Sleeping through Schultz

Schultz article “Elaborating Our History: A Look at Mid-19th Century First Books of Composition” is painfully dull. In the article, she successfully demonstrated her knowledge of mid 1800s composition books, but left me wondering what her point was. She did a bunch of research and found some old and really obscure books on teaching writing. She then contrasts these texts to the more common composition books at the time. The difference between these two types of books is clear the entire time: the popular books, like John Walker’s The Teacher’s Assistant, were more rule-centered and asked students to memorize more than write while the more obscure books that Schultz looks at gave the students more opportunities for creativity and potentially even some preliminary critical thinking.

Schultz shows that Walker underestimated his students, and his three pedagogical tenets make this abundantly clear. He required students to follow strict rules and do an extensive amount of memorizing before they could even tough pen to paper. Morely and Frost, Schultz’s prized writers, prompt their students to just start writing basically and even challenge them to conduct research and observations on topics of interest to them.

An example of the “unconventional” practices of the texts explored by Schultz is the use of illustrations as writing prompts. This is actually mildly interesting. The most important difference though is that these latter authors encourage students to explore their on personal experiences, whereas Walker would never consider such a thing. It is also interesting to see that “Frost invites his students to reflect on their experience as a writer” (22). Practicing metacognition at this time had to be pretty rare it seems, so I give Frost credit.

I just feel that Schultz never made a strong or meaningful argument and that most of the article was extremely tedious and superfluous. She does have three conclusive points she argues at the end; however, these are completely uninteresting. I was just left wondering what the point of this was. How does this apply to modern pedagogical composition approaches? Is it just gaining a further historical perspective as Stewart argues? This is the one article that we read for this week that I feel I took nothing away from.