Zenith City: Stories from Duluth

He Believed Writers Are Made, Not Born

in the s, when Ed Krzenski began teaching English, many of his contemporaries had already abandoned the Sisyphean struggle to equip their pupils with writing skills. The notion that writers are born—not made—was gaining credence in faculty lounges across the United States. In place of learning how to write, some teachers were asking students to respond orally to stories, essays, or poems rather than having students analyze the literature in writing, let alone fashion their own poetry or prose. This didn’t sit well with Ed, who believed that writing could be taught and that nearly anyone could be trained to write passably. He was the finest writing teacher I have known, and if his name is unfamiliar to you it’s because he labored in obscurity at Cloquet High School in Minnesota teaching eleventh-grade English. I don’t think he ever published anything, and he never aspired to. But all of Ed’s students learned to write or they didn’t pass his class. He used to say it was a shame that so many English teachers and professors believed that writing was an innate skill that could not be taught. It was a shame because Ed could teach it and teach it well. He certainly did during the spring quarter of  when I was completing my degree at the University of Minnesota–Duluth and practice-teaching under his tutelage. During those several months, I watched a man dedicate himself to teaching writing to teens whose interests were anywhere but in the schoolroom, where they were required to parse sentences. Ed was the only high school teacher I’m aware of whose students wore out books of grammar. 34 he believed writers are made, not born He Believed Writers Are Made, Not Born | 35 His raison d’être was ensuring that every high school junior enrolled in his class would leave understanding what constituted a sentence, a paragraph, and an essay and knowing how to execute them. “I stress writing,” he informed me the day I arrived in Cloquet. His comment was pointed; my background was literature, and I had expected to emphasize that during my apprenticeship. “The trend these days is away from writing and grammatical rules, but I’m from the old school.” Except he wasn’t that old—late thirties perhaps; he was of medium height and build and wore dark horn-rimmed glasses with lenses that magnified his eyes. “Kids can learn how to write,” he said, “and the ones in my classes will learn.” Ed insisted that every pupil could write solid exposition—essays and criticism—after proper instruction. His directions demanded that students pore over grammar workbooks, complete the exercises , and pay scrupulous attention to numerous discussions about developing and supporting a thesis. His students wrote a five-hundred-word theme each week, which meant Ed was reading about one hundred papers per week— a total of more than fifty thousand words. He demanded quality submissions, complete with proper usage, grammatical perfection, and correct spelling. Students were required to demonstrate comprehension of each week’s ten vocabulary words by using them in their essays. Ed meticulously examined each paper but would not record a grade until it was error-free, an often maddening process for the students. At the top of a returned theme, Ed noted the types of errors in the paper, such as spelling, awkward construction, or grammar . But the notes would never disclose where the problems were located on the page. The student had to figure that out for himor herself. A day or two later Ed would receive the “corrected” paper, sometimes to discover the student had misspelled a second word while missing the original. Now Ed’s notation indicated two words were spelled incorrectly. This exchange might go on for days, even 36 | He Believed Writers Are Made, Not Born weeks, with the paper dishrag-limp from erasures. But before Ed would issue a grade, the entire paper would need to be clear of mistakes. His approach to discipline also involved writing and words. Instead of detention for fractious or recalcitrant students, Ed insisted they copy, verbatim, everything on an assigned page from a Merriam-Webster dictionary, including the diacritical marks. During the time I spent observing and teaching his classes, I learned that even the students he labeled as average possessed working vocabularies far exceeding those of most of my college...