Allen’s personal comments

Foreword*

Getting into first semester English

For many of my students, college English feels like my 7th grade gym class.

Gym class was a misery—probably the worst part of my day. I was the chubby little guy who knew nothing about sports. My father had never played catch with me, the local baseball team (the Washington Senators) had not won a World Series in 34 years, and TV basketball and football were completely unknown (at least we never watched them). So there I was in gym class. The well-built guys all knew the rules of football and basketball, and all of them could throw and catch a baseball. The gym teacher assumed we were all up to speed on these things, so he didn’t bother to teach them. As far as I could tell, the ability to throw a baseball was built into a kid’s DNA. Everyone knew that was something that couldn’t be taught. I might as well have asked for lessons in being taller.

To make matters worse, about halfway through the year something called the “President’s Council on Physical Fitness” entered our lives. All the guys had to get assessed on tasks such as sit-ups, chin-ups, running 440 yards, and (of course) baseball throwing. The results were posted on the gym bulletin board, so we knew precisely who the winners and losers were, and the results were posted as percentiles, whatever that meant. None of the students knew what a percentile was, and the gym teacher didn’t bother to explain (and perhaps he didn’t know either).

A percentile is something like an average, so if a 7th grade boy is in the 50th percentile on sit-ups, that means that half of the boys in the test group (I think it was the whole USA) could do more sit-ups and half of the boys could do fewer. If a kid was in the 50th percentile, that meant he was absolutely normal, but we didn’t know that. If a kid was in the 100th percentile, that meant he was absolutely top of the heap. Nobody could do more. As I said, none of us knew this little detail (and the coach probably didn’t either), but we did know about spelling and arithmetic tests: 100% is the goal, 75% is just barely OK, and 50% is downright failure.

Our results were posted on the gym bulletin board, and only a few of the boys—the ones who were already built like statues of Greek gods and could throw a baseball from outfield to home plate—were winners in the 100th percentile. All the rest were losers.

So why am I telling you all this at the start of an English class?

Many of my English students approach a class like this one the way I approached 7th grade gym class. They assume that the ability to write a good paragraph is inborn and natural, that there is no way to actually learn these things, and that everyone else in the world is better at writing. Perhaps one day we will be able to pull a blood sample and figure out who is a good writer and who isn’t—just as we can pull a blood sample and figure out who can throw a football and who cannot. My students assume that the rules of grammar are as unclear and mystical as the rules of basketball and that teachers’ marks on papers are just a matter of how the teacher feels that day—much like the way an umpire calls balls and strikes based on personal feelings and how much he likes the batter.

If you are getting irritated at this point—good! If you want to tell the chubby 7th grader, “Don’t give up! You can learn to throw a baseball! You can learn the rules of basketball! You can overcome the lack of training in your past! And at 13 years old, you are not done yet—you can get stronger and more skillful!” then perhaps we have something to work with. Tell yourself the same things about your writing.

(And if you are ready to tell me that the rules of basketball are fairly simple stuff that a player can learn and that the baseball umpire actually follows the rules of the game and doesn’t call balls, strikes, and outs because of personal feelings, you have just figured out something important about English teachers grading papers.)

Good writing is not a matter of DNA, and there really are ways to overcome poor training and experience, but you do have to care and commit yourself to doing better.

Coda: Concepts to take back to your major

• Exercise science majors: I hope that you (and those who have also coached kids’ teams) understand that skills such as throwing and catching a baseball can be taught, that the rules of the game are not an impossible mystery, and that there are ways to help a sad, chubby young teenager shed some fat and build some muscle. If you’re in exercise science because you want to keep playing games, you need to find another way to make your money.
• Education majors: I hope you figure out that concepts which are obvious to you are not necessarily obvious to your students, and that the students’ emotions are an important part of the process. If you got into this field just to sit on the floor and read Winnie the Pooh to the children, you are in the wrong field. Perhaps you should aim at becoming a teacher’s aide.
• Accountants and business majors: I hope that whole percentile discussion was a palm-to-the-forehead moment. The way you crunch numbers really is important, but outsiders don’t necessarily know what you are doing and (worse!) we don’t know that we don’t know. Part of your job is communicating and explaining what these numbers mean. (Thus the need for English classes)

* Foreword: One of my editors was surprised and irritated that I didn’t know the difference between “forward” and “foreword.” I guess that proves that there’s always room to learn something. “Foreword” is the word which occurs before a major piece of writing. So now we both know.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.

The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.

Revised 5/26/23 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.