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Last-Ditch Appeal

Good teachers, not sets of guidelines, are key to learning

The National Council of English Teachers released last week a set of "guidelines" for the teaching of English in American schools. The word guidelines is in quotes because, as everyone knows, the word normally implies prescription and/or proscription. When you sit yourself down and get all ready to look at a new set of guidelines, you expect to read about what someone should and should not do. The new set of guidelines, however, does not do this. Its vagueness renders it meaningless, and any good English teacher would need an extra supply of red pens in order to grade it.

The document says that "Students (should) read a wide range of print and non-print texts to build an understanding of texts ... Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works." It also says, "Students (should, could, would?) use a variety of technological and informational resources ... to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge."

Now, I thought I was literate, but these words have no meaning to me. Probably, they're not supposed to. It is safe to assume that one of the chief goals of the Council was to avoid an uproar of the sort that greeted the publication of the national history standards last year.

The Council was so afraid of specificity that the guidelines never mention the word "book." There are plenty of references to "texts," as in "print and non-print texts." Is it possible that Americans -- English teachers no less -- can't agree that educated people should read books? What if they had to decide which books?

Trying to establish national curriculum standards is misguided. It has little to do with education and leads to meaningless political bickering. Besides, we learn from dedicated teachers, regardless of the specific information they impart.

Think of your favorite professor at this school. Would your education be the same without this specific person? You probably could have learned the same information from someone else, or from a book or even from our savior, the Internet. At Michigan State, you could have watched the whole thing on television. But wouldn't you be missing something? Good teachers give students more than information. That's why national or state curriculum standards, if it were possible to create real ones, wouldn't do any good.

Chuck Spencer is an English teacher at my high school. During the four years I was in his classes, he had his own curriculum standards. In writing classes, he taught students how to write formal expository essays. The goal was to get so good at a formal writing style that students wouldn't have trouble knocking off their term papers once they got to college.

One of his rules was that you couldn't have any spelling or grammatical errors. If you did, you failed. Everyone complained about this, but hardly anyone failed. They edited their papers. And they learned the rules of English grammar. Countless students have praised his name while suffering through bluebook exams or typing papers at the last minute.

Of course, there are many other ways to teach writing. There are many other styles of writing to teach. But even students who hated Mr. Spencer's approach learned from him. That's because he believed that what he was teaching was important and he did a good job. Sure, if you were in his classes, you missed something that you might have gained from someone else. But how can you avoid those trade-offs?

Fortunately, it seems that every school, no matter how dismal, has a Chuck Spencer. You know, the kind of teacher everyone remembers. Isn't that what education is all about? Or is it only about disseminating information? If so, we can all sit at home with our modems.

I doubt that the Chuck Spencers of the world would see much value in bickering about what everybody ought to know or about ways to standardize the curriculum. Luckily for us, they're too busy teaching.

-- Jordan Stancil can be reached over e-mail at rialto@umich.edu.