English A Sections

Before the week is out a committee of English A instructors will have met to work out a revision of "Five Kinds of Writing," the well-worn standard text for the course. As far as fixing up English. A goes, they probably will have been wasting their time. For it will take more than the simple remake of a now-aging textbook to patch up the defects of the College's largest course, already far too unwieldly to teach anything past a few required fundamentals.

The most important reason for this awkardness is English A's system of sectioning its students. It screens incoming Freshmen with a difficult and tricky Anticipatory Examinations, then herds the 900-old students who flunk the test into a formidable collection of sections, grouped without a glance towards individual writing skills. The result, as '52 already knows, is pretty unfortunate. Section men find themselves teaching down to their slower students, while better writers are held back and end up learning little.

Similar courses, especially in the Romance Languages Department, neatly avoid the problem by handing newcomers a placement test, repeated every term, and allocating students to classes of varying difficulty on the basis of their sources. The result is that these students move just as fast as their abilities permit. An identical system would go far to help English A. If a placement test were substituted for the Anticipatory--perhaps something along the lines of the late-lamented College Board Achievement Tests in English--it could split the course into far more interesting and efficient sections of comparable skill.

Theodore Morrison, now heading English A, has run up against the placement idea before. He rejected it because of the "unfairness" in making section men teach class of inferior students, and in addition felt a "general hunch" that the whole thing would not work. Neither argument is particularly valid. Instructors in French and Spanish teach ability-grouped students all the way up from the "inferior" level; everybody seems quite happy about it. And it is somewhat silly to retain the present system on what Morrison admits is "just the simple feeling that a placement won't be any good." Instead of tinkering with its ubiquitous textbook, the revision committee would do far better to worry about the haphazard sectioning now making English A one of the more inefficient courses in the College.