Read it and weeep (sic)

Read it and weeep (sic)

From today's Washington Post:
http://tinyurl.com/lmdxr
Writing Off Reading

By Michael Skube
Sunday, August 20, 2006; B03

We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college
sophomores and I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite
writers are. The question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice
in the rear hesitantly volunteered the name of . . . Dan Brown.

No other names were offered.

The author of "The DaVinci Code" was not just the best writer they
could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.

In our better private universities and flagship state schools today,
it's hard to find a student who graduated from high school with much
lower than a 3.5 GPA, and not uncommon to find students whose GPAs
were 4.0 or higher. They somehow got these suspect grades without
having read much. Or if they did read, they've given it up. And it
shows -- in their writing and even in their conversation.

A few years ago, I began keeping a list of everyday words that may as
well have been potholes in exchanges with college students. It began
with a fellow who was two months away from graduating from a well-
respected Midwestern university.

"And what was the impetus for that?" I asked as he finished a
presentation.

At the word "impetus" his head snapped sideways, as if by reflex.
"The what?" he asked.

"The impetus. What gave rise to it? What prompted it?"

I wouldn't have guessed that impetus was a 25-cent word. But I also
wouldn't have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly
recondite, either. I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain
that today's college students carry a weekly planner. But they may or
may not own a dictionary, and if they do own one, it doesn't get much
use. ("Why do you need a dictionary when you can just go online?"
more than one student has asked me.)

You may be surprised -- and dismayed -- by some of the words on my
list.

"Advocate," for example. Neither the verb nor the noun was
immediately clear to students who had graduated from high school with
GPAs above 3.5. A few others:

"Derelict," as in neglectful.

"Satire," as in a literary form.

"Pith," as in the heart of the matter.

"Brevity," as in the quality of being succinct.

And my favorite: "Novel," as in new and as a literary form. College
students nowadays call any book, fact or fiction, a novel. I have no
idea why this is, but I first became acquainted with the peculiarity
when a senior at one of the country's better state universities wrote
a paper in which she referred to "The Prince" as "Machiavelli's
novel."

As freshmen start showing up for classes this month, colleges will
have a new influx of high school graduates with gilded GPAs, and it
won't be long before one professor whispers to another: Did no one
teach these kids basic English? The unhappy truth is that many
students are hard-pressed to string together coherent sentences, to
tell a pronoun from a preposition, even to distinguish between
"then" and "than." Yet they got A's.

How does one explain the inability of college students to read or
write at even a high school level? One explanation, which owes as
much to the culture as to the schools, is that kids don't read for
pleasure. And because they don't read, they are less able to navigate
the language. If words are the coin of their thought, they're working
with little more than pocket change.

Say this -- but no more -- for the Bush administration's No Child
Left Behind Act: It at least recognizes the problem. What we're
graduating from our high schools isn't college material. Sometimes it
isn't even good high school material.

When students with A averages can't write simple English, it
shouldn't be surprising that people ask what a high school diploma is
really worth. In California this year, hundreds of high school
students, many with good grades, faced the prospect of not graduating
because they could not pass a state-mandated exit exam. Although a
judge overturned the effort, legislators (not always so literate
themselves) in other states have also called for exit exams. It's
hardly unreasonable to ask that students demonstrate a minimum
competency in basic subjects, especially English.

Exit exams have become almost a necessity because the GPA is not to
be trusted. In my experience, a high SAT score is far more reliable
than a high GPA -- more indicative of quickness and acuity, and more
reflective of familiarity with language and ideas. College admissions
specialists are of a different view and are apt to label the student
with high SAT scores but mediocre grades unmotivated, even lazy.

I'll take that student any day. I've known such students. They may
have been bored in high school but they read widely and without
prodding from a parent. And they could have nominated a few favorite
writers besides Dan Brown -- even if they thoroughly enjoyed "The
DaVinci Code."

I suspect they would have understood the point I tried unsuccessfully
to make once when I quoted Joseph Pulitzer to my students. It is
journalism's job, he said, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the
comfortable. Too obvious, you think? I might have thought so myself
-- if the words "afflicted" and "afflict" hadn't stumped the whole
class.

mskube@xxxxxxxx

Michael Skube teaches journalism at Elon University in Elon, N.C.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company



--
Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor
Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan.
Unmunged email: /at/hush.ai
"Impatience is the mother of misery."
.

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