When warm
weather really settles in, go
sit for a while in Pioneer
Park. Sit and listen. You’ll
hear the local equivalent of
Ebonics.
It’s based on a very narrow
vocabulary. Missing
words and emotional intensity
are expressed through a
one-syllable obscenity that
serves as noun, as verb (transitive
or intransitive), as adjective,
and as adverb, as
well as expletive.
Deprived of that all-purpose
obscenity, I suspect that
some Pioneer Park denizens
would be struck mute.
Can something be done
for language skills, which
continue to decline nationally?
Yes, if we have the will. I
found out what it takes 35
years ago, over in Edmeston.
I learned it from Margaret
Jones, one of my late first
wife’s teachers and her lifelong
friend.
Margaret grew up on a
poor farm in North Ed and
attended a one-room school
there. Then, though Edmeston
was only four miles
away, she boarded with two
widows in the village so that
she could attend high school.
After her June graduation,
she went to Oneonta Normal
for a two months’ methods
course and started teaching
that very year — 1918, the
year of the Spanish ‘flu. She
kept on teaching, as she used
to say precisely, for the next
“fifty years and four
months.”
For 30 of those years she
was full staff for as series of
one-room schoolhouses —
boarding with neighboring
families; arriving early to
start the woodstove; staying
late to sweep the room; and,
in between, teaching eight
grades all their subjects.
Margaret never married.
With her church, teaching
was her life’s focus. She was
devoted to it, kept all her
grade books, still had sample
work for most years she
taught.
In 1971, still an English
professor, I sat next to Margaret,
examining themes
written 50 years before by
farm children. I marveled at
spelling, punctuation, complex
sentences those supposedly
deprived kids had produced.
“Margaret,” I said, “I can’t
get work like this out of the
college freshmen I teach.
How did you do it?” Her answer
was immediate: “It was
what we made them read
and what we made them
memorize.”
As she talked on, I realized
that she was preaching
heresy by present-day standards.
Make students read
classics, works beyond their
full understanding? Well,
how else, Margaret would
say, to stretch their abilities?
How refreshing, how sensible,
at a time when the first
whine of “It’s too hard!” sets
colleges to buying dumbeddown
texts — college texts
written to an eighth-grade
reading level. And memorization!
Margaret’s pupils
learned a poem a week, often
eight to 10 stanzas. Then
each one recited it, standing
before classmates who could
mouth each word and waited
for the first mistake. That
made poetry stick. I’ll bet
many aged farmers, driving
tractors through crisp fall
air, still recite snatches of
“October’s Bright Blue
Weather.”
As they read and memorized,
those farm kids were
grasping, in unconsciously,
the capacities of English.
And, if they didn’t understand
every word, they were
still internalizing rhythms
and other language resources,
making them their own.
Challenging reading and
rigorous memorizing. There
they are, beyond the smoke
and mirrors of gimcrack
schemes, the two keys to language
skills. In their simplest
forms, they are the way
we began the job as babies:
by mimicry, by making
sounds even before we fully
understood them. In Margaret’s
classrooms, that process
continued, broadened, deepened.
When she confronted her
farm kids with “The Gettysburg
Address,” she had them
study the text, memorize it,
and declaim it before their
peers and parents. After
that, Lincoln’s rich rhythms
and depth of feeling were
theirs.
Of course, it takes willpower
to learn language that
way. And work. I wonder,
have we still enough of the
first to enforce the second?
The signs don’t look good.
Find out about Jim Atwell’s
book, “From Fly Creek
— Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking
Country,” at www.
JimAtwell.com.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.
Photos
