American English Doctor Putting English to Work	By EmailPosts

You are here: Home » Education » All Teachers are English Teachers

All Teachers are English Teachers

A standard heading for a routine assignment

I’ll never forget a junior high faculty meeting in which I suggested that we agree on an all-school policy for the presentation of written work. I’d just returned to the States after teaching in England for several years. My school there had such a policy.

I was astounded by the immediate and explosive reaction from a colleague who taught math and science. She equated the idea of uniform layout with Nazi oppression. To her the idea of requiring students to put their name and the date in the same place on papers for all subjects  was tantamount to fascism. She said that she didn’t care where a student put his name, so long as it was somewhere on the paper.

The advantages for the teacher are probably obvious. Here I’ll just mention a few of the advantages for the student.

It focuses the student’s mind on the work at hand. Many children waste homework time chewing on their pencils and staring at a blank piece of paper before making a start. Having a routine to follow for preparing the paper enables the child to begin work at once, placing the name and other required information in a specified place on the paper.

It leads the child directly to the assignment. After the name and other information are in place, the student writes the name of the textbook (or some agreed-upon abbreviation for it) on the first line, together with the number of the page on which the assigned exercises or questions originate. By then the student is on the right page and ready to begin.

It promotes orderly study habits and pride in one’s work. Most students, in setting up a predictable heading for the homework paper, tend to form their letters more carefully for the heading. Sometimes this care transfers to the rest of the assignment.  It also saves the stress of scribbling the student’s name onto a paper at the last minute, or the inconvenience and confusion that results from forgetting to put a name or date on it at all.

Too often the teachers of subjects other than English balk at the notion that they can or should contribute to their students’ grasp of English skills such as spelling and grammar. That’s an unfortunate situation that needs to be addressed.

Children are in school to be educated. The mastery of their native language is perhaps the most important–and easiest to insure–aspect of their formal education.  It’s unreasonable to expect children, especially those from homes in which a dialect or a foreign language is spoken, to master standard English from their English classes alone. Every teacher has the responsibility to model standard English, and to require correct spelling and usage from their students.

January 22, 2010 | Category: Education

3 comments to All Teachers are English Teachers

• Cassie Tuttle

  January 23, 2010 at 4:03 pm

  What a wonderfully simple concept!

  Yes, sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Thanks for sharing.

• MjMaddox

  January 24, 2010 at 8:48 am

  Repetition is at the heart of learning. Students won’t arrive at college misspelling the months of the year if they’ve been required to spell them correctly on their daily papers. I’d like to see math teachers require their students to spell out the numbers from time to time, particularly “forty.”

• Lori Helms

  January 26, 2010 at 12:40 pm

  Your points are very reasonable. I home school my daughter, and I require her to use a standard heading on her papers. She dislikes writing in cursive, so this is one way I can get her to exercise that skill, and it does focus her on her assignment. Recently she has started taking more pride in the neatness of her headings. I can see no disadvantage to using a standard heading.