Rebecca Coleman

1 March 2003

Analytical Essay: A Balance of Instruments

Over the years the educational system in America has put a great deal of emphasis on testing.  Students are required to take Standard Achievement Tests that measure their academic abilities and play an important role in their future educational opportunities.  With all this focus on performance and testing, is there enough focus placed on the creativity and expression that young students really need to develop?  This issue is addressed in an English Journal article entitled “Writing beyond Testing: ‘The Word as an Instrument of Creation’” by G. Lynn Nelson.  He addresses the conflicts between educating students to pass tests and educating them to develop creative expression.  On considering Nelson’s view and developing my own, I have come to understand that while the standardization and testing of writing is important and useful in young people’s education, it must be accompanied, even exceeded, by a strong emphasis on writing as an instrument of creation.

As I read through various journal articles in search of a subject to write on, I found myself strongly drawn into Nelson’s.  He addresses many of the feelings I have experienced as a student, being involved in a great deal of writing over the years.  He also points to many of the hopes and apprehensions I have had about being a teacher myself.  I have asked myself a variety of questions about the future I have chosen.  Among them: What will be the most important thing students take from my classes?  Will it be how to regurgitate what they’re told they should know and how to pass tests well?  Will it be how to express their thoughts and generate new thought and expression?  Can I teach both skills together?  Which is most important?  I know I want to help students to become good people in society and to discover who they are and who they can be.  And I know that language is a powerful instrument in achieving such things.  These thoughts I have had are precisely some of what Nelson is getting at when he speaks of the measurement side and the creation side of English education. 

In his article, Nelson speaks of two types of instruments having to do with writing.  The first are “instruments to measure standards.”  These are used in the academic assessment of students’ writing “having to do with correctness and organization . . . and the power to pass or fail [that] writing” (Nelson 57).  The second, which he attributes to N. Scott Momaday, author of House Made of Dawn, is dubbed “the Word as an instrument of creation.”  This instrument wields a different kind of power—one that affects and can change the personal lives of students (57).  Nelson conveys a frustration, even a sadness, about America’s huge educational emphasis on testing.  True it measures what students’ writing includes and what it lacks when compared to preset standards, but with such strict expectations and judgment, says Nelson, “we may well be robbing our children of the birthright of their language ‘as an instrument of creation’” (57). 

A writing test cannot measure everything about a person.  It cannot detect the circumstances that shape one’s personal life, it cannot determine one’s greatest inner strengths and weaknesses, nor can it gauge the individual obstacles one may possess, such as difficulty in pulling the right words out of the air on command.  A written test cannot measure the condition or the worth of one’s soul.  Several times in my classes at BYU the droll comment has been made by an instructor: “Don’t worry, even if you fail the test you can still go to heaven.”  I never found this very comforting in the consideration of the actual possibility of failure, but the point is true that the test cannot really tell what kind of person I am, or the role I am capable of playing in society.  The problem is that some tests can determine what role I am permitted to play in society.  So much in the world today depends on one’s educational performance that poor testing really can determine what people can become in their lives.  I have thought on this dilemma often.  Nelson’s article pointed out to me the reverse side as well.  He makes the comment that “there will be students that pass our state tests and still ‘go to hell’” (58).  Not only can a mere measurement of academic standards keep good people from filling some important roles in our society, but it cannot keep down the advancement of those who may be harmful to it.  Future gang members, drug addicts, child abusers, “CEOs of corporations that rape the Earth or who will be rude and egotistical and unkind to their fellow creatures” will pass our standard measuring tests (Nelson 58).  Others will fail the tests—shy, struggling, gentle, capable, lost students.  Students with great hopes, students with no hopes.  Their chances to say what they have to say may be taken away by a system that has labeled them failures.

Nelson shows that his concern is for young students as people—people who face challenging problems in this world far beyond academic testing.  He writes: “Even if they pass our tests, they may not survive life itself.  For the mere passing of our standardized writing tests will not assuage despair and emptiness and lack of meaning in the lives of our youth” (57).  In saying this, however, Nelson does not renounce the importance of writing for young people.  Rather, he believes that they need to have the Word as an instrument of creation in order to endure today’s world.  Writing holds for them the possibility of finding, as he said, “voice and choice and peaceful power” (58).  On this point I agree entirely with Nelson.  When people can use their language to say what they want to, rather than what a standardized exam tells them to, they can open a window into the very essence of humanity.

My own window—probably the best true writing of mine—is framed in the numerous personal journal entries I have composed over the  years.  These entries are for the most part very informal and relaxed in style, containing some long excited run-on sentences, some fragment sentences, a lot of slang, and perhaps a few too many exclamation points.  But every word of it is precisely what I had to say.  As I look back through these entries I notice that my ability to express what I want and to convey it well has increased with my continual education in English and writing, but my individual style and personality are always present.  Those compositions would certainly never pass a state exam, but they are a better exploration and expression of my own mind and soul than any academically acceptable essay could be. 

This expression of soul is just what Nelson is getting at when he speaks of the Word as an instrument of creation.  It is when people use writing to discover who they are.  He gives such examples as the young man in prison, feeling forever lost, finding deliverance through writing; the prisoners in the Warsaw Ghetto of the Nazi era “writing poems and messages on scraps of paper and hiding them in the crevices of the ghetto walls” on their way to extermination; the soldier in a sunken Russian submarine “writing a note to the wife he would never see again” (59).  These are the moments when creation through the Word is all that matters.  Punctuation, grammar, paragraph construction, even spelling matter little compared to the soul and feeling that can be transmitted through such writing.  As Nelson asserts: “We are talking about things like voice and personal empowerment and spiritual growth—things that modern technological society takes away from our students, from all of us” (59). 

I myself know the frustrations of tests and the limits they can place on what I might say.  Nelson’s focus is on this limitation.  But here I part ways with him a little more.  My point is not to say that testing in school is unimportant.  Certainly students need to make the grade.  They need to be prepared for and learn to perform under the stress of examination.  I firmly believe that testing is an important part of education.  It is a motivator to master the material that is taught, and it is a tool to measure the level of that mastery.  My point, rather, is that measurement must not be the extent and purpose of young people’s educations.  Above and beyond that teachers have the power to nurture and encourage, to help their students find and release the voice within themselves, as long as exacting rules of writing and preset expectations do not stifle them.  Too much focus on meeting the set standards can constrict the mind rather than expand it.

Does the standardization of writing matter at all?  Of course it does.  We do need specific guidelines and standards in the written language, and there are certainly some ways of saying things that are more aesthetically pleasing and appropriate than others.  It is much more satisfying to read a work with well and properly structured sentences, that uses concise wording and so on, than one filled with errors.  The knowledge and internalization of such principles gives writers greater power to express and expand their minds far beyond where they could with no such knowledge.  So there must be an equilibrium.

A personal example may illustrate the need for proper balance between the two instruments.  While I was growing up there were several occasions on which my mother was complimented by other adults on the well-behaved manner of her children, whether observed in public settings or as guests in their homes.  Mom was always grateful for such praise, but also a little surprised.  For in the personal and private setting of our own home and surroundings the wild and rambunctious natures of my siblings and I tended to run freely along with our always creative ideas for having fun.  And while she appreciated the creativity and personality we exhibited, we sometimes drove Mom “up the wall.”  After hearing such positive assessments of us from others who didn’t see this non-conformist nature as well as she did, she often wondered: “Does this mean I have failed or have succeeded in raising my kids?”  My own thought is that she succeeded.  While my mother taught us to conform to the social standards and polite manners that were expected of us, she also nurtured and encouraged our individual personalities and original thinking.  The success is that we had learned how to appropriately balance the conformity and the unique self-expression in their proper settings.  Our eccentricity would at times show through in public, but it was usually appropriate even if it did break standard social rules, because we knew those rules so well.  One’s conduct in writing, too, requires a similar balance of conformity and originality. 

At times it seems as though conforming is the only option offered.  Students today feel constantly nagged about using the proper conventions of writing until it feels at times that they cannot express their true thoughts because the rules bind them so tightly.  Papers that students work so hard on are handed back drenched in red corrective marks.  Sometimes it seems that teachers are so concerned with whether or not the thesis statement is concise, that the points a student is actually making are lost to them.  But this does not mean that such exacting criticism and high expectations are not needed.  Should teachers just encourage students to do their own thing, praising all that their students do, and simply celebrate the diversity of works without criticizing at all?  No.  This defeats the very meaning of the title “teacher.”  A teacher is there to guide and correct the development of his or her students, teaching them the rules and at the same time nurturing individual style and unique expression.  As the rules and conventions of writing are mastered they can begin to act as catalysts for new creativity.  The master of these will also know the appropriate times and ways to break out of them.

Young students possess the capability of becoming such literary masters.  They can become so in an environment that incorporates both the teaching of writing standards and the encouragement of unique creativity.  Focus on just one or the other will not suffice.  Some of the world’s greatest writers are great because they broke out of the norms.  They did something different.  They took the proper and set way of doing things and weaved into it their own souls.  Their knowledge of writing aided their unique expression.  Through the creative bravery of original writers, standards are exceeded, and new standards are set.  I want my schoolroom to help generate people like this.  I want to be the kind of instructor that young students need—one who can show them how to reach the boundaries, and then to reach beyond.

Works Cited

Nelson, G. Lynn. “Writing beyond Testing: ‘The Word as an Instrument of Creation.’” English Journal 91.1 (2001): 57-61.