So the department revolved around these two polar opposites, and yet both agreed on a specific approach to teaching freshman writing. This made their instruction of us novices incredibly powerful & compelling. It was another case of binocular vision, of seeing the same ideas from different vantage points & thus understanding them far better than I would have if I'd been taught by either Lou or Don alone.

Now that I know we've got an Expository Writing Problem here in Irvington, I am desperately seeking information about British writing instruction.

How do they do it?

British subjects are the best writers in the English language, bar none. They're incredible.


back in the day
I taught writing for years, btw. I taught the Freshman Rhetoric course at the University of Iowa; later on I taught freshman writing to gifted 11 & 12-year olds for the Johns Hopkins GTY program. (That was a blast.)

In all of these courses I used the approach I was taught at the University of Iowa. Lou Kelly's book, From Diaglogue to Discourse: An open approach to competence and creativity probably explains it fairly well.

That title has probably raised some eyebrows around here. The Rhetoric Department was anchored by two diametrically opposed personalities, Lou Kelly, an avowed leftie-hippie with flowing gray hair whose emotions ran the gamut from furious to still-furious-again-today, and Donovan Ochs, the Chair, who, looking back, was kind of the Sean Connery of Freshman Rhetoric.

So now your eyebrows are up and your heads are spinning—this is why you come here, right?! To read stuff straight out of left field!

Back to Don: I have no idea why I came up with 'Sean Connery,' except that Don was kind of....gruffly masculine, if you know what I mean, and you probably do. Dark brow, beard, direct gaze.

He was the bane of Lou Kelly's existence, and enough of a gentleman to hide the glaring fact that she was the bane of his. (The 'enough of a gentleman' part is what separates Don Ochs from Sean Connery.)

I once had to be Talked To by Don, because a black student had accused me of racism. She was a hostile, complaining sort of girl, and one day in class she'd sighed loudly and said, 'This is boring!'

I snapped right back, "Bored people are boring," and the next thing I knew I was in Don's office.

He fixed his direct gaze on me and somehow managed to convey the idea that I could figure out a way to be more tactful and authoritative in my own classroom, and that was that.

So the department revolved around these two polar opposites, and yet both agreed on a specific approach to teaching freshman writing. This made their instruction of us incredibly powerful & compelling. It was another case of binocular vision, of seeing the same ideas from different vantage points & thus understanding them far better than I would have if I'd been taught by either Lou or Don alone.


back to the future
While I could probably go out and teach a decent expository writing course today, teaching my own eye-rolling 11-year old is a whole different story.

The eye-rolling isn't the problem, actually.

It's the afterschooling.

I need KUMON for expository writing; I need a systematic, structured program of supplemental writing instruction that can take place in 10 to 20 minutes a day.

And I don't have one.

I don't think the Brits have one, either, but I'd like to know how they do what they do.

If any of you knows anything at all about British writing instruction, please let us know.

Thanks.


brief report

[Judith] Koren describes how two British women she knows became effective essayists and speakers. “Each week, they’d had homework exercises like this: While preserving every essential point, reduce a 100-word essay to 50 words, then to 20, then to 10. Reduce 500 words to 50, 1,000 words to 100. Week after week, year after year. A grind? Sure it’s a grind. Who said literacy is easy? It takes practice. Few kids want to put in that amount of work. The schools have to demand it.” (By the way, anyone trained in this method should contact me immediately—I have a job waiting.)