Reflections on "Why Kids Can't Write"

I’ve got a couple problems (not ninety-nine, just a couple) with Dana Goldstein’s article in the New York Times this past August, “Why Kids Can’t Write.” Because kids’ writing (and kids writing, a subtle difference) is pretty much what I am paid to think about for eight hours a day, five days a week, and when you think about something that much, chances are you’re going to have some pretty strong opinions on it. And you’re going to feel an overwhelming impulse to correct what you see as misconceptions about that thing. Like, two years ago I could hardly keep from explaining to random strangers (at parties, let’s say) the subtleties of the difference between Subway’s Spicy Italian, Italian BMT, and Turkey Italiano (the advanced version, reserved for more intimate settings, included a lecture on why it was ambiguous to just ask your Sandwich Artist for an “Italian,” since that is also a type of bread.) Granted, no one ever cares about these rants, and I’m sure this will be no exception. But we write them because we feel we must - and I’m sure someone could make the case (and I possibly already have, somewhere) that this makes them the purest form of writing. So let’s go.

The first problem with Goldstein’s article is that it never really answers its eponymous question (okay, technically it’s a relative clause, but that’s even worse if you think about it. Don't think about it too much.) It really says nothing about why kids can’t write. (That definitely is an interesting question, by the way. My own answer happens to be: because writing is really goddamn hard. And I'm not even fully convinced that I can do it. But I don’t really accept the premise. Kids can write, at least as well as anyone else can.) But Goldstein doesn’t offer an answer. All she does is profile two actual teachers of writing and their methods, with the implication that these approaches, if they were adopted more widely, would make it so that kids could write.

You would never fold the meat like that. You're not
even supposed to. It's actually wrong.

It’s the way in which she discusses each approach that really creates problems for me.

First, she talks about Dr. Judith Hochman, who has a strategy that focuses on teaching students to make meaning at the sentence level first and then slowly build up to paragraphs and, finally, essays. Her approach is direct and explicit. Goldstein says it “focuses on the fundamentals of grammar” and “a return to the basics.” (More on that significant word “return” in a bit.) And from what I have gleaned from the article, I think it is probably quite effective in the hands of a competent teacher with the right, authoritative personality.

When discussing Hochman’s approach, Goldstein contrasts it with stereotypes about “child-centered approaches” that feature “cozy writing nooks” and “journaling about one’s personal experiences.” This is basically a caricature of the writing workshop method. It is taken for granted that this approach is widespread, even universal, and has been since the 1930’s when “progressive educators began to shift the writing curriculum away from penmanship and spelling and toward diary entries and personal letters.” (Quick check: how many of us actually attended schools where spelling didn’t matter in writing? I've never actually seen one.) There are no statistics given about how many writing teachers actually use a workshop method (though I’d honestly be interested to know the breakdown. George Hillocks, in his research for The Testing Trap, found few, but those surveys were conducted in the 90s and I imagine things have probably changed a bit since then - though I’m not sure in what direction.)

Despite what Dr. Hochman says, I always see kids writing
at desks or tables in these things.

The odd thing is: Goldstein is not committed to vilifying the workshop approach. Dr. Hochman might be, but journalist Dana Goldstein is certainly not. The other teacher she profiles, in fact, is Merideth Wanzer, who runs a writing workshop for high school students. Wanzer is associated with a branch of the National Writing Project (as am I, to make my bias here plain), the organization that is most responsible for promoting workshop-style, process-oriented teaching of writing across the country. And Wanzer’s workshop includes some of the expected, orthodox elements of that approach: free-writing exercises and an emphasis on exposing students to great writing in hopes that it will influence their own.

In the parts of the article where she is discussing Wanzer, Goldstein contrasts this approach with “formal grammar instruction, like identifying parts of speech.” In one throwaway sentence, she even acknowledges that direct grammar instruction has even been shown to make students’ writing worse (as measured by standardized assessments of writing, at least, which have their own problems, of course.) But as before, there is no data on how many teachers teach writing like that, by having students learn the parts of speech in a decontextualized manner. (Again, I’d be interested to know.) But whereas Goldstein assumed that the workshop approaches were widespread, she seems to dismisses decontextualized grammar instruction as negligible - again, without any actual data to justify that decision.

But the thing is: Wanzer is the workshop method and Dr. Hochman is direct grammar instruction. The two teachers she profiles and implicitly praises are not exceptions to a general rule of mediocrity. Rather, the two extremes that Goldstein assumes are the norm (that is, bad teaching) are really nothing more than the stereotypes that the two sides of this great debate apply to each other. It’s kind of like this: finding a sane conservative person and saying “he’s not some gun-toting redneck racist” and then finding a sane liberal person and saying “she’s not some kale-munching, safe-space elitist” - as if that’s an accomplishment. It’s the most blasé and uninspired sort of centrism.

And this becomes especially bad when Goldstein goes on to advocate for a compromise between the two approaches. As if that's an insight. Yes, obviously young writers need to learn the structure of the language and how to compose effective sentences. Every writing workshop enthusiast knows that. And yes, they also need to feel a sense of ownership over their own writing and to be exposed to quality literature. Every grammar lesson lover knows that, too. Anyone who is any good has always been doing some combination of both things (though there are undeniably different ways of balancing and sequencing them, some of which may be more effective than others.) And don’t get me wrong - the extremes do exist. But they are just that: extremes.

And I don’t think anyone who actually teaches, who actually thinks about this stuff eight hours a day, five days a week needed the New York Times to tell them that.

*

The only "back to basics" we need.

So that’s my first and most significant issue with Goldstein’s article. But I have two more. Up next is that it uncritically adopts a common, but ultimately baseless, narrative about the history of education. This is the story that education was once very traditional, rooted in direct instruction and “the basics,” but then was taken over by “progressive reformers” at some point and still lives in that shadow. Now, certainly there have been progressive reformers - John Dewey, Lou Labrant, and many others, all the way from the 1930s up through the present day - and they have had an impact upon education. But I don’t think there is any evidence that it was actually a takeover. Progressives didn’t conquer education any more than they conquered politics. There are still plenty of traditionalists out there and, by some accounts, they have remained a majority all the way through.

So the rhetoric of “back to basics” is disingenuous. As Alfie Kohn has written, most of education never left the basics. The movement to spread workshop-based, process-oriented methods of teaching writing was never as successful as Goldstein seems to assume. And even more - there is a whole part of educational history that is relevant here that she ignores. (Which is inexcusable, given that the same Dana Goldstein wrote an entire, fantastic chapter about it in her book The Teacher Wars.) And that is the high-stakes testing and “accountability" movement, which more or less began in the 1980s with the publication of A Nation at Risk and has not slowed down, just changed forms, since then. As P.L. Thomas explains in his critique of Goldstein’s article (admittedly the inspiration for this one), the testing movement effectively killed, or at least stalled, the movement towards “authentic writing instruction” (his non-neutral description of workshop-style teaching.)

But the real problem is that, without data, we are forced to rely on our own assumptions of what education is like. And "progressives took over" is an appealing, simple narrative to invoke, just as it is in the world of politics.

*

And finally, I think Goldstein’s article reveals something even more fundamental about the way we tend to look at teaching (and perhaps other things as well.) I think we often tend to look only at the positive aspects of the things we are familiar with. We sit in on a class and we think about what the lesson is accomplishing. We see that the kids are learning grammar, or they are improving their writing, or they are practicing their revision skills. We rarely bother to think about what is not going on, what they are not getting from that particular lesson. And that might not be a problem so much as an inevitability - it’s harder to conceptualize a lack. But I think we need to start making an effort to see things from both perspectives.

I remember when I first started spending time in classrooms as a non-student - first as an observer, and then as a substitute teacher - my automatic instinct was to look at what was being accomplished. I compared each lesson to “nothing” rather than to all the other possibilities. So a class where students spent twenty-five minutes filling out a math worksheet meant that they were getting twenty-five minutes of practice honing their problem-solving skills. Better than nothing, I’d say, mentally. But the truth is that there are so many other ways that twenty-five minutes could have been spent, and some of them may have been more productive. Opportunity cost and all that.

But for whatever reason, I had this sense in my mind that the majority of what happens in most classrooms out there was really - at a fundamental level - “nothing.” Either it was devoted to managing students’ behavior, or it was busy work, or it was watching movies, or it was teaching so outdated and decontextualized that it wasn't even worth taking seriously. That is what I really, albeit implicitly believed. And there’s definitely a sense in which many Education classes encourage this attitude in their proto-teachers. How many class discussions did we have in which we all seemed to agree that “most teachers” were lacking in some way, that the education system in general was just plain broken, and that we could or should or must be the solution? (And how many others where I found myself feeling that my classmates would join the ranks of ineffective teachers, but I would be the exception?)

And outside of education departments, we pretty much think along the same lines. I mean,

The only movie I really remember from 5th grade.

try bringing up education in pretty much any context with any group of people (except teachers (except sometimes teachers too.)). It will almost certainly go in a critical direction and stay there. We have this tendency to vilify teachers in general, though we will certainly acknowledge individual teachers as “one of the good ones.” But what I have come to realize through actually working in schools for, like, six years now (holy crap) is that it is not a minority of teachers who are doing good things in their classroom. The majority are, in fact, doing things that have value.

But we do need to recognize not only that there is always an opportunity cost for everything we choose to do, but also that every lesson contains both intended effects and side-effects. Yong Zhao has written a fantastic article about just that idea. Hochman’s approach to teaching writing may be effective at getting students to craft stronger sentences and use words like “nevertheless” appropriately, but it may also result in students becoming disengaged from writing as a creative act. And a workshop approach like Wazner’s (or mine) may lead to greater engagement in the writing process, but it may leave students without knowing all that much about the parts of speech. There are always going to be trade-offs, and some of them might not show up until later on.

Nor is compromise always going to be an answer here. First of all, there are not just two ways to teach writing - there are an infinite number of possible approaches, and you are always going to have to make choices from among them, which means leaving something out. The same is true of any subject. That’s just part of life. Also, when bringing together two approaches, there is no guarantee that you are going to get the best of both worlds. You could very well get the worst of both. That is: a hybrid workshop-basics writing class could result in students with lower grammar skills than in pure direct instruction and lower fluency and motivation than pure workshop. Also, there are some strategies which only work if they are pursued holistically, that can not be broken down and served up piecemeal.

But Goldstein’s article does not give us that nuanced sense of things. It assumes that writing taught purposefully - as exemplified by both Hochman and Wazner, on different ends of the ideological spectrum - is the same as writing being taught well. It assumes that we are being held back by the carelessness of individual teachers, who allow their teaching to take the form of a caricature. This keeps us from fully realizing that the problems we do have (i. e., why kids can't write) are either a) intrinsic to the teaching of writing (which, by the way Kurt Vonnegut once claimed was an impossible task) or b) structural, having to do with money and time and administrative support and school policies and a bunch of other things that individual teachers cannot really control.

Why can't kids write? There may be ninety-nine problems, but a majority of teachers being very bad at teaching them how probably ain't one. (I'm so sorry. Also, I tried really hard to get this to rhyme with "bitch," but I guess it just was not meant to be.)