Grammar Matters: A Creative Writer's Argument

New Jersey City University is an urban, public university in Jersey City, New Jersey, serving a diverse population of working-class students, including a range of African American, Latino, and immigrant communities. Our students have been unevenly and inadequately prepared for college by their urban public high schools, and they come to the English major (indeed all their classes) with little in the way of background knowledge, reading experience, and basic skills. Many of these same students pursue education certification to teach early childhood, elementary, secondary, or special education. They are, therefore, the future of the urban schools that feed our university.

Five years ago, our English department operated like many. We taught the traditional canonical surveys, and we strove to give our majors an understanding of literary criticism and literary theory. And while we, as an English department, might have been divided about the shape of our literature curriculum, with the typical split along generational lines between traditionalists and those who wanted to include more works by women and people of color, we were uniform in our assessment of the poor skills of our incoming students. We cited all the traditional problems of urban education: poor funding, immense student needs, the special needs of our many immigrant students, and so on, but we never took the next step in reflecting on our own responsibility for these poorly prepared students. The blame was in the end always placed on the urban high schools by which they had been ill prepared for college level work. However, Ron Fortune (1986: xxi) reports another perspective by quoting Scott Thompson, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, in a 1982 interview: "The colleges are genuine in their feelings that too many students are not adequately prepared for higher education. . . . if the colleges had a modicum of conscience they would know that their own shift in standards and requirements had something to do with the situation that faces the schools today." Fortune agrees with Thompson by noting, "It is our responsibility as college English departments to disseminate what [we] expect of students entering our courses, and [we] should integrate these expectations into [our] work with high school English teachers" (xxi). At my university, since our incoming first-year students come to us from the surrounding urban high schools, they are actually being prepared for college by teachers we as a university with a large education program have prepared and certified. We have produced and continue to produce many of the teachers who in turn produce our undergraduates, so if these students don't meet our expectations, we must be part of the problem.

Our disconnect goes beyond a lack of integration with high school English teachers. First of all, our College of Education and College of Arts and Sciences have had limited to nonexistent interaction. While the College of Education programs actually drive the majority of enrollment in traditional Arts and Sciences majors like English, the faculty in English have operated in a kind of blissful ignorance of this connection. We were producing "good" English majors, regardless of whatever other courses they were taking in education and regardless of the specific purpose for which students were taking English courses. The fact that few if any of the faculty in the English department had ever taught on the secondary or elementary level combined with the fact that many of us had enjoyed educations in the English departments at elite public and private institutions where teacher training was insignificant or irrelevant heightened our departmental insularity and arrogance. In other words, there was institutional, philosophical, and economic stratification between our College of Education and our English department. Indeed, if discussions ever arose in English department curriculum committees about high school English teachers, faculty members were likely to reference experiences based on their children's suburban schools and not the local inner-city schools our university serves.

In other words, not only were we not engaged in the kinds of activities that bring together secondary and postsecondary English teachers in discussions about the teaching of writing and literature, we weren't engaged in...