{"id":968,"date":"2011-05-12T23:02:26","date_gmt":"2011-05-13T03:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=968"},"modified":"2011-05-12T23:02:26","modified_gmt":"2011-05-13T03:02:26","slug":"death-to-high-school-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=968","title":{"rendered":"Death to high school English&#8230; ?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Scott posted this article on Facebook: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/life\/feature\/2011\/05\/10\/death_to_high_school_english\">Death to high school English<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>My reply:<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s funny (in the ironic sense) that the author of the article complains so much about how bad her students&#8217; writing is, yet she never actually defends its importance. Her reasoning behind why writing is important seems to be: &#8220;It just is.&#8221; This prevents her from seeing the heart of the problem: No one cares how they communicate subjects that bore them. Writing is not just about coherent communication, it&#8217;s about communicating something that&#8217;s <em>important<\/em> to the communicator. And that&#8217;s not something a teacher can ever decide.<\/p>\n<p>I like how her friend says in reply to the question of importance: &#8220;No one asks this question about calculus, but who uses calculus besides math majors? If the question&#8217;s going to be asked about writing it should be asked about every subject.&#8221; She should read this blog! I certainly ask the question of every subject. Unfortunately she seems to have no reply for it, other than she hates it. That&#8217;s a pretty poorly reasoned argument.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Scott posted this article on Facebook: Death to high school English. My reply: It&#8217;s funny (in the ironic sense) that the author of the article complains so much about how bad her students&#8217; writing is, yet she never actually defends its importance. Her reasoning behind why writing is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[101],"tags":[393,78],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-fC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}