Posted on 01/29/2007 10:17:16 PM PST by marsh_of_mists
As a new School of Ed student hoping to become an English teacher, I'm perfectly used to left-wing academic claptrap. I've already suffered through four years of it as an liberal-arts literature-major undergraduate. Deconstructionism and Derrida ruled the day. But now I'm with the School of Education folks and it's a rather different strain of pseudo-Marxist hogwash. The problem is this: with the Literary Liberals, it was just a zoo of academic dimwits up in the ivory tower babbling to each other. These Education Liberals are the ones teaching the people who will be teaching the children of America; they have tremendous influence. Sadly but unsurprisingly, it's a negative influence.
I'd just like to briefly quote from two of my required texts (from two different courses) to show you folks what you're up against when you send your kids to public school.
First, Teaching Ten to Fourteen Year Olds by one Chris Stevenson for the middle-school education course. As an advocate for middle school, he argues that young adolescents are in a unique age group and so must be taught in a unique institution with a unique methodology (the middle school). However, I’ve lately found that this methodology is basically identical to the methodologies the elementary and high school "experts" want us to use. What is it? Well, it has nothing to do with curriculum, which is hardly ever spoken of. However, it has everything to do with "responsive schooling":
Just as the students are variable, so must their schooling provide complementary diversity--choices of curricular content, multiple approaches to teaching, diverse grouping formats. Expecting every student to learn the same material at the same time as a result of the same exposure is contradictory to their developmental diversity. Expectations that young adolescents will thrive in a teacher-focused, textbook-centered classroom hour after hour, day after day is at the very least naive [Stevenson 9].
In other words, uniformity and standardization in the classroom is bad. Teach to the student's interests and abilities, whatever they may be! Personally, I don't see why they don't just send the kids home to play video games, since they're so afraid of forcing them to learn outside of "their own pace" or really subject to anything deemed “un-fun”. Stevenson also talks at length about how teachers should be good ethical role models. What does that mean to him?
What is particularly wonderful and at the same time overpowering is that during these middle years one dimension of the changes children experience has to do with how the assess the world they inhabit...Here's the time when the standards and behaviors we model become so very critical to their private challenges. One student commenting about his teachers' participation in public protests said, "These teachers don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk." [Stevenson 8]
Publics protests? Hmmm, were they right-to-life marches or pro-gun rallies?
An unfortunately persistent example of continuing mindlessness is the practice of tracking students for instruction by so-called ability measures even though comprehensive analysis of research data does not support the practice....It is easy to slip into a teaching mode in which all students in a class are expected to be doing or learning the same things at the same time according to a single mode of instruction....Closely akin to [this] myth...is the apparent assumption that the most necessary learning derives from prepackaged instructional materials: textbooks, workbooks, kits[Stevenson 17]
So (a) no assessing students and placing gifted students with each other and low performing ones with each other, even within the same classroom--as in reading groups. (b) No general instruction of a general curriculum--and no expectation that the students should learn it together. (c) Little or no textbook use. These excerpts are only from "Chapter One: A Rationale for Responsive Schooling". Other chapters titles include "Awareness Through Shadow Studies", "Developmentally Responsive Pedagogy", and "Successes and Satisfaction Through Teaming". No, none is this has much of anything to do with teaching subject matter, as far as I can tell.
Secondly, we have Teaching English in Middle and Secondary Schools by Rhoda J. Maxwell and Mary Jordan Meiser, which includes such useful ideas as teaching Romeo and Juliet according to Howard Gardner's theory of seven multiple levels of intelligence (verbal/linguistic; logical/math; visual/spatial; body/kinesthetic; musical/rhythmic; interpersonal; intrapersonal). Now, for all we know, Howard Gardner dreamt this up one day in his underpants with a beer in one hand and joint in the other and we'd do just as well teaching to the four temperaments of Galen’s bodily humours. But my professors accept the multiple intelligence theory as though from the mouth of God. Thus, it is important to know how to teach Romeo and Juliet for those students with, for example, a more "logical/mathematic" intelligence:
...these learners will probably be interested in the meter of the verse, the structure of the Globe Theater, or the choreography of the stageed version. Some might be interested in creating a web page featureing the play or one of the characters. Others may enjoy a close look at the timing of the events. What happens each day? Is the timing logical? Those with a more biological slant may enjoy studying Friar Laurence's plants.[Maxwell 22]
...or an "intrapersonal" intelligence:
...these learners will probably like discussions that connect the play to themselves such as "What expectations do you have for someone you love?" or "What would you have done if your parents disapproved of your girlfriend/boyfriend?" or a journal in which the student choose [sic] a scene and imagines himself/herself in the same situation as the character and writes what he/she would do under the same circumstances.
By letting the students choose how they react and explain their understanding of a novel allows them to take advantage of their strongest intelligence.[Maxwell 22-23]
And be sure to teach to all seven! It doesn't matter if it takes you six months to get through Romeo and Juliet because, as these educators never fail to remind us, covering the curriculum thoroughly is a low (very low) priority.
Speaking of the curriculum, I managed to discover some of it in Chapter 10 of Teaching English:
The literature we select for students to read has both social and political implication and far-reaching consequences....For years multicultural literature has been ignored in the schools, and only recently have women authors been included in anthologies....By omission, teachers create the impression that great works are written only by white males[Maxwell 314
Like it's the teachers’ fault the Native American Jewish lesbian contingent hasn't produced the Great American Novel?
In the late 1980s a movement called cultural literacy gained popularity when Secretary of Education William Bennett argued that students need to read particular authors and works that represent great Western literature [Must be an evil Republican--marsh_of_mists]. The movement affected the public's opinion about what students should know. Cultural literacy gained momentum when E. D. Hirsch Jr. wrote Cultural Literacy, in which he listed the titles of texts he though all students should read. A major difficulty with Hirsch's list is that he sponsors only the cultural literacy of rich and educated white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the 19th and 20th centuries [Sounds like I'll have to pick up that book!--marsh_of_mists]. At a time when our country's population is nearly 40 percent minorities, Hirsch's cultural literacy is too narrow in scope and limited in perspective to adequately meet the needs of teachers and students.
A second difficulty with Hirsch's concept of cultural literacy is its simplistic view of learning. Peter Elbow in What Is English? describes Hirsch's list as ideal for learning chunks of information that have right or wrong answers, but leaves no room for interpretative imagination or the ability to create meaning from reading texts (163)....For Hirsch, then, knowledge is a set of memorizable facts.[Maxwell 316]
Knowledge is a set of memorizable facts. The ability to interpret those facts and put them to use is “wisdom”. I find the authors with little of either.
Literature study is often organized by genre....Or literature is organized by historical periods and geographical locations....We strongly believe that if we want to interest secondary students in literature we should not use these divisions. Students have little interest in literary periods, and this approach relies heavily on "teacher" knowledge ["Teacher knowledge"? How awful!--marsh_of_mists]....Rarely in the real world do we read only poetry from several weeks....We mix forms, styles, and periods, and we believe the same shouls be true in our classrooms. [Maxwell 317]
Another thing I've found here is an obsession with making school imitative of "the real world". Again, why not just send the kids home to experience "the real world"? School is school and we divy up literature into categories to make the canon easier for the students to understand and digest. But again, the curriculum's not very important to these folks. It's a tool for "molding their character". A universal body of culture for the students to know and understand is utterly unimportant. If they could get away with "motivating" their students' "imaginations" with comics and video games they probably would. Maxwell and Meiser talk a little more about organizing the readings around "themes" like "What is a hero?" or "Who am I?". Then they take us through several "categories" of literature: Young Adult, World Literature, Literature by Women, Multicultural Literature (apparently not the same as World Literature), which is subdivided into Native American, Hispanic, African American, and Asian American. But no gay and lesbian literature (yet).
Finally, they recommend numerous possible books for the high school/middle school literary curriculum. Out of maybe one hundred suggestions here --poems, novels, and short stories--I, a college graduate with a major in literature, know of exactly six: The Scarlet Letter, The Catcher in the Rye, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The House on Mango Street, Their Eyes Were Watching God and, of course, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Of those, only two, in my opinion, are worth reading, let alone teaching. Caged Bird is doggerel but the goddess Oprah happens to like it. Mango Street and Watching God are similarly bad and I only know of them because I myself had to suffer through them in 8th grade and 10th grade, respectively (I knew they were garbage then; it was that sort of thing that got me started on my glorious journey to young curmudgeon-hood). As for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I simply find it as boring as sin. While he would no doubt be considered a moldy antique to Maxwell and Meiser, who likely think that fire was discovered sometime in the 60s, James Joyce is not a great classic writer. In fact, he's one of the first junk modernists to say "Ooh, look how experimental, edgy, and radical I am! I must be a genius!". But that's another story.
Other excellent suggestions for English teachers from Teaching English's list include such beloved masterpieces as Anpao: An American Odyssey by Jamake Highwater, Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings edited by Miguel Algarin and Miguel Pinero, Aiieee! an Asian American writers' anthology, Jews Without Money by Michael Gold, A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck, Christopher Reeve by Megan Howard, and The Splendid Outcast by Beryl Markham. Not listed are The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote and Paradise Lost. Chaucer is mentioned in a brief aside justifying "multicultural" literature, much as Shakespeare was used as a basic example of how to teach to Gardner's multiple intelligences. Otherwise, they've been pushed off a cliff. Malory, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Austen, Dumas, Longfellow, Emerson, Dickens, Austen, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Melville, Poe, Mark Twain, Robert Louise Stevenson, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Dumas, O. Henry, Frost, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Flannery O'Connor are also consigned to the Dead White Male category (including Austen, Stowe, and O'Connor). The Grapes of Wrath has been trampled out its vintage, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest flown over the nest by the cuckoos, The Lord of the Flies slaughtered like a pig, and 1984 tossed down the memory hole. You can guess what happened Fahrenheit 451. Hawthorne and Joyce are the token Dead White Males on the list. How nice to have a whole two.
Why am I studying to become a teacher in a system under the ideological thumb of people like Stevenson, Maxwell, and Meiser? Why not just cry "Homeschool!" and become a software engineer? Well, let's close with a quotation from another book the aforementioned educators would likely consider "old hat":
Jesus heard this and said to them, "Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do." [Mark 2:17]
Perhaps naively, I hope to be such a physician. Thank you for your time.
Hi, I would like to post this to my School District mailing list - have you put it on the web anywhere to link to ?
You are the author (and the prospective teacher) right ?
The Federal Government should have never been allowed into public education. It should be handled at the local level. The cat's out of the bag now and it's not easy to find a school not willing to re-write and teach history and every other class with a liberal perspective.
A good summary and I wish you well. Clearly teaching for you is still a vocation. From global warming (for lunches they asked me not to send sandwiches in plastic bags, but "suggested" a resealable container) to multiculturalism (while pleased to see Hannukah celebrated, we found that Wicca was included in the "faith forward" curriculum) - you have your work cut out for you.
Thanks for the critical thinking and consideration of the children.
Having gone through a university education and taking social sciences, literature, humanities, political science and journalism as either electives or required curriculum, I can relate.
My political science professor, in the 80's took his summers in Moscow and his winters fighting for the USA to freeze its nuclear programs. He gave me a C for my flat tax proposal, but upgraded it to an A when I included a modification that made it progressive.
My journalism professor gave me a D on an article I wrote about the potential benefits of the Strategic Defense Initiative, but gave me an A on the article I wrote about how Reagan was promoting armaggedon. (The latter being a sarcastic rant that was designed to be transparent to a liberal...and it worked)
My social science professor gave me a D on my essay on the need to maintain social morality in order to maintain social order, and an A on my essay on how homosexuals are victimized more by the stigma society puts on them, than AIDS itself.
It was a great education. I learned how to play the game. But then, I was older than most students, a bit wiser, and not susceptible to the programming they were trying to perform.
I wrote it for here so it is not posted anywhere else but here, but you are free to do what you want with it.
I gave up college after my professor of Biology graded me down to a "C" for my paper on controlling overpopulation. I put forth the theory that free enterprise, property rights, equal rights for women, and a few other things uniquely American, would prove to be the best solution.
He believed, and stated so in class, that "the Chinese know how to keep population growth down."
I raised my hand and said, "yeah, but don't they have forced abortions?"
He was less than enamored with me bringing that up.
Thank you for your complement.
I was two classes from becoming an English teacher when I regained my sanity. I just couldn't stomach the (re)education portion of the curriculum and the dogmatic rigidity of school administrations.
Your observations are 100% correct in my experience. Unfortunately, the humanities have been ripe with such effluence for nigh on a century. What passes for educational pedagogy in this modern age is no more than quackery and psychobabble. Empiricism and academic rigor have no place in the postmodern cult of methodology. :)
I salute you for your perseverance and pray you can make a difference.
That's why the new methods of teaching by trying to understand the little ankle-biters will fail. Drill and repetition are still the best ways as far as I'm concerned. A great many kids won't learn anything unless they're forced too. Put the nuns who taught me in school in charge with unlimited power, and you'll get better results.
Education post ping
Just a few random comments here, on things that especially piqued my interest:
Separating out middle school (used to be called junior high) students is IMO one of the stupidest ideas ever to come along. A friend of my mother's who was a teaching nun told her that, in her order, they had a saying, "To teach junior high, you have to be touched by God -- or just plain 'touched'!" I think the older model of 1-8 as elementary grades and 9-12 as high school had the effect of toning down junior high craziness, whether by appealing to 7th and 8th graders' better natures (such as they are) by expecting them to be in some measure an example to the "little kids" or, in high school, by leaving the 9th graders to the tender mercies of upperclassmen -- to knock the snot out of them if they get above themselves! Putting junior high kids together without moderating influences is like putting all the Islamofascists together and expecting any good to come of it.
Ah, "developmental diversity" -- what a scam, or is it cop-out? All teachers have always had to face "developmental diversity," even with tracking. My own high school was a small parish school -- not enough students for tracking, even if they had wanted to. The nuns coped: In our 3rd year Latin class, there was one boy whose IQ measured at 80. Perhaps you would think he couldn't keep up with 3rd year Latin (we did Cicero's orations that year) and would hold the class back. Well, the teacher (a nun who was a gifted teacher) typically gave as our homework assignment where to start in the text and instructions to go on for 40 minutes (which she considered a fair time for one night's homework in single subject). She had a shrewd and accurate understanding of how far each student in the class could get in 40 minutes, working diligently and to the best of his ability, and she called on the slower students to recite early in the class, the quicker students later (never belittling any student or talking about her method).
how they assess the world they inhabit
The world is up for junior high students' assessment here? I thought they were supposed to learn what the curriculum prescribed! (Actually, I kept thinking here of that passage in C.S. Lewis where he cites a "modern education" proponent as questioning what good tests did a boy. Lewis's (traditional) understanding was that it was reading the material that was supposed to do the boy good -- the test was merely to ascertain that he had read it!)
I do, however, question your "put-down" of the theory of the four temperaments. It's probably as useful in practical terms for describing reality as the Minnesota Multiphasic (granted, I'm a language/literature person -- not social science!). Aquinas put it to use to illuminate points of moral theology -- the virtues and vices typical of each type. And, of course, it's necessary for understanding a lot of medieval and Renaissance (including Shakespeare) literature. Maybe you could have used a different example! ;-)
All in all, though, an excellent piece. I am heartened that someone like you can make it through the minefields of "education" education!
This is an eye opening site. It has some things you will want to know. It is a history of the public education system.
Our sons are both in middle school, so this hits close to home. Fortunately, they have a preponderance of reasonable teachers and our district maintains some ability grouping.
My greatest gripe is with time-killing busywork projects. The worst offender is our 8th grader's English teacher. She's a silly dolt who started out studying marine biology and was inspired to teach English somewhere along the way. I suspect she was too dumb for the sciences and opted to teach instead. We were pretty irritated at her assignment of a very laborious project making "getting acquainted" mobiles at the beginning of the school year. This past weekend, my poor son spent hours clipping and pasting pictures from magazines onto a pocket folder to represent his outer and inner being . . . this is English????? After hours spent on the silly thing, it wasn't graded - just a checkmark to show that it had been done. Teachers like this really anger me. They waste the students' time with nonsense when they should be learning something worthwhile.
"Expecting every student to learn the same material at the same time as a result of the same exposure is contradictory to their developmental diversity. Expectations that young adolescents will thrive in a teacher-focused, textbook-centered classroom hour after hour, day after day is at the very least naive"
If you take out all the liberal-speak and numerous uses of the word "diversity", I believe this guy is just saying that not all students can learn effectively with the standard sit-in-your-seat-while-I-lecture-you style of teaching.
I strongly believe that this standard method of instruction is one reason that schools are doing so poorly. This teaching style doesn't suit many children. That's why some thrive easily in that environment and make good grades but many are just plain bored. How many on FR profess to spending lots of time at school daydreaming while looking out the window? Of course, they solved that problem by designing schools without windows in the classrooms (hmm, what other insitituion is designed with few windows?).
Some kids can't sit still and take dry lectures all day. That's why you see lots of boys on Ritalin today. Why does everyone have to be instructed the same way? Why shove everyone into the same mold? That's what socialism demands.
Compulsory, universal public education is a relatively new invention, having only been around for 2-3 generations in the US, so it's not unusual to find the whole premise needing to be re-worked.
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