It's Evolution, Baby !

I’ve been a high school English teacher for nearly thirteen years now. In that time, teaching a course that every student must take, I’ve seen the full range of adolescent ability. I’ve read some student work that made me so jealous of their natural gift for words. I’ve read other work that made me wonder if the kid had actually ever written or read words before. Such is the life on an English teacher. Reading and writing are two of the hardest things to teach, but recently I’ve begun thinking of a different approach.

I’d say that one of the biggest obstacles to the improvement of young writers is simply the fact that many of them barely read anymore. It’s certainly not for a lack of materials. I imagine that there are more books published and in print today than ever before. It’s the competition for one’s time that takes away the joy of reading. Simply put, it takes too much time to finish a book. We live in a very fast age now. Everything is instantaneous. We can reach just about anyone at anytime via cell phones. Don’t know something? Get online and you’ll know in a matter of seconds. Everything we do now is about doing it faster. Reading even a great book takes a lot of time and is not a very fast practice. It really goes against much of what society is doing today. And while I’m thankful every day for people like JK Rowling and Oprah Winfrey for revitalizing the book world, the archaic form of entertainment that is literature is probably losing ground to more technologically-savvy things like video games, the internet, etc. So how can we expect young people to read or write well when they don’t know what good writing is? They just don’t really see it too much anymore.

I’ve always believed that reading and writing went hand in hand. Every student I’ve ever had who was a good writer was also an avid reader, at least at some point in their lives. They know about good grammar, because all books are written that way. They know about sentence variety, because most good writers employ such techniques. They have a good vocabulary, because reading thousands of pages has taught them that. The other key to good writing is practicing it, and herein lies what I consider to be our greatest problem.

Look at younger people today and tell me what kind of writing they do. They text-message friends on their cell phones, IM them via the internet, or send emails to one another. Take a good look at those three mediums. Do any of them promote any of the virtues of good writing that I listed in the previous paragraph? Technological writing, as I’ll call it, has no rules. It’s about getting your point across quickly and in the fewest words, or in many cases symbols or characters, possible. If this is the primary form of writing that many young people are doing, how can we possibly expect them to write differently in class?

I’ve had many foreign-born students before who struggle with English. When their foreign-born parents ask me how their kids can learn to read, write, or speak better, I always paint this scenario for them. If I’ve got a Korean student, he probably goes home and speaks Korean almost exclusively in the house. He probably has a Korean newspaper to look at and through the virtue of cable can probably watch Korean TV too. Later, his family uses a Korean bank, a Korean dry-cleaners, eats at Korean restaurants, shops at a Korean grocery store, and attends a Korean church. In school, his friends are almost all Korean and in lunch they sit together and speak to one another in their native tongue. How is that kid ever going to get any better with English? He never, ever practices it.

How can a kid learn to write better and more properly if they never practice that form? Is it becoming an unrealistic expectation of teachers to demand such?

Language is evolving. Usually evolution is slow and takes place over a long period of time. No one can see it happening. But now, however, we can see English changing right before our eyes, all as a result of the computer and technological explosion that has happened in only about the last ten or fifteen years.

Email has probably become the primary form of writing now. Think about some emails you’ve read or written lately. Did they have paragraphs? Were they indented? Was everything you wrote a proper sentence? Did you use any internet slang like LOL or type the omnipresent :) after you wrote something funny? I can’t get through an email myself without writing or seeing those things, and I’m an English teacher.

At one time people said “thou.” Then they said “you.” Now they write “u.”

At one time people said “Fare thee well.” Then they said “goodbye.” Now they write “L8R.”

Just recently the term “Google” was added to Webster’s Dictionary. It’s listed as a transitive verb and means “to search for information on the World Wide Web.”

The world of language is changing. Why are we fighting it?

Many people will call me a fool for even suggesting such a thing. Many of those people, however, are blind champions of the old ways who live in arrogant denial. To them, everything they did in their day was right. “That’s not the way I was taught,” some will say. While I am a traditionalist in many regards, it’s only when I’ve reasoned that it’s the smartest way to do something. I don’t do anything simply because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” To me, that’s a ludicrous and dangerous way of thinking. The old way is always better? Do we still drive old cars with their outdated machinery? Do we still follow ancient ways of medicine, or employ archaic materials and practices for building purposes, for forensic investigations, or anything else for that matter? Of course not. Times change, and we change with them. Why are we holding fast with language in the classroom?

Some people have told me “they don’t write like that in the business world.” Not yet they don’t. Who’s running businesses today? Older people. But every day you hear about younger and younger entrepreneurs and corporate leaders inventing and taking over every form of business out there. Children are the future, right? Their ideas will guide us tomorrow, and so will their language.

It’s evolution, baby !