The Right Hand is High School English; The Left Hand is College Composition

My freshmen often express disillusionment in their transition from high school English to college composition. Many of them feel (and I agree) that their high school English classes have left them unprepared for college writing in general, and my composition classes in particular. As a teacher, it is easy for me to suggest that such culture shock is a natural part of the learning process. As students advance both educationally and cognitively, it makes sense that the pedagogies upon which they once relied and within which they once thrived will seem inadequate. My students, on the other hand, have no such benign perspective. Many of them feel cheated or even led astray by high school teachers who would often justify hard or tedious assignments by claiming that they were "preparing them for college."

Thus, when my teaching points out the inadequacies of the five paragraph essay, or when I challenge often overly-pedantic views of first person writing and so on, my students respond bitterly about a secondary education that was supposed to "prepare them for college" but that has failed to do so. My students often hyperbolically express their desire to injure, maim, or kill their high school teachers for their false teaching. In fact, a student once told me that when he had gone home for a visit, he ran into his high school English teacher at Wal-Mart and he told her, right there in the store, that she owed him an apology.

On one hand, our students' feelings are natural to the educational experience and we need not worry about them; I remember having these same feelings as an undergraduate who had excelled in my high school English classes and had tested out of Composition I. But there is also a real and legitimate criticism couched in the responses of my students. At least from my perspective as a composition teacher, there is little curricular alignment between high school English programs and the college English departments their students are entering. There are, unfortunately, some unavoidable reasons for this.

Most high school English programs combine both the teaching of writing and of literature. And because most English teachers enter the field because of their love for literature, teaching about the history and interpretation of literature becomes the primary focus of the class. In fact, writing instruction in most high school English classes takes place while students are writing about the literary works they are reading. Thus, even in the English classroom, writing is treated as more of a skill set necessary for but peripheral to the real subject of the class. Writing is an activity that supports the teaching of literature, rather than being a subject of its own.

More significantly, though, is that high school and college teachers don’t seem to know what the other is actually doing. This should not be particularly surprising. Many high school teachers do not have the educational credentials and few have the time to teach as adjuncts in college composition programs. At the same time, only a few of the composition teachers I know have taught in secondary English programs. Though it’s an ever-present mantra in high school English classes to say that the class is “preparing students for college,” teachers of high school English know very little about what we actually do in the composition classroom.

To our shame, many first year writing programs have done little in the way of supporting secondary English programs. There are many researchers in the universities who are studying the writing habits, rhetorical prowess, and language usage of high school writers and proposing pedagogies based on their findings. But the lessons we are learning from this research seem too often to be getting lost in the ether. High school teachers aren’t reading our journals, and we’re not visiting their classrooms.

It is my admittedly un-researched argument here that there is a palpable disconnect between first-year composition programs and secondary English programs. It is also my assertion that this is a problem that we ought to work toward fixing. Without a doubt, true curriculum alignment will not be possible. The two enterprises are different enough to prevent this. Though high schools do indeed make it their goal to prepare students for higher education, they also have the burden of universal education. So it is also their goal to prepare students who will not and, perhaps, cannot go to college. Furthermore, high schools do not simply send students to the nearest state university, but instead send students to the four winds. Therefore, high schools cannot hope to account for the numerous pedagogical approaches at different institutions.

But even without some form of specific curriculum alignment, we can improve our teaching in both high school and college by fostering better communication between college English departments and high schools programs. We can help high school teachers better prepare their students for us by making clearer what we do, and what types of writing we privilege. We can also find ways to make sure that the research we do about their students gets back to them, so that the latest research a teacher has won’t be what they learned in their English education program while they themselves were in college. Furthermore, if we hate the five paragraph essay, we ought to be searching for and implementing new techniques to teach organization and invention. We are, after all, the research wing of the educational enterprise. And if teachers need these forms that we so hate because they work, it falls upon us to find something else that works and that isn’t antithetical to what we teach.

Ultimately, we must recognize that we are not involved in mutually exclusive projects, but rather we are indeed colleagues whose work can and should influence one another’s practices.