Triply unjust now is that many of these students believe that the only way they can succeed is by entering a college that is not well prepared to receive them. (A college that doesn't have the SEEK program like CUNY of Shaugnessy's day) Then they take massive loans that can never be discharged, then they drop out of school because they are so inadequately prepared and inadequately taught. So now they are uneducated and in massive, undischargeable debt. What a crock of manure that is.
Then I remember that my job is not to fix all the injustices in the world -- my job is (I hope someday) to teach the students in my class, whoever they may be - wherever they come from. This is why I admire Shaughnessy. She doesn't spend any time belaboring the unpreparedness of her students or complaining about the impossibilty of her situation. She seems to take the tack that she is faced with a very difficult, but solveable problem. She made Basic Writing into a discipline and looked for ways to fix the problem. This is quite admirable.
There is no getting around the fact that Standard American English (SAE) is a shibboleth. It is the a very good way for students to enter the world of the middle class - the world of high salaries, good schools, good nutrition, and safe neighborhoods. Of course, the trades are another way into the good life, but it seems to me that as our service and manufacturing economy becomes more sophisticated that even the trades require a great deal more education than they did before. I'm certain that avionics technicians, diesel mechanics, microchip fab workers, paramedics, and other high-paying developed-world tradesmen and women are earning at least an associate's degree and thus taking the concomitant composition requirements.
So I like that Shaughnessy doesn't back down from this fact. She may not like that students are criminally unprepared. She may not like that errors are so distracting to educated readers that they destroy the message. But she knows she can't change these things. So she came up with an entire framework and a discipline for fixing what should could fix. So "Basic Writing"was born.
As for me, I'm very interested in this concept of "basic writing" and how it relates to my undergraduate degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I'm particularly interested in the affective domain aspects of "basic writing,"not just whether students react well to instruction, but how their emotions affect their writing and their ability to learn. Is error correction freezing them in their tracks the same way it does for second language learners? I'll be exploring this question further.
