Preface to: Go to Iraq and Fight, Mr. President
Special Commentary, July 15, 2007
Keith Olbermann: Truth and Consequences
I’ve been a fast writer ever since I showed up for something called “Comp Class” at Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, in September 1970. It wasn’t a theoretical writing course; it was more like learning to swim by being thrown into the surf. True to the brand name, those familiar black-and-white-speckle-covered “composition notebooks” would be handed out, then a topic – or often the dread “free topic” – would be chalked out on a blackboard and an empathetically smirking English teacher would say “Go.” We had fifty-five minutes to think up, map out, and write – by hand – three to five pages with the proverbial beginning, middle, and end.
I don’t know if I perceived it then, but after five years of that kind of practice, usually at the very start of the school day, the worst of us was fully prepared to skate through almost any writing load that college – or real life – could present us. I can still see a National Merit Scholar from Ohio blanching visibly as she sat opposite me in our first week at Cornell. We’d been assigned three three-page papers as the entire essay total for a semester-long Shakespeare course. I thought, “You want ‘em Thursday?” She later admitted to me that at her high school, she’d never written anything longer than three paragraphs.
As a frequent teaching assistant at UCLA, I have to say that high school education seems to be going down the tubes. But I don’t think we should blame the teachers. Several of my best students will become high school educators, and they are more than competent intellectually and personally. So it would seem the system itself is broken. Looking forward to reading more!
I couldn’t agree more. Look at the “raw material” the teachers get to (have to) work with. Having a class full of unmotivated students is an uphill battle and administrators and others seem to think teachers should be caregivers rather than educators.