It's Pick a Fight Day on LJ!

[swan_tower]

(No, it isn't. Just on my LJ.)

So, I'm mostly okay with this article in the Telegraph about how it's okay not to have read John Updike, or for that matter other literary greats. It's certainly true that it isn't possible for even the most well-intentioned of book lovers to have read all of the Great Literature that's been published in the last two hundred years, even if you aim only for the top tier.

But here's where the writer and I part ways:

This is not an argument against the literary canon. I do believe there are certain key authors – most of them Dead, White, European and Male – who jolly well ought to be studied at school by virtue of the quality and intelligence and depth of their writing. And I certainly don't believe in the modern anything-goes approach to teaching novels to children in school where they're served up in gobbets of "text" (whole books being considered too challenging for the Xbox generation) and where literary merit is thought of less importance than "relevance" or "accessibility".

All I mean is that once you've had a reasonable grounding in sufficient "proper" literature to form your taste, you should never again read a book out of duty.

Er.

Okay, middle first. I'm with him on the distressing notion that a whole book is too much for kids to read; God, I hope there aren't many schools doing that. But. But.

Dead, White, European, and Male. The blithe assumption that they've got a majority share on "quality and intelligence and depth." Gyah. I won't even waste space on arguing that one; you all can do that for yourselves.

The end; the end is where I start talking back to my monitor. The idea that you should form your taste by reading "proper" literature. That literary merit (as judged by, I presume, highly-educated White European Males) should be our primary criterion for handing books to kids -- because "relevance" and "accessibility" are silly little concerns, not something we should be wasting their time on.

How the hell does he expect anybody to learn to love reading, with that approach? How does an education in which you're forced to read books out of duty incline anybody to go on reading them when the duty is removed?

A couple of months ago, I finally managed to articulate one of the things that bothered me about high school English lit classes: I think they force-feed students lots of things the students have no particular reason to understand or care about, and they do it because this is the last chance society has to make you read those books. So who cares if Death of a Salesman is about a guy decades ago having a mid-life crisis and you're a sixteen-year-old barely aware that traveling salesmen once existed? Who cares if you have any reason to find Willy Loman's pain sympathetic or even comprehensible? You'll read it because we think you should do so before you die, and once you graduate our chance to enforce that is gone.

I don't think any power in the 'verse could have made me like that play, but I've got a tidy little list of authors I should give a second chance, because I might enjoy them now that I'm ready for them.

But I formed my taste by reading books I liked, books I cared about. It probably isn't the taste Mr. Dellingpole thinks I should have; it's okay for me not to read Updike, but probably less okay if the reason I'm not reading Updike is that I'm reading George R. R. Martin. But I submit that quality, intelligence, and depth exist as much in one's interaction with a book as they do in the text itself: all the literary brilliance in the world doesn't matter if my eyes are glazing over as I turn the pages. You want to know how I learned close reading? By obsessing over Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books and piecing together the fragments of prophecy and foreshadowing scattered through them. And it's entirely possible I never would have become an alert enough reader to survive Dorothy Dunnett had I not gone through those baby steps first. But if somebody had convinced me I ought to be spending my time on Zadie Smith instead of Jordan, it's also possible I would have never picked up Dunnett in the first place -- or, y'know, other books in general.

If I were in charge of high school curricula, you know what? Literary merit would not be my overriding concern. I would set out to give kids books they might enjoy, and then once they're engaged, teach them how to pay attention to what they're reading. Everything else can follow from there, because once you've done that, the chances of there being an "everything else" get a lot higher.

It's a fine irony when Mr. Dellingford decries readers who pick up literary books only out of a sense of obligation -- while also telling us we should obligate kids to do just that.

Comments

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

Or did they tend to get interested when they had an inspired teacher and less so when the teacher was going through the motions?


Obviously a good teacher should be able to get students interested in practically anything. That's what good teachers do. But the discussion (as I understood it) wasn't how to hire better teachers, but about the value of teaching books with Literary Merit versus teaching books that are Entertaining. It's a false dichotomy, because obviously there are plenty of books with both. But what is at stake here is the value that underpins high school curriculums: are we teaching English Lit in order to get students to read well? Or is our primary goal to get them familiar with a body of information? (Or to put this in the bald terms of debates over the direction of secondary education: should our priority be skills or information?)

I would far rather have my godkids learn about, say, the Mughal Empire in their second grade history class... than learn the same curriculum about the American Revolution that every other student in their grade is learning...

Well, a good teacher is a good teacher, and should be able to make the American Revolution just as interesting as the Mughal Empire. But as for your larger point, I have to disagree. Certainly, there are alternative schools that pride themselves providing student-driven learning, so if you want that for your child, you can have it. But within the state (or provincial) system, a teacher's failure to follow the curriculum often causes chaos, and ultimately is a diservice to the child.

Curriculums are supposed to be designed to ensure that each grade provides the building blocks needed for the next level. In grade 1 students learn to count & identify numbers. In grade 2 they learn to add and subtract. In grade 3 they learn to multiply, and so on. If, in grade 2, the teacher decides to teach fractions instead of addition, those students go onto grade 3 *not knowing how to add or subtract.* And then the grade 3 teacher has to either play catchup (thus meaning the students *don't learn how to multiply*) or teach the curriculum and try to help those other students on the side. The almost universal result? Those students fall behind at math, come in below average on standardized tests, and probably develop a complex about their "weak" math skills that will last the rest of their lives.

I admit that I come to this question from 2 directions. First, because I switched countries as a child, I also switched curriculums, and I found out firsthand what it is like to miss out on subjects like multiplication and national history (it sucked). Secondly, I've seen the results in both high-school and university classrooms. The college-level students who missed out on the American Revolution because their history teacher/basketball coach talked about basketball instead? They suffer, and they really resent not learning about the American Revolution. But they have a much, much easier time than the American students we get who were never taught the basics of English reading and pronounciation. (The "e" on the end of "time" is silent. Who knew?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, a good teacher is a good teacher, and should be able to make the American Revolution just as interesting as the Mughal Empire.

I think this is a fundamental point of disagreement between us. To me, this is like saying, "A good musician is a good musician, and should be able to play the violin just as well as the piano." There are skills and parts of musicality that overlap, and of course there are people who play both well and other instruments to boot. But I don't believe that all good teachers should be equally passionate and engaged with all material within their own subject.

I'm not sure where you jumped to "student-driven learning" when I was advocating letting the teachers choose, within their subjects, what to teach. Did I accidentally hit on a buzzword that usually signals student-driven learning without knowing it? There is a big, big difference between Mr. or Ms. So-and-so coming in and saying, "Okay, class, what do you feel like learning today? Go pick a project," and Mr. or Ms. So-and-so coming in and saying, "Okay, class, our next history unit is going to be on the Aztecs!"

Your example with the basketball coach also puzzles me, because it looks to me like this is not a situation that is remedied by having a mandated curriculum. We had a mandated curriculum in my seventh grade history class. The teacher wanted to talk about running (he was the track coach) and goof around. He did so. Having the mandated curriculum did nothing to stop him. If you have a history teacher who consistently doesn't teach history, I don't care whether it's because he's out behind the school with a fifth of gin or because he's in the classroom talking about how the team did Saturday (I had teachers in each category). But if you have a history teacher who teaches the French Revolution, and the students are learning it, I don't see the problem. If the same grade level history students in the next room are learning about the American Revolution and the ones in the school across town are learning about Cromwell, I really fail to see how any of these students are being let down by the system--or how it's equivalent to having the teacher talking about basketball instead of teaching history.

On the other hand, the honors English teachers in my school resisted having an externally mandated curriculum until after I was graduated and out of there. My seventh grade English teacher had the freedom to teach us Bullfinch's Mythology, Julius Caesar, and The Illustrated Man. She did an amazing job, and I believe one of the biggest tools she used to make it amazing was the freedom to adjust her curriculum at will--to look at how we were handling Bullfinch and say, "These kids are ready for their first Shakespeare, and I think it should be Julius Caesar," or else, "These kids are not getting the level of analysis I'd like with the Bullfinch, but maybe I can get them with Our Town." If you tell her that no matter what results she's getting with thing one, she absolutely has to go on to thing two, and never thing b or thing beta, you are more likely to get the situation with kids who are not grasping an appreciable portion of the subject at hand, not less.

And your math example confuses me in more than one direction: do you believe that history is like math in this regard, and if so, how? What things are the direct equivalents of addition and subtraction? Also, how would someone "teach fractions" without teaching the addition and subtraction of fractions? I still believe there's a lot of room for variability in math curricula--I know two really good fifth grade math teachers who do very different things in the classroom but both get kids who are good at math objectively and comfortable with math subjectively. But I don't believe that it has nearly the scope for variation that a literature or history curriculum does, simply because if you decide, "I don't feel like teaching these second graders fractions--let's do multivariable calculus!", you will soon find out that your second grade class does not have the background for calculus and will need to be able to add fractions first.

This is not true of the Heian Era vs. the Iroquois as topics for history classes.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

I'll start with the math example.

First, people (i.e. bad teachers) do teach fractions without having taught addition. And the students don't get it. And they end up learning neither addition nore fractions properly. Usually the teacher is doing it to impress parents (omg, my kid is already learning fractions, and the other class is still on addition!), and the gaps in the student's learning don't show up until a the next grade, at which point the parents usually blame that grade's teacher for the sudden plunge in their child's mathematical performance. (My kid was getting "above grade level" in grade 2!)

And this happens with all subjects. I've seen teachers put their students through Shakespeare "enrichment" in Grade 3 (there's your equivalent of calculus). The kids didn't get it, but their parents loved it. Ditto with history: the students got a lot of take-home projects on medieval knights in the year they were supposed to be doing national history. As a result, the entire school suffered on the national standards exam. And the students learned how to make tin foil shields, but they didn't really learn much about medieval history either.)

The thing about mandated curriculums is that they're supposed to be tools for holding teachers accountable for the content of their classes, and making sure the province's students are learning more-or-less the same thing at roughly the same time, and thus will not be at a crippling disadvantage to other students when it comes to applying for college or transferring schools.

Now, in practice it usually comes down to the school's principal to make sure his/her school is meeting the curriculum and isn't getting in trouble. In schools with weak principals, that's where teachers like the basketball coach get away with stuff. But in a properly administered system, the principal will be held accountable for the school's adherance to the curriculum, and there are consequences (i.e. losing funding / people getting fired) if the school is proved to depart from those standards. Note that this is different from "students in your low income area are not performing as well at reading as students from this high income area;" it consists of "show us the lesson plans and student work so that we can see that the reason for low student performance is not that you were teaching them about Jesus instead of science."

In all of this, I'm speaking based on what I've seen of the Canadian elementary/high school system. Fractions teacher was a real person, and he did get in trouble. From what I remember, he got to keep his job, but the union agreed to have him put under close monitoring by the admin. We've also had court cases over schools introducing religious curriculums into provincially funded schools. That makes sense to me: if students' ability to get into university is going to be determined by their ability to explain evolution, they better have been taught about the the theory of evolution.

(And yes, further explanation - we have content-based Gr 12 exams to determine admission to university. So really, if a student learned about the Aztecs instead of the French Revolution, it will make a difference to that student's performance on the History Provincial Exam. And that will make a difference to that student's ability to get into university, or get a job. This may help explain why I'm a bt more leery than you are about teachers independently changing the curriculum.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, that really is a difference in how the system works--and it makes me leery of large-scale standardized tests rather than of teachers choosing curricula.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've seen teachers put their students through Shakespeare "enrichment" in Grade 3 (there's your equivalent of calculus). The kids didn't get it, but their parents loved it.

I certainly don't advocate replacing one thing that doesn't work with something else that doesn't work. But I still disagree with the comparison of literature to math, unless you're trying to map age-appropriateness of texts* to the necessary prerequisite skills of math.


*Age-appropriateness being a deeply mutable concept anyway -- there are nine-year-olds who would love A Midsummer Night's Dream if you helped them with the archaic language.

[akashiver.livejournal.com]

I'm talking about learning sequenced skills. "Age appropriateness" is often blended into this when it comes to teaching reading, as there's a certain vocabulary level that students are supposed to have mastered at each grade. Yes, some students can read more, just as some students are perfectly capable of doing advanced math. But from a teaching perspective, the instructor usuallly has to teach to the middle/upper-middle of a 25-35 student class.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I still don't agree that reading is a sequenced skill, though -- not the way math is. There's not a prerequisite order you have to learn words in, nor do you graduate from sentences to paragraphs, except at a very young age, which is not the kind of education we started out discussing.

And I don't think the point I raised is served by being dragged off to other contexts: I'm not talking about teaching Shakespeare to third-graders, I'm talking about teaching Death of a Salesman (yes, I hate that play THAT MUCH) to juniors in high school. There is no skill-based reason to argue for or against its inclusion in the curriculum, nor -- I think -- is there one for preventing teachers from having greater flexibility in choosing texts. You don't need to have read Dickens to understand, say, Updike. (Or Tolkien or Stephanie Meyer.) Will you gain something by having done so? Perhaps. But you'll gain a lot more by choosing a text that doesn't rely heavily upon a cultural context (in that case, Victorian England) that your students don't know much about, and therefore don'g have much interest in.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

(Or to put this in the bald terms of debates over the direction of secondary education: should our priority be skills or information?)

Skills. Hands-down. Because the information doesn't do you a damn bit of good if you don't know what to do with it -- and, as Mrissa has pointed out, the information we are getting across tends to be fragmentary and misunderstood.

And your math comparison really doesn't work for me, because math has a much more rigidly-defined progression, where you can't really do algebra if you can't do arithmetic. What's the equivalent in literature? You can't do Gaiman if you haven't done Dickens? You can't do Dickens if you haven't done Shakespeare? Sure you can. You might miss an allusion or three, but those allusions are only one part of understanding a text, and not even necessarily the most interesting to talk about.

History is a better comparison, and I can make some of the same arguments there that I do for literature: I'd rather history classes focused less on making students remember dates of events, and more on helping them understand the patterns and forces behind those events. In other words, critical reasoning. But cut-and-dried facts are easier to test, and so in our mass-production educational system, that's what we increasingly focus on.