IEDs PLANTED BY ENGLISH TEACHERS

At one time (as late as the Sixties) English was the most basic element of a curriculum and it was even suggested that ALL high school teachers should act as teachers of English -- that is, in science, history and even math classes part of the grade ought to be on the quality of the writing.  Then the subject of English self-destructed, taking some students and most teachers with it.

The first explosion was the realization that science, history and math teachers had lousy writing skills.  Then, that the English teachers were becoming less and less trained.  They were boneheads with delusions.

Then an ideological megabomb challenged the arrogant domination by high level English skills and the racist idea of English as the prime language and the right of societies to impose such values on students.  This came from INSIDE the humanities studies of colleges via the French Algerians who had nothing to lose if they spoke the truth.

More subtly, the English teachers had managed to conflate proper usage with class: low-class people use vernacular.  The best people (from England or Massachusetts or Shakespeare) have snob accents and huge multi-syllabic vocabularies.  If someone uses slang, they are low-class and if the slang is really profane or obscene, the speaker is probably criminal.  This idea merged with race stigma when African-Americans came up to the northern mega-cities speaking the soft accent of the Southern whites plus a kind of pidgin vocabulary of their own.  Ghetto talk.  Now defiantly celebrated in music.

Grammar has not been taught to the level where it becomes useful.  Knowing the parts of speech is only the beginning, like learning the alphabet or how to count.  It is not until one gets to phrases and how they connect to each other, how they can be converted from one to the other (participle to prepositional phrase, subordinate clause to gerund, and so on), that grammar is useful.  Even then it is only useful in service to clarity and parsimony: saying as much as possible gracefully but in as few words as possible without confusion.  (If only the French Algerians had been better at this.)

Another hidden bomb was English education as a curricular/canonical/required check list of books read and the whole idea that one book is better than another without even the teachers quite knowing why -- only that the idea was taught to them.  I’m not talking about whether high school kids should read Shakespeare instead of Judy Blume and Heavy Metal, but that the value is in what you get out of it, not how many you have checked off like a bird-spotting life list.  While I’m at it, you’ve probably noticed that illustrated books and comix are stigmatized and that reading “chapter books” with no pictures is considered a child’s milestone.  How to read pictures -- whether drawn or photographed -- is not taught, and yet the vocabulary of moving images is probably more important in electronic world reconciliation and sharing than any print has ever been.  

In American schools English is seen as a subject only in print and one language.  Concepts of meta-language -- why the word for tree has different implications in different languages, let alone the word for love or parenthood -- are never taught.  English is the fountainhead of certainty and domination.  It becomes a moral concept: from “is to ought,” from most-spoken to must-speak.  The language of the King James Bible obsolete locutions are seen as God’s language though the accurate historical languages were Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic and often improperly translated.  

We are a country of immigrants that forced even the pre-existing natives to conform to the British Empire.  English as both a language and a subject is that in which the student must qualify as an applicant, not as a way of acquiring communication skills subject to experiment, contradiction, local experience, human relationship, story and simple glee in sound.

Then the gender grenade.  English is a girl language and men who teach English must somehow prove their virility by being blunt and simple, but girls are not allowed to talk that way.  Women are girls; boys are men.  Therefore, since English teachers are most often female, male students try to prove their gender by defiance and acting up.

These assumptions and practices are indeed small disruptive and destructive bombs along the way in high school, but there is one more that is the most life-destroying of all: the idea that writing a splendid book will make a person rich and famous, prove that the author was a hero in disguise and relieve all the author’s angst with the therapeutic gift of revelation.  If the writer is from the lower classes, possibly a “less human” race, the best-selling (it is assumed sales will indicate quality) book will take on the cachet of a “talking dog.” (Isn’t it remarkable that a formerly addicted black high school dropout with a criminal record can even grip a pencil!!  Think what such an uninhibited natural person must be like in bed!!)  The bar is graciously lowered by effete upperclass grad school people whose sensitive humanity allows them to appreciate such efforts (and fantasize).  Which defeats the whole purpose of the struggling autodidact intending to prove he (always he) can write as well as those snobs with their expensive laptops.

Every author with integrity wants to know the true value of his or her book.  Lulu.com will now evaluate your self-published book for a small fee.  What they are really doing is searching the grass for material worth the time and money of a publishing house and making the authors pay for it themselves.  (We’re beginning to catch on.)  But the real truth is that every book is a creature of a time and place and its value is confined to those terms.  What is world-shaking to one audience is banal to another; what was crucial when Harold Bloom was educated is irrelevant now.  What some anonymous “reader” thinks is a good book is not likely to be helpful.  

It is possible to go spelunking through history, trying to understand what it was that made the groundlings roar with appreciation of Shakespeare, but why should a modern sixteen-year-old care?  If the story is rewritten to feature songs and dances performed by gangs in Manhattan, is it Shakespeare anymore?  Or just a reputation, a label?

“English” -- so misleadingly named -- is really anthropological communication and ought to be taught as such.  It should include speech and hearing, sign talk, translation, and always the search for assumptions.  This means a whole generation of English teachers will have to be retrained or driven out.  Part of retraining will have to be “how to read” which is supposed to be taught in the beginning but isn’t, which explains many troubles.  Distinct but complex brain skills are involved, unique from person to person depending on the architecture their experience has created in the neurons whose webs form their identities.  

So there you have it:  forget “English.”  This subject should be called “the Connectome,” concerned with building up the skill and content of metaphor, story, context, and all the various human communication means including computer language -- even txting.  As well, the school should evaluate and develop the fifty or a hundred brain functions that go into interpreting print.  In a way it’s a good thing that the past version of “English” is so badly taught.  It leaves room in young brains for the future.

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.

DO ENGLISH TEACHERS READ "HEAVY METAL"?

Recently I was talking to someone (young, bicoastal, male) and told him that for a while, maybe fifteen years ago, I was a regular reader of “Heavy Metal” graphic adult illustrated magazine. He, being convinced that English teachers are enforcers of good grammar and manners, hopelessly prissy and rigid, was vastly amused.

I had a former student serving time for murder one. I thought of him as a good writer, so I sent him books. He asked for “Heavy Metal,” so I got it, but I never send any print to anyone without reading it first. It was much like “The Crow,” one of his favorite movies and also “Near Dark.” a cult vampire movie, which he packed around in hopes of finding a VCR so he could see his fav scene (the blood-spattered small town redneck bar). Any idiot would say I was enabling, including me, but I hoped I could somehow turn the tide. I’d let him watch it if I could sit alongside and comment.

For instance, I would watch “Near Dark” and point out that it’s about the marginal powerless person who has finally found a group to belong to that is as hated as himself and they are able to take revenge on the bully oppressors. “The Crow” was about the same, except in the deteriorated city where the hero is a kind of Batman who can swoop in to save the small, victimized child from gobbling exploiters. It’s a mix of Gothic thriller and romance. I’d point this out and he’d snort, “Oh, Mrs. Scriver, you just KILLED IT!” which was both ironic and true. But my fangs were not long enough or sharp enough or something. The dynamics of the tale were undead.

The one Heavy Metal story that has really stayed with me was about a bored octopus, beautifully drawn. The octopus divided into two humans, heterosexual, and made love between the two halves of itself -- that WAS graphic and beautiful. All underwater, an erotic ballet. Then, exhausted, the octopus mutated back into itself. It was an ingenious concept, beautifully drawn. Not a printed WORD in the whole thing.

So when I was in Great Falls this week, I picked up the latest issue. I was a little surprised at how different the stories have become. These are almost like Prince Valiant, or maybe Prince Valiant has become more like these stories. The drawing continues to be elegant but now the hero seems more like a “normal” guy, except that like all genre heroes someone is after him and he has an amazing ability to survive grave damage. The plots and supporting cast are a dense mix of James Bond, Lord of the Rings, classic children’s fairy tales and fantasy, and plenty more along those lines. Harry Potter shows up as a little old man. Christian and Islamic ideas, Masons, Knights Templar -- much of the stuff is in “The Novel: an Alternative History” by Kevin Moore. It’s enough to make you believe in Jung’s shared unconscious.

There are no children. I wonder why: pedophiliaphobia? There is violence, more subtle than “blam, splat.” Sex is implied but not pictured. There are careful drawings of beautiful interiors and fantastic underground passages, peopled by Star Wars. No blacks. (Some greens and blues.)

The first story is the one I like best: “Animal’s” -- told by a dolphin. The drawing was like the octopus story I remember. The creator is listed as E. Bilal. http://wn.com/Enki_Bilal_working_in_his_Studio He’s in Paris and the vids are great. The story itself seems to be part of a series about two men, a woman, little bionic seahorses and lobsters who are servants, all on a boat.

“Wisher” is a little more conventional -- well, given fairies and djinns. Familiar elements to this reader, who went down every fairy tale and myth shelf in the local library by the end of the fourth grade and went on to sci-fi just as it was beginning. This is what English teachers think about besides grammar: “The Red Planet Mars” and how it is reincarnated in “Star Wars,” which goes back to Norse myth and English fantasy writers like Tolkien and George MacDonald (my fav), Inklings. Arthur Rackham illustrations. If YOUR English teacher wasn’t up to it, I’m sorry. But I must admit that I only now realized that “The Dark Crystal” is considered a vampire movie. (It was on a list.)

I see that Heavy Metal magazine in the States was originally the French Métal Hurlant which translates literally as "Howling Metal" or “Screaming Metal.” You could look all that up. See if you can get a research paper out of it.

It seems to me that the graphic genre is bending back into the past to pick up North African exotica/erotica while expressing a surreal but glamourous aesthetic and an athletic potency more Australian than Austrian. Very “Black Swan.” There’s a sense of despairing post-war existentialism (the last best planet) along with a defiant explosion of other emotions: regret, resistance, determination, maybe even alliance. Many contemporary movies seem to have the same vision. Technology is magic; old men are untrustworthy; women are replaceable, but . . . The only animals I see are the horses of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse -- skulls for heads. (Sumptuous illustrations.) Is anyone surprised? The current “real” reality is not a young man’s world, unless they want to be soldiers, but young men can come alive in these pages.

When I reflect on how this old lady former English teacher developed an affinity for Heavy Metal, I think at first about my years as an undergrad when I babysat for an editor of “Rogue” magazine who kept piles of the mags everywhere. But it goes back even earlier to our childhood box of Classic comics. My brothers and I had them all and kept them obsessively in order (they were numbered) even as we read them again and again. You could put a section of “Lorna Doone” into Heavy Metal and it would fit.

I had a serious break with a good friend because her son married a Japanese girl who loves Manga and my friend thinks that Manga is indecent, sinful and should be eliminated. I don’t read Manga, barely recognize it, but I defended it. She couldn’t handle that. To her, the world will end unless it obeys the Catholic Church. The irony is that she renewed contact with me in the first place because she wanted reassurance that she was educated and “with it.” I guess she thought that would be like an English teacher -- all prissy and corrective. At least the young men in the world have moved past that.