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Writing about history

January 10, 2011 By

Will Fitzhugh’s crusade to get high school history teachers to assign research papers to allegedly college-prep students made the New York Times.

“Most kids don’t know how to write, don’t know any history, and that’s a disgrace,” Mr. Fitzhugh said. “Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools.”

His mood brightens, however, when talk turns to the occasionally brilliant work of the students whose heavily footnoted history papers appear in his quarterly, The Concord Review.  Over 23 years, the review has printed 924 essays by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations.

Publishing in the Concord Review is the equivalent of winning a national math competition, says William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions.  

In the most recent issue, a senior from Montclair, N.J., writes of Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure as a New York police commissioner; a New Orleans student profiles a 19th-century transcendentalist philosopher; and a senior from Seoul documents the oppression of Korean residents on a North Pacific island.

Fitzhugh started teaching history at a Massachusetts high school in 1977.  Already, the long research paper was out of fashion. But a sophomore’s well-researched, 28-page paper on America’s strategic nuclear balance with the Soviet Union persuaded him he hadn’t been asking students to work hard enough. In 1987, he started the review.  it’s won praise but little financing.

Most essays come from students at private schools. Few public school history teachers assign long research papers, Fitzhugh says.

He recently asked the head of a history department at a New Jersey high school if he assigned research papers.

“Not anymore,” Mr. Fitzhugh quoted the teacher as saying. “I have my kids do PowerPoint presentations.” Mr. Fitzhugh said he scoffs when some educators argue that research papers have lost relevance because Google has put so much knowledge just keystrokes away.

Researching a history paper, he said, is not just about accumulating facts, but about developing a sense of historical context, synthesizing findings into new ideas, and wrestling with how to communicate them clearly — a challenge for many students, now that many schools do not require students to write more than five-paragraph essays.

In 2002, the Shanker Institute, a research group associated with the American Federation of Teachers, funded a nationwide survey of public school history teachers. While 95 percent  said assigning long research papers was important, 80 percent said they never did because they had too little time to read and grade them.

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Reading: quantity, nonfiction, knowledge

September 30, 2009 By

The common standards movement has sparked a useful discussion of teaching reading. Many critics like the newest draft of the standards, reports Curriculum Matters.

Carol Jago, the president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, tells me she thinks the draft has improved in two ways. First, it emphasizes “quantity in reading.” Jago, an author and former high school teacher, served as one of several outside reviewers of the English-language arts version of the document.

“More is more when it comes to students and reading,” Jago told me in an e-mail. “I was delighted to see this important point addressed so directly…The dramatic difference between the number of books students read in high school and the number they are assigned in college I believe contributes enormously to student failure in the first semester at university.”

Jago also likes the focus on reading challenging books independently, a skill needed for college and the workplace.

Will Fitzhugh, the founder of The Concord Review, wants more stress on nonfiction documents and research papers.

In a Washington Post op-ed, cognitive scientist Dan Willingham critiques the standards for assuming students can understand what they read without background knowledge. Teaching “strategies” doesn’t lead to comprehension, he writes.

Remarkably, if you take kids who score poorly on a reading test and ask them to read on a topic they know something about (baseball, say, or dinosaurs) all of a sudden their comprehension is terrific—better than kids who score well on reading tests but who don’t know a lot about baseball or dinosaurs.

In other words, kids who score well on reading tests are not really kids with good “reading skills.”

Once students have “cracked the code of letters and sounds” and read fluently, the good readers are the ones with the prior knowledge to enable them to understand what they read, Willingham argues.  Students who lack background knowledge can reason their way through a text, but it’s slow and difficult, “a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”

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Let's make writing pleasant

September 20, 2009 By

Will Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, explains why writing instruction in the U.S. has failed: we dare not make it hard. This pillowed approach comes not from novice teachers, but from the NCTE itself.

Writing has “historically and inexorably been linked to testing,” says the NCTE. Moreover, it has been “associated with unpleasantness–with unsatisfying work and episodes of despair–and thus evoked a good deal of ambivalence.”

Fitzhugh takes us to the consequences of this strange historical analysis:

So, how does NCTE propose to free writing from its unhappy association with testing, episodes of despair, and so on? By encouraging students to do what they are doing already: texting, twitting, emailing, sending notes, sending photos, and the like-only this time it will be part of the high school “writing” curriculum. In other words, instead of NCTE encouraging educators to lift kids out of the crib, it wants them to jump in with them.

What happens when teachers encourage kids to just keep on doing what they’re already doing? They don’t learn how to write about anything. Lucy Calkins told Fitzhugh once, “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much.” But what happens when you teach writing without “getting into content”?

For one, students don’t write about the topic at hand, even if they have one. On a NAEP test, students were asked to write a brief review of a book worth preserving. of Fitzhugh cites part of a student’s review of Hermann Hesse’s Demian :

High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life.

I get it! I could write about Paradise Lost:

Life is full of trial and error. Sometimes we make big mistakes, but most of the time we make little ones. We should always remember that mistakes are surmountable–even when we make someone mad or fail a test. No matter how embarrassed we are, we can laugh at ourselves, learn from our mistakes, and move on.

Very pleasant and very sad.

For another excellent piece by Will Fitzhugh, see “Critical Likability.”

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