"Teachers Aren't Dumb," New York Times
It is a relief to see the issue of poor teacher
training being highlighted by Daniel T. Willingham, who correctly observes that
many university professors tasked with preparing their students for reading
instruction cannot themselves perform basic literacy tasks such as identifying
phonemes or morphemes ("Teachers Aren't Dumb", New York Times, Op-Ed, Sept. 8, 2015).
Recent emphasis by university writing faculty on
"writing as process", whereby students are expected to improve their writing
abilities by constant journaling, has deemphasized the necessity of language
teachers learning nuts-and-bolts basics such as word-classification,
clause-identification, punctuation, syntax, or morphology. This quite certainly
leaves intending teachers (and future
university instructors) "in the dark", as Professor Willingham puts
it, and doomed to repeat the cycle of ignorance with their own students.
Universities and colleges have an obligation to
provide their students, particularly those training for the professions, with
sound, useful instruction. If graduates of reading or writing programs cannot
explicitly describe their language, they have been failed by their
institutions.
Labels: grammar, linguistics, new york times, Teaching, universities, willingham
posted by sacsanua @ 9:42 AM
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