The Joy Composition Club

Philadelphia, Pa.—College English professors are trying to teach students how to write when some of these same pupils haven’t read much. “Student reading levels continue to decline,” Thomas Lawrence Long of Thomas Nelson Community College said at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual convention. “What we need is a ‘reading across the curriculum’ movement to go with the ‘writing across the curriculum’ movement.”

Dr. Long and his co-panelists agreed that at every level of education, students are expected to read less. “Students’ attitudes towards writing have improved but the same has not happened with their attitude towards reading,” Pamela Sue Hardman of Cuyahoga Community College says. But does that type of attitudinal writing even make for good graffiti?

Even professors who love books, such as the ones on this panel, adopt something of a pro-choice position on them in the classroom. “I have found that nothing is more effective than the experiences students bring to the classroom,” Maria Treglia of Bronx Community College says.

She uses “contemporary works that may not always use Standard English.” She wants to “Give students the chance to be experts because they know as much about feelings as we do.”

To be sure, Dr. Treglia faces unique challenges at BCC, which is part of the City University of New York. “About half of our students are parents,” she notes.

More than half are foreign-born, “for whom English is a second or third language,” Dr. Treglia points out. She requires “more than fact-based essays” because she thinks it “helps students to get to know themselves better and validates their thinking.”

“Eventually students get to work with fact-based essays,” she says. Strangely enough, as “student-centered” as Dr. Treglia’s approach is, even her charges sometimes find it surprising. “Many students are surprised to hear me describe slang as one of the many variations of the English language,” she admits.

Dr. Treglia read a letter from a former student who learned about “religions, cultures, regimes, dictatorships and values” in her class. But what did the student learn of the parts of speech and conjugation of verbs?

“Students’ final drafts contain literate writing,” Dr. Treglia says. But in what texts would they be exposed to same?

Dr. Treglia uses John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as well as plays, poems, articles and other forms of writing. “Students feel more comfortable with genres that are less restrictive than the ones usually found in books,” Dr. Treglia says.

For her part, Dr. Hardman stresses collaborative writing. “Students work collaboratively,” she says, and “They’re used to working collaboratively.” But is writing ultimately a collaborative act? It’s very difficult, for example, for two people to use either a pen or a keyboard at the same time.

At the end of the panel discussion, I asked the discussants, all quite literate, whether any of them were taught in the manner in which they are now teaching. Never before have I heard 50 people—the sum of the number attending the event along with the panelists—gasp at the same time.

None of the panelists answered my question, beyond Dr. Long’s “Whoa!,” but a professor in the audience did. “I was taught the way I am now teaching but in between something different happened,” she said.

What she eventually realized is that the means of instruction she received was the only method by which students could actually learn something.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.