Education: A Good English Teacher

At New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Ill., a pretty, blue-eyed young woman, who might be mistaken for a home economics teacher, instead makes an unusual approach to the teaching of high school English. Karin De Long spiritedly guides her students through challenging books, then has them find and lift out techniques to use in their own writing. Any kind of writing—mostly good, but sometimes bad—is fair game for Teacher De Long. One week she may give her class Chaucer, another week Thomas Hardy, another a collection of Japanese Haiku (17-syllable poems). "I want to see both good structure and an exciting use of words," she tells her students, as they buckle down to a job that has caught their interest.

Writing Precisely. This instruction is only part of Teacher De Long's course, which covers all the conventional ground of high school English. But it goes to the heart of her method: making students realize the power of words, and their own potential power over them. Above all, Teacher De Long strives to teach composition, and she begins composition at a logical starting point. Instead of sugary essays on "What I Did Last Summer,'' her students begin with two weeks of literary logic—causation, connectives, transitions. What earns a good mark is order and clarity, not florid language. It is the principle once stated by Ernest Hemingway: "Prose is architecture, not interior decoration."

When they get the heft of the tools, Teacher De Long's students move on to consider emotions. "What is this writer doing with these words?" she asks, and the writer may be a True Story fictioneer or the adman who coined the phrase, "Ocean-Combed Percales" ("Can the ocean comb anything?"). If the writer is Shakespeare, she wants to know precisely and specifically how the reader is made to feel, for instance, the evil in Lady Macbeth. If the writer is a student, she wants him to say precisely what he feels. "Everything goes back to this general aim: to make students more effective as human beings."

Is such teaching rare these days in U.S. public schools? Many high school principals feel that it may be. At their annual convention in Portland, Ore. last week, high school principals called for more English themes, even if teachers must enlist salaried assistants to help read and appraise them. At another meeting of U.S. school administrators in Atlantic City, N.J., Paul B. Diederich of the Educational Testing Service loosed a startling prediction: by 1970, U.S. colleges will be rejecting one-fourth of all applicants because they read and write so badly. Diederich's reason: soaring enrollment is killing English composition in the high schools.