In the movie Little Big Man, the adopted grandfather of Dustin Hoffman’s character creates a running joke with his line “It is a good day to die.” Whenever the situation looks bleak, this old man pulls out his pat phrase. The laugh comes when the situation never turns out to be as dire as all that.

The State of Illinois, in its infinite educational wisdom, has decided to do away with the writing portion of the state’s standardized test. While one would wish this decision came as a result of clear thinking on the part of the state’s educational leaders, the bottom line for the decision was the bottom line. The State saves money by not having to grade that section of the test. Still, it was a good day to die.

As I have noted, I think, in earlier posts of this blog, I came to seriously thinking about the teaching of writing late in my career. I changed my major to English because I loved literature and all that went with it. Graduate school put only a minor thorn in that side when my assistantship called for teaching entry-level writing courses. My performance in front of those classes was perfunctory at best. The course I was required to take as part of my assistantship did introduce me to important names — Elbow, Kinneavy, and others — but I took little of that to heart. Even when I was teaching composition for eleven years at a community college I dealt with writing in the same old-fashioned, tired way I had as an undergraduate.

That all changed when I took my current teaching job. Suddenly I had a class full of informed, motivated, academically-gifted students. The old warhorse five paragraph theme did not work for them in the least, just as it had long since ceased to work for me as a writer. I needed to take this writing stuff more seriously. Along came the National Writing Project. I applied, was accepted, and my approach to writing has never been the same. I now not only recognize how important writing is — which I like to think I always realized, I am invested in making the student the focus, invested in growing writers, not simply “papers.”

Now those gifted students I have become extremely adept at knowing when to actually write and when to spit out a pre-fabricated, mechanical, test-oriented essay. My students would never consider using the same style essay for a Shakespeare class or a college application that they would write for a standardized test. They know enough to understand the test writing is graded on the most superficial of levels. Format is paramount. I am blessed to have students who can not only recognize the difference, they can negotiate it.

Not all teachers are so lucky, and not all students have learned to master these different situations. Standardized tests are, in huge part, responsible for this lack. Teachers feel pressured to obtain test results. The test grades depend on meeting the basic requirements looked for by over-worked, brain-fogged readers. The standardized test dictates ineffective writing.

Perhaps, then, the withdrawal of at least that section of the test coupled with a growing willingness from schools to defy the test mentality will lead to invigorated teaching of writing. Without the test blade hanging over their heads, teachers will be able to take real writing more seriously, to lead students into examining rhetorical situations and adjust accordingly, to build writers rather than automatons.

For writers, it was a good day for the test to die.

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