1/23 Kitzhaber

Kitzhaber 257-260

Jan. 18, 2013

The beginning of Kitzhaber’s essay reads like the chicken and the egg paradox. For generations, university instructors have criticized high school English teaching and yet the same issues that they complain about existing in the high school classroom, are prevalent in the college English classrooms as well. So do the students exhibit these “issues” when they come into the high school classroom and leave high school with them still? Do they enter without them and attain them in high school? Do they even overcome them in college? If college English instructors have pinpointed these problems in high schools, how is it they haven’t noticed them at their own level? How is it that the same problems exist at their level if they are so quick to point them out to the high school teachers? The whole situation seems hypocritical. When the essay described the “Olympic tone” college instructors used when addressing the problems to high school teachers, I was able to picture it immediately. It seems that the easiest method of looking for what is wrong with the current state of composition instruction is to point the finger at others. And why not point the finger at high school instructors, from a college instructor perspective; this is an easy and convenient target. Again, like Kitzhaber, I am not saying that high school teachers are innocent in this situation, but college instructors seem to make it a habit of dumping the blame on them for the problems with writing instruction. Do college instructors who make “suggestions” realize how they must sound to the high school teachers? Just hearing a vague description of the scene, I can tell that they must sound extremely condescending. I think part of this problem is the finger pointing. It is much easier to look at the problems of others and turn a blind eye to your own indiscretions. If instead we look at the possibility of instructors uncovering and fixing their own bad habits, it would be a step in the right direction. Instead of being at odds with each other, if college and high school instructors came together and discussed the current issues and worked as a united front to absolve current composition teaching problems, perhaps we could move forward and make English courses better.