LITERACY IN ROWLAND HEIGHTS

As I sit down to grade the final drafts of sixty high school students, I come across fifteen serious errors within the first two papers.  I think to myself, are these students just not putting forth the effort?  I allow myself to hold that opinion until, upon finishing the grades, observe well over one-hundred errors in basic mechanics, sentence structure, spelling, punctuation, subject-verb agreement, and in virtually every other field of English grammar known to man.  At that point in my early career of teaching, I suspect more than the individual’s stubbornness to revise and complete the assignment given out more than one month ago and, while continuing throughout the next set of papers, develop a train of thought that places responsibility, not simply on the students, but on the teachers and school districts, as well.  My research in this field will show you that the majority of the problem lies, beyond the shadow of a doubt, inside the educational institutions across the country.

My job as a tutor takes place inside the Rowland Heights Unified School District, located near Fullerton and Brea.  It is here where I help students primarily with their writing techniques in a program called “AVID,” (Achievement Via Individual Determination), where literacy is the foremost goal.  This program was administered approximately three years ago in this particular district and has been headed by the same two teachers, Carolyn Creighton and Leslie Smith, throughout this time.  While I’ve luckily had the chance to participate in a program specially devised to help college-bound students succeed in their goals, I’ve come to notice many flaws in the program itself, as well as in the way English classroom time is utilized.

To effectively exercise my case in literacy, I’d like to briefly take you through two days of AVID, the days where the bulk of English is learned, so you will understand its process.  Students enter class on Mondays and Wednesdays with their “Interactive Reader,” which the AVID program often uses as a device to improve literacy.  In this workbook, students read short stories while answering critical thinking questions off to the sides.  Mrs. Creighton or I then grade how well they interpreted the story; however, little advice is given, due to the school district’s tight regiment of academic activities, to inform them on how to improve their literacy and, therefore, three fourths of the students, as I’ve seen the past three months, fail the activity and do not progress the next time around.  You would think that a class of college-bound students would take the assignment more seriously, yet that is not the case.  Mrs. Creighton will spend the remainder of the class time by covering different subjects in the “Interactive Reader”: plot, summary, theme, mood, and so on, but each time I observe the class, I can’t help but feel that their activities are vain.

Now that you have some idea of how the program operates, I’ll address the specific flaws that have been apparent to me.  As most people are aware, there is little work done in class on writing, but much done with reading selected and widely canonized works by famous authors like Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, and Miller.  In fact, during my own years of high school in the Temecula School District, my English classes from ninth to twelfth grade were centered on reading, first with Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” then with Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” then to Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” and back to Shakespeare in the twelfth grade with “Hamlet.”  The essays, however, were to be assigned and brought back to receive a pithy sentence or two that wouldn’t benefit my writing techniques whatsoever; the same goes for AVID.  The majority of class time is spent on reading the “Interactive Reader,” while essays are quickly written and returned to Mrs. Creighton for a cursory look.  If the essays were at least satisfactory, no dilemma would be present, but the writing tells a different story. 

Here is a concise list of misspelled words I located within the first five minutes of grading one set of papers: dramaticed, loosing, memorie, write more clearer, catched, streat, exited, nervouse, grocerie, insted, sentance, boreing, happend, chronologicly, gramaticcel (in commenting that another person’s paper wasn’t grammatical), apprichiated, seperated, felted, supposely, discriptive, imform, deatale, gived, well-putted.  As these are clearly abnormal errors, it’s evident that the students are not being educated enough on the writing process.  While the teacher is often aware of the students’ errors, she explains that it is due to their lack of a repertoire of writers and stories in their minds that they should be able to draw upon when writing, yet no person can become a famous baseball player by having a list of admirable teams he or she recalls when the game begins.

In these last three months, the students of six AVID classes have written one essay with three drafts, and have read close to four or five entire novels by Hawthorne, Salinger, and the usual rest.  Out of ten questions I receive in one class period, nine of them will be regarding novel comprehension and one will be addressing writing.  Out of the sixty minutes of class time, forty-five minutes are spent on reading, five are spent reviewing some part of the writing process (detail, organization), and ten are wasted on  maintaining classroom behavior.  Being that the Teacher’s Network Organization defines literacy as “communication through reading, writing, speaking and listening,” and also that “the four are interrelated, so development in one impacts development in the other three,” there should not be such a difference in the amount of time spent on those four necessities.  With equal time given to the four, it would only seem logical that each area would improve dramatically.  If writing positively affects reading, and writing is nearly absent from the routine, both writing and reading skills will continue to decline as the article, “Literacy of College Graduates Is on the Decline,” in the Washington Post proposes: “Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as "proficient" in prose - reading and understanding information in short texts - down 10 percentage points since 1992.”  To clarify, this test was given to more than 19,000 students who, while in their homes, were asked to read several prose and undergo various tests; this would explain why the students’ are practically impaired in their writing and reading abilities. The article also points out another vital fact: “On average, adult literacy is virtually unchanged since 1992, with 30 million people struggling with basic reading tasks.  The study showed that from 1992 to 2003 adults made no improvement in their ability [to] read newspapers or books, or comprehend basic forms.”  These are a set of issues that the education administration needs to set straight; perhaps the examples of students’ writing below will express that point clearly.

Take a look at this introduction to one student’s final draft, a narrative, by a tenth grader in AVID: “In the future I want to become a make-up artist.  I want to become a make-up artist in the future because I want to do make-up for celebrities.  I also want to become a make-up artist because my mom always puts on make-up and I think it would be fun to do in the future.”  I could go on and the rest of the essay would sound very familiar to the first sentence.  In fact, her last sentence is identical to the first.  Though this is merely one example of poor writing, I can assure you that the other fifty-nine final drafts are quite similar in format and depth.  Out of these sixty papers, forty-six are based on sports, and the clearest image I retain is vague and trivial: “The field is a beautiful thing.”  Though I encouraged this writer beforehand to illustrate this image more, he did not in the least.  This is where we arrive at the students’ faults. 

While the teachers’ primary focus on novels and reading exercises limits the amount of time spent on the development of writing, the students’ minimal effort on the writing assignment contributes much to their decline in literacy.  It was more than obvious that a large quantity of these students failed to spend any time improving their papers, yet it must be granted that there will always be students who neglect to try; however, when the numbers of those who do not try are increasing so significantly, teachers must implement various activities to retrieve the students’ interest in writing.  This can be accomplished by providing more “open topic” essays, with fewer limitations and more freedom in terms of form and style.

In a survey that I issued to each AVID student from all four grade levels, fifteen of fifty-seven claimed that they had never had the opportunity to write an open topic essay.  This was a much lower number than I had expected, and so it seems that open topics are being allowed more recently than before when my school district in 2001 through 2004 had a strict list of previously chosen topics that we were assigned.  On the other hand, forty-one students state that their teachers simply write a sentence or two on their graded papers without justifying the grade or offering advice on how to better the writing performance.  This is the main blunder that many teachers make, for most everyone cannot improve his or her paper without the proper mentoring.  The answer then on improving literacy would be to set aside more class time for writing and writing exercises (cubing, outlining, concept mapping, QAD), to employ more open topics and less selected prompts, and to have each teacher explain in detail how each of the students can advance in his or her writing skills. 

As I worked one on one yesterday with two tenth graders, Robert Heinzel and Brian Montenegro, they presented their essays to me with one question in mind: “where can I add more detail?”  I could have never taken the time to discuss this with them, written “more detail” on their paper and gone home in pursuit of my own hobbies, yet as I directed them in adding detail to specific images (a soccer field and a dirt-biking area), I saw their faces grasp the concept I was attempting to convey: build concrete images.  Their first drafts were bland and general, without uniqueness or vibrant descriptions;  their most expressive words were “awesome” and “unbelievable,” but when I came across their final drafts just the other day, I was proud to give them both a well-deserved “A.”  If I only had the class time to meet one on one with each student, they could all have the chance to inquire and build their illustrations and originality, yet with the school’s rigid schedule of reading and comprehending, I unfortunately am incapable of doing so.  If the time was only given, I maintain the belief that each of these talented students could write with clarity and significance, and then extrapolate all they wish to from diverse texts, for writing and reading go hand in hand.

12/14/06

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