English Ain't No Snap

"Every morning I awake with an empty feeling, as if there had been a death in the family," says white-haired Floyd Rinker, veteran of 32 years of English teaching at Newton (Mass.) High School. What depresses Rinker is the generally sad state of the 90,000 English teachers in U.S. secondary schools--public, private and parochial.

Rinker well knows that English teaching can be impossibly hard. The "normal" high school teaching load is 125 to 150 pupils a day. If a teacher assigns 125 pupils one 500-word essay a week, allowing 15 minutes apiece to correct them, he faces more than 30 hours of extra work. (One result is that some teachers assign no essays, and high schools are graduating students who never wrote a single composition in four years.) Nonetheless, Rinker thinks that the deeper problem is simply incompetence; few teachers, for example, read enough, and many cannot write with style and clarity.

"Germ Carriers." Teacher Rinker is now executive director of a coast-to-coast rescue squad called the Commission on English, which the College Entrance Examination Board launched in 1959 with $1,000,000. A top priority: re-educating teachers. Says Harvard Professor Harold Martin, chairman of the commission:

"They're doing a damned poor job in education schools--75% of the time is wasted time, filled time."

This summer Rinker & Co. set up "institutes" at 20 universities from Cornell to California, gave 900 teachers a stiff dose of everything from satire to syntax. Supposedly the nation's best English teachers, they are expected to go home as "germ carriers" after a graduate-level summer tour of literature, linguistics and composition. Rinker is pleased--but not nearly as pleased as he hoped to be.

Reformer Rinker's problem was clear last week at Harvard, which wound up an institute for 45 New England teachers. Their ages ranged from 25 to 62, and 85% of them had master's degrees. As the course ended, a few were plain flunking; many others had barely grasped it. Only about a dozen emerged with honor.

"Born Again." In teaching the literature course, Harvard's Professor Martin dug deep into the "ethos" of King Lear. His charges scribbled copious, precise notes (only one or two actually dozed). At length Martin paused to ask: "What happens to Edgar at the end of the play?"

A long silence followed; apparently no one remembered Edgar. Finally Martin said, a little ruefully, "He's king."

Professor Scott Elledge ruthlessly ripped apart the teachers' compositions--the first creative writing for some of them since adolescence. "Full of hazy thought," he snapped. "This kind of rhetoric we don't need--it's unliterary." The teachers, who tend to see correcting essays as sim ple proofreading rather than criticism of meaning, giggled nervously, or sat in stunned embarrassment.

Happily, they remained undaunted. "It's like being born again," said one woman teacher. Inspired by their encounter with Greek rhetoric, 21 teachers even launched a new syllabus for teaching expository writing in high schools. Still to be seen is how much of an epidemic such germ carriers can start back home.

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