'An Answer to the Cry for More English"

While I thoroughly enjoyed all the assigned readings this week, there was one that really held my attention and thoughts. Adams Sherman Hills’, “An Answer to the Cry for More English,” captivated my attention from the very first paragraph. Hill writes, “Boys and girls who were well on in their teens could talk glibly about “parts of Speech, “analyze’ sentences, and “parse” difficult lines in Young’s “Night Thoughts” or Pope’s “Essay on man,” but could not explain the sentences they took to pieces, or write grammatical sentences of their own.” From my own personal experiences in the classroom , this travesty is still happening in every school across America today. As I have had many English classrooms where I have been a substitute, there are so many students that do not have the life experience to understand the conventions and rhetoric appropriate to all kinds of writing situations. They lack the responsibility to realize that one must proofread in order to have successful writing skills. I truly believe there needs to be more motivation, habit, and above all respect to all students and their needs.
In the second paragraph there is another quote from Hill that I find worthy of note. “The overburdened and underpaid teacher had every inducement to cling to the prescribed routine; the superintendent of schools was too busy to listen, too busy with machinery of “the working system,” with his pet theory of education, with the problem how to crowd a new study into “the curriculum,” or how to secure his own re-election; the professor, absorbed in a specialty, contented himself with requiring at recitations and examinations knowledge of the subject- matter, however ill-digested and ill-expressed; journals of the better affirmed that, though such a book was not written well, it was written well enough for its purpose, and sneered at those who took pains to correct gross errors in others, or to avoid them themselves; and even some acknowledged masters of English held, with Dogberry, that “to write and read comes by nature.” This perspective is all true…from the underpaid teachers to the superintendent that was too busy to listen. I see teachers that have grown comfortable with their “curriculum” and are frightened to change or step out of their comfort level. Writing is not separate from content, nor a skill that can be mastered. I want to think that a teacher should show students how to think and express their thinking in and through writing.
Also, “so long as people think literary skill easy acquisition, they will be unwilling to have their children spend time acquiring “an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue.” To this day, I still often write fragments, or misspell words. I feel that no one is perfect, and everyone will make mistakes, this only helps people grow and learn. The help of teachers and parents working with one another in the effort to better understand the “use of the mother tongue” intelligently will only empower their students/children advancement in life. Again, motivation and engagement in the writing material plays a key role in the learning process. I believe that if students are not engaged in their writing, they did not put much effort in to it, and as a result may have seemed as if they lacked good writing skills.