.

Clowns Teach Writing Classes

Students’ attitudes were dismal;
composition skills, abysmal!
Desperate to make things better,
teachers asked expert go-getters,
“Will you please get their attention?
What we need’s an intervention,
something new-wave, fresh, progressive—
something youth will find impressive!”

“We will help you,” they asserted.

“HEROES!” weary teachers blurted.
“While you fix this situation,
we’ll just take a short vacation.”

Dressed as clowns, with bright red noses,
“experts” told how one composes
essays. Students were attentive
to instructions so inventive:

“Slap those thoughts down. Hurry! Hurry!
Incoherent? Shucks, don’t worry.
Spelling, punctuation, grammar—
Smash ‘em with a great-big hammer.
Sentence structure, keep ignoring!
Writing standards are so boring.
Creativity, they smother.
Rules—I’d ban if I’d my druthers.
Pay no mind to your lame teachers.
Go play games behind the bleachers!”

Teachers soon returned expecting
with these kids they’d be connecting,
reading their descriptive writing,
in which they would be delighting.

What they found was quite confounding,
red-nosed youth in clown suits pounding
on their books with rubber hammers,
yelling, “We don’t need no grammars!”

.

.

Janice Canerdy is a retired high-school English teacher from Potts Camp, Mississippi. Her works have appeared in several publications, including Society of Classical Poets Journal (and online) Spirit Fire, Light, The Road Not Taken, Lyric, Parody, Bitterroot, Westward Quarterly, Lighten Up Online, Better Than Starbucks, Saturday Evening Post, Encore (journal of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies), The Mississippi Poetry Society Journal, Your Daily Poem, and LIVE (by Gospel Publishing House). Her first book, Expressions of Faith (Christian Faith Publishing), was published in December 2016.

NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets.

The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary.


Trending now:

25 Responses

  1. Cheryl Corey

    Janice, reading your poem today was so timely. Below is an excerpt from today’s NY Post. The dumbing down of American education continues. Kids might be better served with a McGuffie’s Reader from little house on the prairie days. When you think about how our founders grew up studying Latin, Greek, Plato, and other classics, the contrast is striking.

    “Juniors taking American literature at highly rated Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn were tasked with a series of rudimentary assignments based on childhood fables and fairy tales — third grade-level classwork that stunned critics and parents called “educational neglect.”
    After reading “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and “The Tortoise and the Hare” this semester, the 11th-grade general education students were then tasked with answering simple questions, such as “Who?” “What?” “When?” and “Why?” according to students who provided copies of the lessons to The Post.”

    Reply
    • Janice Canerdy

      Thanks so much, Cheryl. Here’s what I consider another example: A few years back, I learned of a change that literally made me CRY. The teaching of cursive writing was being deleted from the curriculum in many areas. I suppose this trend has continued! In my parents’ day, separate grades were given for penmanship. In my day, neatness in penmanship was required. When I taught (retired nineteen years ago), I would not allow printing.

      Reply
  2. Joseph S. Salemi

    This poem about “clowns” teaching writing classes touches a very raw nerve with me.

    For over thirty years I taught freshman composition in various colleges and universities. And I saw first-hand the pedagogical absurdities that Janice Canerdy points out here. Every semester, in every school, I and a few other rigorists had to fight lunatic proposals and imbecile methodologies put forward by clueless writing faculty — proposals that were EXACTLY what Canerdy describes in her poem. We rigorists were always mocked and abused and voted down by the great majority in the department, all of whom seemed to nurture a violent resentment against good grammar, correct spelling, rhetorical form, paragraph structure, and logical coherence. (Many of these faculty were children of the 1960s, so their brains had already been turned to cottage cheese by drugs and rock-n-roll.)

    Unfortunately these stupid faculty were backed up by the monolithic and totalitarian racket that I call “The Composition Establishment.” By this I mean the utterly lockstep rigidity of those professional organizations, journals, school “writing centers,” and teachers’ unions that enforce absolute orthodoxy in the teaching of composition.

    We were told that we could not correct errors (whether in spelling or grammar) on a student’s paper. (We could only “make suggestions.”) We were told that all assigned subjects had to involve the student’s personal feelings, or be connected with some kind of “social awareness.” We were told that students had to be compelled to keep daily journals where they should write down their reactions to the composition course, and to discuss what they thought about “Writing” (as if it were some kind of hypostasized abstraction). We were told that every student had to put together a “portfolio” of his work for the term, and that his final grade had to be based on a negotiated decision made by his teacher and two other faculty members. We were even told that we could not use red ink in making comments or suggestions on a student paper, as this might “trigger” coeds who were having their period.

    All of this was completely insane, but it was backed up by self-appointed “experts” in composition who wielded great power, even though their own prose was an unreadable pastiche of bureaucratic jargon and New-Age blather. I and those who agreed with me generally ignored all of these crackpot strictures, but English departments are filled with timeserving cowards and conformists. As a result the teaching of good English prose basically collapsed, nation-wide.

    I wrote a lengthy article exposing all of this chickenshit absurdity, heavily footnoted and documented. Not a single journal dealing with composition studies would publish it, and in fact I received infuriated and vitriolic responses from the assigned peer readers. I finally sent it to the well-known critic John Simon, who not only wrote back praising my article to the skies, but also phoned me to say that I had diagnosed the disease in our English departments perfectly. But he also said “They’ll never publish this article, Professor. It is too damaging to their self-conceit.”

    Reply
    • Janice Canerdy

      Thanks so much, Cheryl. Here’s what I consider another example: A few years back, I learned of a change that literally made me CRY. The teaching of cursive writing was being deleted from the curriculum in many areas. I suppose this trend has continued! In my parents’ day, separate grades were given for penmanship. In my day, neatness in penmanship was required. When I taught (retired nineteen years ago), I would not allow printing.

      Reply
    • Janice Canerdy

      Joseph, your response to my poem is a masterpiece! It has made my day! I used an ocean of red ink during the twenty-nine years I taught high-school English. I gave specific feedback, in writing and verbally, on rough drafts of essays, book reports, research papers, etc. Final copies were always much improved. If students are not informed about their mistakes and weaknesses, how are they to learn?! Teachers should TEACH them the rules and demonstrate how to apply them.
      Won’t this process quickly become repetitive? Of course!
      How do I know I didn’t fail my students? Numerous former students have thanked me for the methods I used, for my persistence. Some have told me that College Comp I and Comp II posed little challenge for them; they gave me the credit. Thanks again!

      Reply
  3. Mike Bryant

    Great poem! As a blue collar worker I missed out on much of this school work revolution. I suppose it makes a certain kind of sense, though. Why waste the time becoming proficient in English since we’ll soon have to start speaking (and writing, I suppose) in Chinese?

    Reply
  5. Sally Cook

    Joe, I really don’t know how you have managed to stay sane all these years, but — to my mind, you are brilliant. Doesn’t anyone anywhere care to see a creative endeavor correctly completed? Must it always be about somebody’s feelings, and some vague sort of mush ?

    God knows there is plenty of room within the boundaries of any legitimate endeavor, I am aware that he has a sense of humor, but this must be a bit of a stretch, even for Him !

    Personally, I think Mike’s a very lucky guy to have missed much of what has passed for education during the last half century or so.
    What these dummies need is a good dose of my grandmother’s tactics.

    Reply
      • Sally Cook

        Janice, I apologize for rudely failing to address your poem before answering Joseph. Now, about the poem. When one asks for help, as did your teacher, it opens the door for any old routine off-the-cuff response. People give what they think you need, or more importantly, not what you need but what THEY need.
        Your poem nicely sums up the usual result that comes when routine “help” occurs — not what actually helps , The children see this, turn it into parody, and learn nothing.

        Of teachers I recall, the best knew how to listen. There is a difference between giving a routine, pufffed-up answer and
        actually taking time to perceive the nature of the problem. To my mind, that’s the dilemma your good poem addresses.

  6. Joshua C. Frank

    Well done Janice! This poem says it all about modern “education” in writing, which is why I never bothered with a writing class.

    Reply
    • Janice Canerdy

      Thanks, Joshua! My grandson, a high-school sophomore,
      does many of his assignments online. Yep~~types them and clicks on a key to rocket-speed them over to the teachers. If I still taught, one of two things would happen: (1) Students would WRITE their lessons and hand them to me in class or (2) I would be fired for refusing to follow curriculum guidelines!

      Reply
  7. Sally Cook

    PS-I would very much like to read your essay on this topic; so would Bob. It must be a zinger.

    Reply
      • Joshua C. Frank

        I’d like to see it too, and I’m sure a lot of us would as well. What if you submitted your essay to be posted here?

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        It’s too long, and it does not deal with poetic composition, which is the chief concern of this website. When I find it I can send you a copy, if you tell Evan Mantyk to send me your mailing address.

    • Janice Canerdy

      Joseph, when you find that essay, I too would love to read it.

      Thanks again for your response to my poem! Janice Canerdy

      Reply
      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Same thing — if you tell Evan Mantyk to send me your mailing address, I’ll send it when I find it.

  8. C.B. Anderson

    Leave it to an English teacher to point out the deficiencies of modern public school education. I would have laughed out loud had not the verisimilitude of what you’ve laid out been so distressing.

    Reply
    • Janice Canerdy

      Oh, go ahead and laugh out loud, C. B.! We’d may as well laugh about it, since I don’t think we–anyone–can (or WILL) change things. THANK YOU so much. I truly appreciate your response.

      Reply
  9. Paul Freeman

    Many years back, I was teaching kids of miners and farmhands in sub-Saharan Africa. English was their second or third language. I focused on the basic tenses so they could write simply in the past, present and future, compiled a massive spelling list and gave them weekly spelling tests (in their stories the ‘dog’ being walked was an ‘Alsatian’ or a ‘Chihuahua’), and taught them how to punctuate correctly, especially direct speech. It all seems like a no-brainer, especially since the first errors your average reader notices are spelling mistakes.

    And yet, if your reader is assessing pupils’ spelling phonetically, and if handwriting’s allowed to remain a spider scrawl without penalty, this is not literacy to my mind.

    Those students of mine performed wonders. Three of them passed English and no other ‘O’ Levels. Many of their faces and voices are indelibly imprinted on and in my mind, including Tazvinga Tembo, a prefect with an infectious smile who would be dead in a mining accident a few months later.

    Crikey, I’m wandering. What I want to say is that thankfully I was allowed to teach in a way that fit in with my students’ needs and environment, added to which we developed a mutual trust and confidence in each other. Another plus is that they learned to express themselves freely and to educate me on their, and their families’ often very difficult lives (some of them had no electricity or running water at home and had to walk up to 10 miles to school), their hopes and their dreams.

    As far as I know, in the UK we’ve now gone back to basics, with grammar and punctuation being focused on (I’m not sure about spellings), and my kids all learned about literary devices (metaphor, personification, etc.) instead of magically being expected to know them.

    Thanks for highlighting this aspect of education, Janice (it’s close to my heart, as you can tell), and sorry if I’ve warbled on a bit.

    Reply
    • Janice Canerdy

      Paul, I am very moved and awed by your response. In your teaching experiences, you dealt with challenges I can only imagine, since I taught Mississippi kids in a Mississippi school!
      You worked hard, meeting your students where they WERE, and helped them advance. Your rewards? They learned because they WANTED to, due to your encouraging methods. I truly appreciate your response.

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.