I Heart You Hartwell

One gets the impression that old Mr. Hartwell is trying to put an end to the "grammar" debate. I can respect that.

I can't help but think as I read this, though, about my own instruction in language--doing grammar drills--and how still, today, in 2008, I hear colleagues and others refer to their students as "stupid" or "less than middle-school" because of issues of grammar. It isn't the name-calling on occasion, sometimes even the best eighteen-year-old is a cretin, it is the assumption that because of the grammar the intelligence is lacking. I believe Hartwell is right when he says "It is, after all, a question of power" (228). He is referring here to the debate surrounding the teacher's power in the classroom, but I think it applies to the deeper power structure--I as educated can silence you as uneducated. If you can't speak like me, I don't have to listen. Was it Perl or Emig that remarked on something like that?

And so how do you shake the very power structures embedding the education system that perpetuate bad teaching? I am being harsh here, and my intention is not to offer disrespect, but rather to state what I see as truth. Teaching grammar by example and grading for "correctness" only--not to mention judging students' intelligence based on such usage--is bad teaching. But as graduate students and unprepared teachers are thrown into the classroom, or good teachers are beaten down by workloads and standardized tests, these structures reassert themselves. Despite everyone "knowing" that "it is the mastery of written language that increases one's awareness of language as language" (Hartwell, 224) we still argue over how best to teach the mastery of written language. In teaching to tests it becomes about the performance of skill, not true mastery; in teaching college freshman it becomes about asserting power, a particularly vicious form of the banking model, not encouraging mastery. And I'm not blaming the teacher's here, I am, after all, one of them, but I am asking how do we change anything when it is the people in charge that are perpetuating the problem?

Hartwell has set out to settle the "grammar" question and he does a fine job, but I can't help but wonder if the grammar debate is COIK--if you recognize the silliness of such an approach of course these studies make sense, but if you are still married to the idea, consciously or subconsciously, or forced into the position, of educating your students your way whether they like it or not and any failures resting solely on them then this research means little. It doesn't matter that research shows teaching grammar to be unproductive because it is the student's fault.

My question then, I suppose, is where is the research that asks the question: what fault lies with the student and what fault lies with the teacher? What concessions should each side make? When do our demands hinder their education, and when are we "preparing them for life?" These are the underlying questions of the grammar debate as I see it; we talked about them briefly last class. And until these are answered, no amount of research will convince the well-meaning teacher that s/he is doing more harm than good.