THE ENGLISH TEACHER CASE FILES

Maybe the art teachers and the music teachers -- humanities -- have as much of a window into kids as English teachers do -- individual or en masse -- but maybe English teachers haven’t had quite the tools to respond to the issues of contemporary kids, either the early writers (6 to 10) or the adolescents.  Soon -- maybe now in some places -- the video arts will join or displace writing as the brain shapers.  Modern kids seem to learn the technicalities of electronics the way kids used to learn to read.  In fact, they seem to learn in images better than print.  They handle iPads more easily than they grip crayons.  They need no alphabet.  They don't write their name: they choose an avatar.

On Twitter I was challenged by a “Propriety Troll” who was intent on showing that I was misusing “antediluvian”  when it should have been “archaic.” He claimed he was saving civilization by preserving proper language.  I should have explained to him the difference between a prig and a prick.   A school aide once explained to me that the job of the English teacher is to correct everything that anyone says that’s wrong or improper.  She didn’t think I was a very good English teacher.  (She was not a high school graduate.)  By contrast, the administration didn’t think I should let the kids “express themselves.”  Because that just encourages them to be nonconformists.  So they didn’t think I was a very good English teacher either and my contract was not renewed.  This was high school, of course.

It was probably a good thing, because I’d gotten to the point that I’d sit with the papers in front of me, nearly weeping.  

A.  The kid whose face is constantly full of anguish and occasionally bruised.  

B.  The kid who is frozen and turns in an empty paper.

C.  The kid who is compliant and knows only pretty conventions.

D.  The kid who wants to be confronted and therefore writes material more shocking than Hustler.

E.  The kid who wants how to get a teacher into trouble, so hides black magic symbols all over his paper and then tips off his dad, who comes up to rebuke the principal on religious grounds.

F.  The boy who can barely write puts effort into a paper describing how he will kidnap and rape a girl.  It’s the best thing he’s written, but the content is criminal.  In the twenty years since then, he has acted it out.

I recently got into trouble on an academic listserv because a young comp prof at a two year college was appalled by the low level of writing skills.  She was baffled about how to grade their papers because there is no clear hierarchy of standards.  In fact, one of the things badly wrong about grading is the implication that it SHOULD be a hierarchy.  Students need to know three things:  where they are now, where they are expected to go, and how they might best go about getting there.  All three steps are complex, arguable, and maybe indeterminable.  Teachers might not KNOW how to address any of them, given the state of the education of educators.

What is most neglected is what comes BEFORE writing: the thinking, the forming of ideas.  And before that the reading.  Kids don’t read much now -- neither do adults.  When I was teaching on the rez, I always had a few kids in high school who could not read at all.  Either their brains had never learned the trick or they felt no need. Science suggests that brains find and use an equivalence between spoken sounds and making marks in different ways and some brains just can’t do it.  Forget pretty handwriting and the quarrel over print versus cursive.  By high school they could write their own name but understood it as some kind of action that certified a document, like a contract or check.  In their houses were no books, magazines or newspapers.  I did not know how to teach reading or how to diagnose their difficulties.  

In all backwaters there is a consistent tendency to mistake symbols and tokens as having a kind of “magic” value, they forget a piece of paper stands for the commercial value of a dollar and begin to hoard the paper itself.  This applies to the education process: some think a diploma is not certification that one has learned a certain body of knowledge and skill but rather a key to the future: automatically entitled by attendance, necessarily signed, and open to negotiation like a treaty.  When I was first starting out in 1961, I wrote a curriculum that specified certain achievements at each level, like:  “can write an organized three-paragraph essay with no more than five grammatical or spelling errors.”  Turned out that not many could do it and those who couldn’t would fight.  In any case, grammar and even spelling can be arguable, to say nothing of content.

Add to that the difficulties presented by being cross-cultural.  English more than any other subject is thinly disguised assimilation.  Freshman comp at any college is really teaching (arbitrarily) how to be the kind of person wanted.  This is relatively conscious when dealing with two different cultures, but now the college -- like everything else -- is engulfed in a new culture that is a matter of generations rather than countries.  Students entering college today have formidably developed brains when it comes to visual literacy (non-verbal interpretation of metaphor and gesture) and are often multi-lingual, one of those languages being that of the “thumb-bumpers” who text/photo/send in a constant stream.  They can interpret and absorb vids more quickly than I can figure out what I’m looking at.  What they have to say to each other is often reduced to like/dislike, which seems to have more to do with solidarity than emotion.  They speak in music -- not name that tune, but the literal music.  Not the lyrics -- what adult can understand them anyway?  The style and thrust, the magic of it, the consciousness.

It’s folly to oppose or suppress this, but some professors understand that to be their task, like missionaries intent on suppressing tribal ceremonies.  The young prof became quite emotional and felt she was insulted by my remarks -- partly, I think, because she didn’t understand what I was saying (not that I was that clear) and partly because she herself is being “graded” hierarchically by the administration in a self-contradicting way.  She should not flunk a lot of kids but they should all conform to expectations.   At some point she will get past this stuff and have the clarity to see the human beings behind the writing.  That’s when the deeper and more worthy struggle begins.   Part of it will be keeping the job.