thoughts on contemporary rhetoric

Although the reading was still a little heavy for me this week, I found that I had the same thought running in my mind as I continued to read the chapter. On page 44, Williams writes, “As literacy skills have declined over the last several decades, many curriculum guides in our public schools also have de-emphasized the essay (and even summary book reports), on the grounds that it is too difficult for our students and have shifted the focus to personal and business letters.” And on page 63, when discussing romantic rhetoric: “Students who cannot reason sufficiently to write analytical papers or who cannot spell or punctuate nevertheless can receive high grades because assessment becomes determining whether the writing seems ‘real’.” To me, this is the dumbing down of our education system. It is no wonder that our students cannot write well. We change the system to meet them below the bar and don’t expect them to meet any high standards. We are in a society that still emphasizes everyone getting great grades without having to do any real work. We find a way to pass along students who cannot meet standards, and would rather change the education system to accommodate mediocrity than work to make our students learn. We have become a society that is so afraid to hurt a child’s feelings that we do whatever it takes to keep them happy. And then we complain that our school students are lagging beyond students in other countries.


America seems to be interested in the “wrong” stuff when it comes to education. We worry about defining statements, exclamations, questions, and commands and not about whether a student can write a logical sentence. We think that standardized testing is the greatest measure of what a student knows, yet we do not measure what should be considered important. We worry about the little things, like spelling and grammar, and not whether our students can make it in the real world. We are afraid to give children failing grades, because it might hurt their feelings. We treat children as such fragile little beings and we don’t teach them how to exist in the real world. By third grade, we expect students to be able to write out how they solve a math problem, but we never teach them how to do this. I have had to explain how I do a task, but I have never had to explain it in the minute detail the PSSA’s require. Never in my real life have I had to identify a sentence as an exclamation over a statement, but I do need to know how to write many different things. There are grocery lists, letters, emails, papers, arguments to parents about why I think my Girl Scout troop needs to go to a certain activity, newsletters, letters to the editor. They each require a different style, audience, rhetoric. I did not learn these through osmosis; I learned them by being taught different types of writing, and by practicing them over and over. If we do not start teaching our students how to approach different writing tasks differently, then we are doing them a huge disservice.


I am a big supporter of WAC. I think that it is a great way to show students that they can be writers about many different topics, in many different ways. Cooperation among teachers to further emphasize each other’s subject matter not only teaches students that these subjects are important, it reinforces the interconnectedness of everything we learn. I think that those opposed to WAC make a good point that WAC stifles a student’s individual voice (77), but this individuality could be included in the curriculum, especially in language arts class. I do not believe that WAC is designed to restrict student thinking or expression, but rather, gives students more practice writing, so that they can develop their individual voice and find the more effective means by which to express their individual voice. Personal expression can be included in areas of social studies, math, and science also, but it requires teachers to put more thought and put more work into finding the ways to include it.


Finally, I think the point about linked WAC being costly to implement was right on, and a little unfair to teachers. Williams points out that teachers would have to go to training workshops to learn how to best implement it, and want to be compensated for doing so, making the program costly. This statement portrays teachers as only wanting to do things for the money. Most teachers I know go above and beyond the general scope of their job. Most teachers became teachers because they want to make a difference in the lives of students. It is unfair to portray them as not wanting to do what’s best for their students because they wouldn’t get paid to take a workshop. We expect teachers to be on top of the best practices and ready to do what has now been determined as the best practice, but we expect them to learn how to do this on their own. We expect teachers to do their trainings on top of the work they do during school hours and after school hours, not be compensated for it, and to do it because they want to. I know that most professions pay for their employees to go to training seminars and course work that will benefit them in their job. Most of the time, employees do this training on company time, paid for with company dollars. It is not fair to expect teachers to always do more for and with less. We should have much more regard for teachers, and as a society, place more emphasis on giving teachers the training and information they need, regardless of cost, so that our students, in turn, get the best education that they deserve.