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Mark Goldenson does not understand English Dept.

Editor:

Once again one of your contributors has chastised Freshman Composition and its instructors for perceived lax standards and misplaced priorities. This time, Mark Joseph Goldenson ("UA English Dept. must get back to the basics," March 7) has attacked the ev ils of English 101, and in so doing has succeeded remarkably in showing his own need for the rhetorical skills that are taught in that course.

Goldenson wants Composition (note: it's not the English department) to get back to "the grunt work of the language," and he recommends that the methods of his old grammar teacher, Father Becker, be used as a model. Okay, let's say we change English 101 so that it duplicates Father Becker's grammar drills. Would Goldenson eagerly take this course, or would his complaint now be that Freshman Composition just makes him study a lot of stuff that he already knows? The fact is, the Composition program believes that all students have already had the basics, and that it's now time to apply those skills to higher levels of writing.

Furthermore, let's look at those bad ol' texts he claims "have no place in introductory English." Don't they? The idea is to read several types of texts to study how arguments are made- and not to indoctrinate anyone. But even if the agendas of certain in structors are purely political, so what? The only way to determine if values and beliefs- those things we write about-have any meaning is to put them beside other views, "incoherent" and "unreasonable" or not. If the only ideas students are exposed to are ones they already agree with or which don't threaten them, what will they learn about themselves as thinkers, writers, and human beings?

It's true that many students enter college unprepared for Freshman Composition; but there are services on campus to help them, and every TA dedicates plenty of time outside the classroom to showing students the "basics" of grammar. All of these facts go i gnored by a columnist who apparently knows his grammar, but who seems to believe that petulant whining and a compelling argument are the same thing.

By Paul J. Niemeyer (letter)
Arizona Daily Wildcat
March 14, 1997


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