Okay. I confess. My wife and I send a chatty letter to friends and relatives at the end of each year. Many people loathe such missives. Ours may be particularly lame. But the letters we get in return are often well-crafted and suggest a way to improve the awful state of writing instruction in America.
Many of the people who send these letters have done much writing in their lives. They know how to communicate clearly and effectively, with verve and humor. And the existence of these extracurricular letters suggests they have some free time on their hands.
I think they could help relieve the two greatest obstacles to teaching students how to write: not enough writing teachers and not enough time to give students the attention they need.
Without the needed time and teachers, schools keep instruction in writing to a minimum. A study of 1,876 literacy assignments in six urban middle schools by the nonprofit Education Trust showed 18 percent required no writing at all. About 60 percent demanded just some note-taking, short responses or a sentence or two. Fourteen percent required students to write a single paragraph, and only 9 percent went beyond that.
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Almost no U.S. high school students are required to do long research papers, except students in private schools or public schools with International Baccalaureate programs. The best instruction in writing happens on school newspapers, which usually have talented faculty advisers and smart seniors willing to help untrained freshmen, but that activity is often underfunded or missing altogether.
The painful jargon of secondary school English department classes still rules, despite attempts by talented teachers to change it. Here is guidance from the Common Core State Standards for ninth- and 10th-graders trying to write an argument: "Introduce precise claim(s), distinguish the claims(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that establishes clear relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons and evidence."
I didn't learn to write well enough to get paid for it until college. The more experienced staffers on the daily student paper ripped apart my overlong sentences and vague summaries. To learn writing, you need a tough editor with the time to show you what's wrong and how to fix it.
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Six years ago, I made this suggestion for a different way to teach writing in high school: "Require students to take at least one semester of reading and writing instead of their regular English class. A paper is due each Monday. In class, students read whatever they like or work on next week's essay while the teacher calls them up in turn and edits their papers as they watch."
Each student would get about 10 minutes of live editing a week, much more than the zero minutes usually allotted. A few teachers told me they were doing something like that, but I realize it is too radical a reform for most places.
So what can we do? How can we add time and teachers to the meager writing instruction we have now?
How about a once-a-month editing bee with volunteers who know what good writing is, including the many retired or semiretired wordsmiths in our communities?
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After judging our qualifications by looking at a writing sample, the school could sit us in the cafeteria with a few snacks and drinks. (I like apple juice.) Students would spend their English class period with us, getting at least 10 minutes of editing on whatever writing they were doing. (This would force schools to have regular writing assignments, which they often don't.)
It would be fun for the volunteer editors and invigorating for the kids. Education reform expert Marc Tucker has suggested teacher candidates also be required to write long papers. The volunteers could edit those, too.
This would take time away from doing the annual family letter, but that's okay. To those of you who have gotten the Mathews letter in the past and think we are very late this year, we can only say, vaguely, that it's in the mail.
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