THIRD WAY IN ENGLISH

...He had taught in the Simi Valley public system before returning home to Indiana and his current teaching job at a private school...

...While I had Frank Raispis in high esteem as a modern paragon of what the old school still could accomplish, I came to work with and admire Bob Pierle, a social studies teacher masterful at taking his Third Way, insistently pragmatic yet hardly a headstrong radical...

...A different sort of grimness, bureaucratic and disheartening, settled into the place...

...If they're not good, they don't get it...

...Key documents like Newsweek's "Why Johnny Can't Write" (Dec...

...He needed to find instead a medium that might disengage his audience from its role as passive receptor, disengage its members from their quotidian habits of thought long enough to get them to enter into the spirit of his performance, to engage in his inquiry about education...

...Almost no one reads theses...

...S.A.T...

...These sound, however, like rather obvious and paltry comebacks...

...thesis in it...

...Category and the making of absolute judgments within incredibly arbitrary limits (the latter a thumbnail description of most '"tests") are preeminent here...

...The loci of my concern, though, are those more, regimented schools staffed by the kinds of teachers in Holt's audience...

...A publisher-friend informs me that Media & Methods plans an issue meant to put into a more reasonable perspective the recent spate of critical salvos...

...He was trying language in a specific setting, for a specific purpose, without compromising it...

...II I thought of Holt earlier this year, in the midst of the media blitz that generally questioned the adequacy of methods being used to teach English, particularly the writing of English, in the United States today...

...I grew embarrassed, as I tend to do when a public figure I respect seems headed for a belittling performance...

...I connected myself with O'Gorman's storefront experience in Harlem, trying to invigorate my present by retaining links to a grand summer of the past, 1968, when I had helped run a neighborhood storefront project on Chicago's west side...

...other, older experiments...

...Hardly any avoid the defensive stance thrust upon their speakers by the crisis-journalists...

...Carefully-detailed poems like those Mike Kulis wrote about the aging pastor mocked by his parishioners, the lives caged by skid-row fire escapes...

...They have largely destroyed, for most of us, our so vital sense that the world, human life, human experience, is a whole, and everywhere open to us...

...Once a week at most...

...See how for more students than ever before years of education accrue to create a fragmented view of the world, a fractional experience that many of them claim as their share of absolute truth...

...It was shaping up to be a grim evening...

...I remembered, in the wake of so much Two Ways criticism, how so many had turned away from Holt's lecture, dissatisfied with the man's modest yet brash pragmatism...

...In writing, if a student is weak on how the language is put together I have him get an elementary grammar book and exercise...

...Like Holt's audience few go along with him...

...Students are not allowed to read and write on toward discovering their need to understand the basics of things, except under certain very limited conditions (1 & 2 above...

...Free schools inspired since the sixties by the work of teachers like Jonathan Kozol and Herbert Kohl...

...Measurements used to assess such learning experiments have just as often been the same standardized ones created to gauge the rote/lecture system in its heyday...

...I taught competently, often by lecture, mapping sectors of English or American literature for my students, policing them through grammar exercises...

...It's no wonder, I guess, that so many are terrified of raising children who might not conform to school, jock heroics and job...

...They ought instead to make some simple points overlooked by the simplistic critics, points especially applicable to situations in which regimented educators have pretended to make certain allowances for alternative ways of teaching, if only with an eye toward lumping all such efforts as the failed Other Way...

...Score another for the good old boys...

...At the other were people like myself, who had long admired Holt's sanity and rigorous pragmatism in the work of education and had come to the lecture to reconnect with his arguments and to cheer him on against those bubble-headed illusionists who insist upon labeling him "romantic...

...I just give them creative writing as a treat...

...Amid the the gloom, then, some gratification for AP English teachers...

...Meanwhile let us notice how proof of the rote/lecture system's failure abounds in our world...

...But I did discover that the risks worked, that from them came the best writing my students turned in, fine perceptive stories like the ones John Conley, whom I'd banished from class, wrote about the winos derelicit along west Lake St., or Tony Sedlak's accounts of his hilarious capers on the south side of Chicago...

...Like the men who long ago enclosed the common land in rural England, or those who later fenced in much of the open range in our own West, they have cut up our common property into little pieces, fenced them in, put up signs saying No Trespassing and Entrance by Permission Only...

...In his work he challenges constantly the idea that he be held accountable to a numbers racket that has educated our citizenry so well in the past we've had to settle for Vietnam, Nixon and the utter debasement of our public language during the time our nation was supposed to be reaching a new maturity...

...In the public forum, though, the mixing of issues slanders those good teachers who use creative techniques to teach writing...

...The few times I tried it, the students had them back in correct rows before the bell rang to begin class...

...Macrorie, whose ideas I believe are so valuable because so many of them come from his experience in public instruction (chiefly at Western Michigan University) defines in Uptaught his Third Way: In the First Way the teacher hands out a package of information and tests to see whether students can remember its content . . . In the Second Way, the teacher provides complete freedom and no direction at all...

...and I discovered Macrorie, found his account of his change of heart toward teaching methods similar to the one I'd experienced, and following his advice in Telling Writing (Hayden, 1970) taught one of my most successful writing courses...

...Sedlak a bus mechanic...

...So, with an eye out for Engfishers, Bob and I converse at least with each other, often with others, while traveling by Third Ways...

...which indeed he is...

...Back to basics," I'm sure many of them were thinking, "Down with license...

...Granted, advocates of this view make in some instances finer distinctions...

...The college undergraduate is told by his professor that he must learn it so he can go on to graduate school and write his Ph.D...

...I seldom relinquished, though, my artificial status, standing before rows of desks...

...And so few are able to champion Third Ways on the ways' own merits, since they answer charges contrived by the dualistic view...

...Macrorie describes further the tyranny of Engfish over the kingdoms of language and literature: The grade school student is told by his teacher that he must learn Engfish because the high school teacher will expect mastery of it...

...He confronts in his indirect way, and sometimes directly, the administration, other teachers, his students...

...These managers and reporters trade, perhaps not always deliberately, in distortions inevitable to their simplistic view...

...They constitute a massive problem in American education, these places where taking a Third Way is so risky, yet so vital an option...

...Between them a teacher must choose, or mix at her/his risk: a small dose of the latter might be allowed on occasion to flavor the former...

...Non-writing figures in the separate issue of bad teaching...

...And, in spite of its attractions, the Advanced Placement Program is at most a more enlightened part of that overload of national-testing paraphernalia with which a report of this sort feels constrained to deal...

...The Curriculum Report I quoted above does begin, in several of its sections, to address these points, especially the problem of measuring-systems...

...Bureaucrat-educators worry that without incessant drills the students will fall below national norms...

...8, 1975) spurred reporters and news commentators to beleaguer us all through the last spring with rehashed jeremiads about the decline and fall of Verbal S.A.T...

...He started in such a halting manner, apparently fumbling for his words, rephrasing sentences...

...For many, it's as if he's speaking another language...

...Lately, in places where teachers have opted for liberation with responsibility, often in the face of openly-critical colleagues, officials have been wont to harp on "accountability...

...Some of them, for example, write off more creative teaching techniques as ineffective by suggesting that English electives which feature such techniques are essentially no-writing courses...

...Out of the Navy and beginning to raise a family that numbers nine children to date, he had put himself through school in Los Angeles, earning two master's degrees, by driving a cement truck...

...Those who cry "accountability" speak as potentates of licensing, against license...

...I despaired nonetheless...

...They are given real choices . . . The vocabulary of the First Way dominates the current media-driven crisis in education...

...a) holistically graded essay assessment that for 16 years has reflected no score decline...

...Any good teacher, in reality, agrees that writing ought to be a major part of all English courses, elective or otherwise, as should reading...

...III Conventional retorts to the pro-basics offensive of the past months have cited the increase in diversity and numbers of students currently enrolled in our schools, as well as the likelihood that what passed as good writing in the good old days may have been no better than what appears to be failing as writing today...

...And no doubt they were convinced which way yields the desired results, which allows students to score highest on standardized exams marked by companies who seem at present a little too gratuitously concerned over falling scores, in light of their economic self-interests...

...They are, essentially, the Two Ways...

...Most of my teaching, I realized, was going on in the same way most of the other teaching in the school was, the same way it had been going on during my days there as a student...

...At one extreme of the audience were those who knew of Holt by reputation only and wished to hear whether his ideas might be of some use to them in their classrooms...

...Same As Then...

...Bob's devotion to thoughtful freedom is unflagging...

...and I reflected that what he had to say, derived from his personal and long-standing practice of education, coupled with the impersonal situjohn druska is a writer who currently teaches high school in Indianapolis...

...other-ways-of-inquiry problem...

...I worried that Holt might have been KO'd by the pre- and post-prandial refreshments commonly offered big-name lecturers before their appearances...

...In his sequel to The Storefront (Harper, 1970), The Wilderness and the Laurel Tree (Harper, 1972), O'Gorman describes how part of our youngest generation has been and is being brought into a lockstep education earlier than ever, through Head Start programs that aim for sending children on to the schools "docile, drilled in alphabets and silence...

...Absent from nearly all of the browbeating critiques of the past months was mention of prophets like Holt, Macrorie (whose words "Third Way" I appreciate here), the late Paul Goodman, Ned O'Gorman-writers and teachers who certainly don't agree with each other on all points, but who are equally committed to freeing students' minds so that they may come to honor the self-discipline required of creative work...

...Kulis killed before finishing college...

...But it's one I've come to understand...

...He had too deep a respect for his audience, his subject, and himself to chatter on glibly and to offer us the conceptual jargon and slick token strictures of politicians, education teachers and newsmagazines...

...The article quoted James Dickey who, drawing on the same jock cliches he's used often enough to cheapen his poetry, portrayed the English teacher as "a kind of coach...

...These quotes and the Newsweek article, along with similar recent pronouncements, suggest in the main a dualistic view of English teaching, quite apt in our two-party land of hawks and doves, prelates and politicians, secretaries and whores...

...as if there always had been but two choices...

...In its reactionary amalgam of educational criticism Newsweek spent little time exploring the areas which it touched...

...It considers the College Board's and ACT's changing policies toward including writing-sample tests in the standard batteries, and more importantly, notes that the College Board's Advanced Placement Program English Examination "assesses actual writing by students (and) is superior both as a teaching and measuring model...

...2) Space: Restrictive notions of school-space and mind-space abet the tyranny of puppeteer-teachers and devalue Third Way belief in the organic relation between learning and one's life...

...I sensed the incredible force it would take, simply for example to re-figure the desks in my room...

...A dialect in which words are almost never 'attached to things,' as Emerson said they should be...

...Swallowed whole by Engfish, the audience that night last year wasn't able to understand Holt talking plain English...

...Large portions of the Newsweek story, typical in this of many reports of its ilk, implied support of rotelearning and other so-called traditional techniques, and doubt as to the efficacy of so-called more creative techniques...

...Let me offer my version of them, culled in my case from teaching experiences that span a dozen years: 1) On Time and Measurement: Deviations from the rote/lecture teaching methodology have been evaluated in many instances over strictly limited periods of time...

...It cited a young teacher at Chicago's DuSable High School who mixes dialect-translations with more restrictive approaches to teaching language: "And interestingly enough, she finds that the youngsters respond particularly well to traditional drills for teaching standard English...

...Perhaps future responses to the pro-basics criticism will be able to introduce more of the Third Way vocabulary, talking English instead of Engfish...

...or, "I spend most of my time on grammar...

...truer than ever tomorrow, and we may be left then with little more than the hapless joke of the poem which here ends his quote: The fault of our universities, of our intellectuals and academics, is that they have made themselves into Experts instead of Philosophers...

...In the Third Way, which I stumbled onto, students operate with freedom and discipline...

...Few, I thought, had really tried to entertain Holt's thoughts with even a fraction of the care he had taken in revealing them to us...

...It was the first time I'd seen Holt and he appeared at the podium, dressed I think in a corduroy suit, looking more formidable than I'd expected...

...Omitted from its analyses are those educators who, over the last several decades, have tried to show us Third Ways of teaching...

...Others, thanks to his trust, learn how to learn...

...They have taken the great common property of human knowledge and experience, which ought to belong to us all, and made it into private property...

...These points, in one form or another, implied or explicated, appear through the works of those aforementioned prophet-philosophers, as well as in the writings of many other teachers (for an excellent bibliography see Appendix II of Holt's What Do I Do Monday...

...So may they grow to travel The Road That Must Be Taken, learning lessons in Engfish along the way...

...IV During the tenure of my first full-time high school job (1968-1971) my steps toward Third Ways were tentatively taken, retractable...

...A case in point: working in a remedial program for problem learners sponsored by the Illinois Department of Mental Health (in 1970 & 1971) several of us taught handfuls of students who averaged by the end of two-months' work nearly a two-years' increase in reading levels...

...Even as a Holt-run classroom might engage students and teacher in working through theories and practices on their own instincts, making discoveries...

...scores over the past dozen years and about the yen of concerned educators and their clients to "get back to basics...

...One I don't think any of us can afford to lose, once we learn it, unless in our discourse with one another we wish to lose our minds and hearts as well...

...The close of the Curriculum Report, its half-dozen item bibliography of sources for the teaching of writing and the Exempli Gratia list of various high school writing programs, is patently shadowed by the testing-question, yet another example of a response to the fabricated crisis that fails to clarify the practicality and the evaluative autonomy of Third Ways that work...

...Most predictably, the great number of students who have been trained as model prisoners to equate lack of regimentation with foolishness are the ones who budge least...

...Once he began speaking, though, it became evident that large sections of the audience-murmuring and nodding and smiling among themselves-weren't going along with Holt...

...Score one for the old-timers...

...It was an object lesson, but one that few of the teachers present had the patience to appreciate...

...When I read the Newsweek article, upon the recommendation of a member of our school administration, 1 was appalled by the crudeness in its treatment of the issue: the article dealt with the problems involved in teaching writing in terms of such simplistic reductions of the experience itself...

...Bureaucrat-educators as a rule regard Third Way tolerance as a lowering of standards, a disservice to clients, when in fact it suggests the deepest respect for the humanity of learner and of language...

...But not much finer, and once any issue enters our miraculous disseminatory channels, the already simplistic has a way of becoming monolithically so...

...There are the salutary prescriptive methods and the volatile creative ones, the two sets of which virtually exclude each other...

...Their desire for efficiency in our educational machines finds ready company in our current critics' Jesuitical concern with ends, with how students will fit into place once out of school...

...I recalled the caution Holt gives in one of his books against regarding the brain, in all its mysterious and wonderful capacities, as merely a muscle...

...Dell, 1970] and add to it more recent works like Macrorie's outstanding A Vulnerable Teacher [Hayden, 1974...

...Many reacted to Holt's public style by regarding his ideas with scornful condescension ("I'd like to see him try that in my classroom," "I know how to handle that problem...

...Some in the school feel threatened, resent him, scoff at him...

...Yet for years 99 percent of the school's graduates had gone on to college, to become the professionals, and far less often, the artists of the future (Conley, though, a dropout first...

...The most astonishing thing about this view-more astonishing to me than its sinister undercurrent, a neurotic suspicion of creativity-is in the blindness from which it suffers...

...A feel-nothing, say-nothing language, dead like Latin, devoid of the rhythms of contemporary speech...

...Indeed, the more I listened the more this connection appeared the aim of his slow, self-editing manner of speaking, his ingenuous presentation of ideas startling to many of those present...

...An endless droning seemed to come from each roof, muffled by the terrific lethargy it struggled against, the same listlessness as in that grainy, grey vision of Fred Wiseman's startling film High School...

...Additionally, as reported in the June issue of the National Association of Secondary School Principals' Curriculum Report: "To ask if there has been a decline in writing ability may be to ask the unanswerable question, since, as Ralph Tyler and other competent observers of the educational scene note, the purposes for writing have declined in the outer society...

...I took a few risks: breaking classes up into smaller groups, releasing students from classroom time, putting one or two on independent study, inviting discussion and response...

...The high school student is told by his teacher that he must learn it because the college professor will expect mastery of it...

...What many Third Ways insist upon, namely that tolerance must be practiced in gauging the progress of a student who is exploring and developing her/his use of language and that advancement in learning is predicated upon the student's working from his strengths, is undercut by artificial criteria that require students to become proficient in fragmented, unnatural modes of expression, in labeling and nitpicking rather than in gaining sensibly a grasp of the logic of one's utterances...

...A truth about learning, however, is that at any age large amounts of knowledge can be assimilated in short periods of time, if the student is interested, if he/she comes to a need for knowing...

...Without the interest in language that our individual attentions had elicited from them, back in crowded public-school classrooms where most of their teachers had already written them off (at ages 10-13) as wiseoffs and dumb spies, they were bound to fail, and fail again...

...And so on...

...In fact, he had...

...See why the indictment of rote/lecture learning, of how its instilled docility produces time and again bigotry of every sort, needs to be phrased in devastating terms: it has helped to build the chauvinistic yet insecure, the gossiping yet mute, America we know, and has insisted on advertising itself as the Great White Hope against its dark foe libertarianism...

...That catchword continues to require evaluation in terms of standardized, sometimes fossilized, norms, constricting space and time and the student's mind, rather than in terms of how students learn, of the possibility that by traveling Third Ways students might establish alternative and equally valid means of achievement and assessment...

...Only the teachers who were able to maintain great classroom presences, some of them through innovation (there had been, thankfully, quite a few-the Jesuits Whitehead, Polakowski, Mattimoe, Cahill-and one or two were left, like the still-indomitable classicist Frank Raispis), could transcend the completely dulling effect of this pedagogy...

...But Holt gained a sort of hesitant momentum as he continued to speak...

...Yet the Report's, discussion of this program, vis-a-vis the measurement of writing skills, barely begins to investigate the rote/lecture vs...

...Holt's struck me as an honest lecture rather than a textbook one, suggesting that perhaps in many instances only such indirection as his directs us to true statement...

...Parents, as well as teachers, continue to buy the dualistic tripe...

...It was as if Holt had spoken in another language...

...and some of them posed skeptical questions during the post-lecture discussion period...

...Educator Ken Macrorie, in his book Uptaugfit (Hayden, 1970), uses one of his student's designations, "Engfish," to name that kind of language which I knew Holt's audience had been trained to expect, the kind used as legal tender at all levels of education and especially helpful in a teacher's daily struggles to assert classroom dominance: This girl (unnamed) had given me a name for the bloated, pretentious language I saw everywhere around me, in the students' themes, in the textbooks on writing, in the professors' and administrators' communications to each other...

...Self-direction, peer-group evaluation, courses open to changing direction and variant approaches (a fair list of the characteristics of most humane adult occupations) are highly suspect...

...Many similar reports succumb to the criteria of this baggage, the rub again in that repetitive criticism of less-restrictive teaching techniques has too often incited response in its own terms, so obscuring the issue...

...ation of his having to address a mob-sized audience that night, had caused his tentative beginnings, his probing attempts to connect with the individual members of the audience in terms of their experience and to make himself and his ideas vulnerable to their concerns...

...For me, too, since in the course of five separate years since 1968 I've taught versions of this program, whose "course description and . . . exam," says the Report, "are applicable to any English high school instruction," though administered mainly to "upper level students seeking college credit...

...The article's hearsay effect reminded me of random quotes I'd heard at teachers' meetings: "Well, affective has been in for a while, but it's on the way out now...

...3) On the Basic Structure of Things: The colleges cry that basics aren't being taught in high schools, which in turn cry out at the grade schools...

...Not every essay is literate, but the general level of literacy is higher each year, the examiners say...

...The crux of the real issue -whether there is One Way to teach writing well, or whether Third Ways work, if not by One Way criteria then according to other, possibly more significant, values -is, by this simplification, rendered unintelligible...

...About this, I feel much like the unknown people's poet who wrote, about the enclosure of the common lands in England: The law condemns both man and woman Who steals the goose from off the common But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose...

...When I returned to high school teaching elsewhere after working on a university fellowship, I invoked mentors like Holt and Goodman to counsel me...

...Near the end of those three years of teaching, while I walked the corridors of the school I had attended not many years before, I sensed that something was wrong...

...At every level rote/lecture teaching strategies prevent individual students from developing a sense of why structure and precision in language are useful...

...Let us lament that with continued ignorance of Third Ways rampant about us we'll be doomed to find John Holt's assessment of our situation today (from What Do I Do Monday...

...THIRD WAY IN ENGLISH JOHN DRUSKA Tyranny in the kingdoms of language and literature I Last year I attended a lecture given by John Holt in a hotel meeting-room that was filled with several hundred listeners, many of them teachers...

...After all, millions of us are products of what Goodman has called our "lock-step" system of education (in Compulsory Miseduca-tion [Vintage, 1962]), functioning now in the lock-step economic mill of American society, though at one of the mill's more insecure moments...

...Alternatives exist for some...