Why Declining Literacy Claims Make Me Roll My Eyes: A High School English Teacher’s Perspective
The lukewarm remains of my 9 a.m. coffee sat on the kitchen table last Tuesday, next to a stack of 10th grade personal narratives and a half-eaten oat granola bar crumbled into a napkin. I was scrolling through Instagram during a 5-minute grading break when I saw it: a viral post calling out the state of student writing, with that very line typed out for the world to cluck over: “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.” Hundreds of comments echoed the same take: this is proof literacy is declining, kids don’t know how to write, schools are failing the next generation. I rolled my eyes so hard I almost got a headache. That line wasn’t written by some illiterate kid who can’t string a sentence together. It was written by my student Mia, last semester.
Mia’s story was about her paternal grandma, who grew up outside Manila and worked as a runway model in the early 1970s before moving to the U.S. She’d come to class a week before turning the draft in, bouncing in her seat, pulling up a photo of her grandma in that dress on her phone. It was a floor-length caftan covered in giant embroidered pineapples, the fabric stiff enough to stand out a foot from her body. “All anyone ever talks about is the shape,” Mia told me. “She says the whole show stopped when she walked out because no one had ever seen anything that big.”
When I first read that sentence in her draft, I paused, too. The grammar is a little off, the word choice is awkward, “gauche” isn’t the word most people would reach for. But instead of crossing it out and writing “awkward – rephrase” in the margin like so many of the people commenting on that post would have done, I jotted down a quick question: “Love what you’re doing here – what does this line mean to you?” Mia stayed after class that day to talk about it, her neon pink hair clip slipping down her forehead as she leaned against my desk. She’d been binging a vintage fashion TikTok series, she said, where the host used “gauche” all the time to describe clothes that were bold enough to be almost too much. She liked the word, liked how it sounded sharper than “big” or “loud.” “Silhouette” wasn’t a mistake, either – she’d looked up old fashion terms to get the story right, and silhouette was the word everyone used to talk about that dress’s shape. She just wanted to lead with the thing that mattered most.
That’s the thing no one mentions in these viral panics, right? Awkward writing is almost always learning in action. When I was 15, I wrote a whole poem about my first dog that used the word “perspicacious” three times because I’d seen it in a YA novel and thought it sounded pretty. I had no idea it meant “having a sharp insight.” My 10th grade teacher didn’t put my poem on the internet as proof literacy was dying. She wrote in the margin, “Great word – let’s talk about what it actually means, and why it works here even if you got it wrong.” That’s the lesson I still remember, not the mistake.
I tell parents this all the time at conferences, when they’re worried their kid uses words wrong or writes sentences that don’t make sense at first glance. The first small shift you can make is read for meaning before you hunt for mistakes. I ask parents to read their kid’s whole writing assignment all the way through, ask them what part they were most proud of, before you point out any errors. It takes 30 extra seconds, and it changes how kids feel about writing. No one wants to keep putting their ideas down if the first thing you do is point out what’s broken.
Second, if they use a word wrong, don’t just cross it out and write the correct one. Ask them two quick questions: where did you hear that word, and what made you want to use it? That turns a mistake into a conversation that sticks way better than a red pen correction. Mia still talks about that conversation about “gauche,” because it wasn’t just a grammar lesson – it was her getting to talk about her grandma and her love of vintage fashion, which is the whole point of the story she was writing in the first place. After we talked, I showed her the full dictionary definition, and we talked about how words shift meaning when people use them in new contexts anyway. She left my class knowing what the word meant, and she didn’t leave scared to use new words in her next story.
Third, don’t buy into the “kids these days” panic. I’ve been teaching for 12 years, and I can tell you kids write more, read more, and care more about communicating their actual ideas now than they did when I started. They just don’t always write the kind of stiff, generic prose that people think “good writing” is supposed to look like. They pull words from the media they consume, the hobbies they love, the conversations they have with people online and off. That’s not a failure of literacy – that’s how language has always worked.
A couple of weeks ago, Mia turned in a new story about working weekends at her grandma’s vintage shop downtown. It’s about a customer who brought in a sequined 1960s cocktail dress that was way too flashy for the 1960s, but the customer loved it anyway. At the end of the description of the dress, she wrote: “It was extraordinary, and wonderfully gauche.” She put a little star next to the word, and a note in the margin: “Got it right this time :)” I wrote back “This is my favorite line you’ve ever written.”
There will always be another viral post, another awkward line pulled out of context that everyone points to as proof the world is going downhill. But I get to see the whole story, not just one sentence. Kids are still learning, still experimenting, still putting their ideas down on paper. That’s not declining literacy. That’s how literacy works.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Declining Literacy Claims Make Me Roll My Eyes: A High School English Teacher’s Perspective