Notes on Literacy Education

Scrabble, often used as a stand-in for knowledge of language. Interestingly, also owned by Hasbro, another group of people who keep wrecking things that work. (image taken from wikimedia commons, uploaded by user thebarrowboy, and used under a CC BY 2.0 license.)

I’m three weeks into a new semester, and I’m teaching my second new class of the academic year. Whenever you teach a new class, the process of preparation is a real sprint: you have to internalize so much new information that you end up knowing things that you don’t know that you know them. Sometimes you sweat this new information out and you end up with a residue: rote knowledge that gets passed on and you don’t really know why.

I try to avoid that situation wherever possible. I tend to be a pretty routine-focused person – writing for this website is a big part of that, and I’ve stuck with it this long – but I don’t want my teaching to ever be purely routine. I always want to try to experiment with it and figure out new things, which means constantly pulling in new information to use. One of the big sources for that is one of the textbooks I use – it’s available through West Virginia’s University system in a Creative Commons 4.0 license, and it’s called Bad Ideas About Writing, it’s an anthology of essays by composition scholars about ideas that they’re seen that they want to try to disabuse people of.

A few of these are standbys for me now, but some of them I haven’t read, and in my downtime I’m trying to pick through them and read them, to see if I undervalued something useful. One of these latter ones is “America is Facing a Literacy Crisis” by Jacob Babb. Babb – an assistant professor of English at Indiana State University at the time that this was written – argues that we, in America at least, have always perceived literacy as being in crisis, and that the issue is more that we tend to make literacy more and more complex.

At the very least, since we’ve perceived literacy to be in crisis since the inception of higher education as a more open project, roughly a century ago, it behooves us to be skeptical of the idea that literacy is in decline.

Say what you will about the medieval university: they had a better sense of style.

Which is not to say that literacy never declines. We can look to the decline in literacy through the Middle Ages (as opposed to antiquity and modernity, commonly called “the Dark Ages”) or to the more complete destruction of civilization found after the Bronze Age collapse. However, I don’t see any sea peoples (it’s unlikely; I’m in Missouri, which is about as landlocked as you can get in North America), and any latter-day Alaric would most likely not lead to as widespread a collapse, given the redundancy built into modern systems of control.

Still, I think that it’s important to consider literacy, and I will admit that a big part of this is the fact that I’m a teacher. It’s at that perfect intersection of job security and catastrophism, you see.

The other end of the spectrum comes from a New Yorker article, entitled “The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy”, written by novelist and editor Jessica Winter, and published September 1 of last year. It describes a program, instituted by Lucy Calkins, Robinsons Professor of Children’s Literature at the Teachers College at Columbia University. While Winter uses the disparaging term “Vibes Based Literacy”, a more proper term for this is “Balanced Literacy”, which attempted to strike a balance between Whole Language literacy and Phonics-based Literacy. However, it is important to note that Calkins was identified by New York Magazine as a proponent of the Whole Language model.

The difference between these two models is simple: phonics focuses on the word as a physical entity; Whole Language is about the word as signifier.

Columbia college, ground zero for the literacy crisis in its current form. Maybe.

Phonics is about how the sounds are recorded – or indicated – by the letters on the page or screen. Which, of course, leads to the criticism that, in English, you can technically spell fish as “ghoti” (using the “gh” from “enough”, the “o” from “women”, and the “ti” from “motion”.) This is, on the face of it, quite sensible: English is full of exceptions to rules.

There is a great deal that is supposed to set Whole Language apart, but a thing is what it does. Whole Language – especially the version described in the New Yorker article – is often implemented as a system of treating the English Language as using a phonetic script to build an ideographic language: students memorize that this string of letters signify “cat” while this one signified “can”, and this other one signifies “island” while this one signified “inland”. The result, to hear Winter tell it, is that only about 40% of readers become truly proficient.

There is, indeed, some evidence that phonics-based instruction – especially for younger children – is much more useful, as this NPR article notes regarding the Bedford, Pennsylvania school district.

This is a much more satisfying narrative than most of literacy crises: we can just tar and feather this Lucy Calkins character! Then, when we roll out Common Core 1.1, we can just patch up the literacy issue and move on. Problem solved.

Of course, it’s not so simple.

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If this is how you got through college, then I’m sorry that you paid tens of thousands of dollars to not learn anything.

Here’s something that’s always been true: students don’t like reading the things assigned to them. A good teacher can reach around that by being a good advocate for the material presented. I’m middling good with that – I can form a rapport with students a good portion of the time, but I never stop having at least occasional failures. One of the things that I do occasionally – when I don’t have a workaround for students not reading a text, and it’s essential that we have forward momentum – is make the class read as a group.

I hate doing this, because the students hate it, and I feel as if I’m wasting time with it, but if needs must then I don’t know what else to do. One thing I’ve noticed is that it really feels as if reading proficiency has dropped.

And of course, being a man closer to forty than thirty, this triggers an instinctive reaction of yelling about how kids are getting dumber or lazier, or whatever. Back in my day I read everything ever assigned to me so long as it wasn’t a Jane Austen novel or something presented to me when I was in a deep depression, and I was no more than an average student right?

Of course, I always noted that average people tended to think of themselves as exceptional and exceptional people tended to think of themselves as average, so I tried to reverse psychologize myself into the “exceptional category” by insisting on my own average abilities. This was most likely some rather baroque symptom of anxiety or another mood disorder.

In any case, I can’t help but think of myself as having been an average student, and I did everything, so what’s wrong with these kids today?

I know, though, in my bones, that this isn’t the truth.

Look, first of all, generations as essentialist categories are bullshit. At best, they can be treated as proxies for long-term social change. If reading abilities are in decline, it’s because of some idiocy that sprang out of Frankenstein’s Writing Lab, and we just have to find a way to rework things so that they can pick up the necessary skills as quickly as possible so we can move on.

Problem solved – or at least we have a road map, a vector to solve the problem.

But there’s another issue.

Look: I’m doing my best to kill the Boomer in my head, and a lot of people in education need to do the same thing. I don’t necessarily mean, specifically, a member of the Baby Boomer generation – I mean the tendency to be retrograde and insisting that things need to be exactly like they were in the past.

Have you ever watched a dog pull needlessly on a chain, trying to reach something just beyond its reach? Have you ever watched a dog, whose chain has been caught on something, strain to reach something that it would be able to reach if it would just backtrack something like three steps?

Whenever I find myself looking at an apparently insoluble problem, I’m trying to teach myself to go back and see what I’ve gotten caught on.

We don’t need to make sure that things work exactly as they did when we were younger. That’s the sort of toxic nostalgia I have begun thinking of as “boomer brain” (and I will note, I know many people in the appropriate age category to be officially “baby boomers” who don’t qualify here – conversation for another time, though, I’m going to keep going.) What we need is for people to be able to read and write and participate in society and culture, to derive meaning from it.

Young people communicate fairly often through text. Sure, the rise in social media and short video platforms seems to have some legitimate problems to it (we will one day look back at Facebook, Instagram, and related phenomena the way we look at cigarettes – and I’m saying this as a smoker. They won’t go away, but we’ll recognize them as vices.) However, in a great many of these platforms, young people are communicating in a text-based medium to a great extent. This is something that many composition instructors note: the problem is confusing different contexts, failing to differentiate different registers, not them struggling to write in the first place.

Though, as an aside, I have noted an uptick in students not being able to differentiate their writing voice from their speaking voice, as far as how they form sentences and choose words. The two are – and should be – quite different, though they are often interrelated.

Do I worry that my students somehow made it to college without well-developed reading skills? Of course. Do I worry that politicians mutilate the education system more and more every time they think about it? Certainly.

I, of course, do not sympathize with the behaviorist impulse to punish people for failure, but — as a teacher — I understand why those in my field might reach for this hammer when faced with something that looks like a nail (it’s a screw. It’s not a nail, it’s a screw, you idiot.)

But a bigger problem, I think – the root problem, I would be willing to wager – is the emphasis on a strict success/failure distinction. We have a tendency to divide the world into winners and losers, and we instill in young people a fear of being “losers.”

However, this does not make people more likely to succeed: it makes people less likely to admit their mistakes and faults and work to fix them. This has important implications for education and mental health, both.

In writing education, this has led to major problems, where students are unable or unwilling to do multiple drafts: some of my students – often young people who believe themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be exceptional – absolutely refuse to do multiple drafts. Either they make no alterations between the two drafts or, in extreme cases, refuse to hand in a rough draft.

So I’m beginning to think that the two qualities that a teacher needs to model for their students are these: failing gracefully and being willing and able to correct their mistakes.

I have begun, in my classes, to make a show of leaving non-essential documents un- or only lightly edited, and building in time in class to stop, point out my own error, and fix it in front of them. The point here is to model for them that adults make mistakes, admit to them, and fix them.

If students believe that people in positions of expertise or authority don’t make errors, it can lead to impostor syndrome down the line, it can lead to them denying that they made any mistake and failing to grow. While I don’t really think of myself as an authority or a role model, I want to do a small part of demonstrating that there is something better than sticking to your guns: being right at the end of a process, even if you start off wrong.

If a student is embarrassed to mispronounce a word, or is worried that one of their peers will mock them for a lack of proficiency, then they will not grow. What is needed is to teach them not to fear failure – which, given the structure and emphasis of our curriculum, is a difficult thing.

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