“Students can’t write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.” At least, according to Stanley Fish, dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago they can’t. In Fish’s column in the New York Times, he clearly communicates his belief that in writing, “Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom.” Fish seems to believe that during the process of being taught writing structure and sentence makeup, students are distracted by content instead of being taught that “Form is the way” and that turning a random list of words into a sentence is done by putting “words into a relationship with one another.” During his long career in teaching, Fish has developed his own method of teaching form. Fish believes that by requiring his students to come up with their own language, he is teaching them the ins and outs of sentence structure, not forcing their focus to zoom in on interesting content.
According to Collin Brooke, to imply that professors are incapable of teaching form in the context of actual writing is not only an incorrect assessment, but it is “colossally insulting”. Professor Brooke made this statement as a reply to Professor Stanley Fish’s article Devoid of Content, in which Fish claims that using or making content relevant while teaching sentence form and structure is not only distracting, but ineffective. Although Brooke disagrees with the claim made by Fish that “Most” of the millions of students graduating from high school and college are “utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence.”, he goes on to show respect for Fish’s method of teaching by stating that he doesn’t “doubt that Fish’s students leave his class fully capable of crafting logically coherent sentences”. This lets us know that it isn’t Fish’s method of teaching that Brooke disagrees with, but the position that Professor Fish seemingly takes, a position that makes his way the only way.
I find myself agreeing with both Professors, but more with Professor Brooke. I agree with him more simply because I believe that for anyone to pretend or even hint that there is only one way to get to a goal is absurd. I do agree that taking a bit of the focus off of content and placing it into form would help me as a student understand sentence structure a bit more, but requiring me to create a different language is even more distracting than having focus placed on good content. I believe that everyone has a unique learning and teaching style, and because of that, we all can benefit from the differences amongst us. There is not just one way to reach the mark, but many routes that can get you to a common place. It is very important that we remember that although the route we took got us to where we need to be, it is not the only way to get there. I believe that Professor Stanley Fish forgot this; this is why I agree that there is a Fish in a Barrel.
i agree with brooke but for other reasons as well.
i liked his argument better.
brooke made an inference based on his observation and compared two similar things (his ability to sample the learning pool with that of fish)
fish made an assumption or rather a stretched inference based on a narrow sample set that didn’t necessarily represent what he was evaluating(trends in writing abilities of graduates or overall quality of writing of graduates.)
i like the title of brooke’s essay since he seems to demonstrate that shooting holes in fish’s arguments is like shooting fish in a barrel.