I forgot that at some point in high school we also listened to the first few pages of Huckleberry Fin just to hear what it would sound like. We never went any farther than that.
I didn't get to reflect on any of those memories, so here I go.
Thinking about this made me think of the "mentioning" teaching Applebee talks about (forgive me, I don't know where it is or what exactly it is called). My teachers seemed to want to mention as much as they could just so that we knew that these novels existed, and that they were the classics. So rarely did we read in high school, and it was even less often that what we read took us anywhere beyond literal meanings and giant packets of vocabulary.
It makes me wonder what is happening. I know the teachers were miserable, they knew we were miserable, so why not change. The more I read the more I realize that the pedagogy that I thought was contemporary has been around long enough for them to have picked it up somewhere. So what's going on here? I thought maybe Laredo lived in it's own terrible education bubble, but after looking into some Austin classrooms, I haven't seen much of a difference. Sorry for the reiteration, but what's happening here? For Juniors and Seniors in English who have passed the TAKS we certainly can't blame it all on teaching to the test. Can we?
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4 comments:
EXHAUSTION!
It is so much easier to lecture on a book, pass out multiple choice questions, and quiz on vocabulary. Creative, hands-on learning takes planning and work. In addition, it takes management skills.
Am I saying that teachers are lazy? Absolutely not. This goes back to Applebee's comment that I sited in my own blog, "Although teachers claimed to have broad, humanistic goals for literature instruction, classroom practice found that the teaching of literature continued to be a relatively traditional enterprise." (29)
I think teachers want to be creative and want to engage their students. The reality is that this job is so hard and takes so much time that sometimes teachers end up using the worksheets that go along with the district's literature book, even if it is in contrast to the kind of teaching they always thought they would do.
I really think that if teachers were given more time and resources to plan units that would be meaningful and relevant, we would see changes. The model teacher does this in his/her own time, just as he/she spends his/her summer break planning and preparing for the next school year. We, as teachers, sit through so many meetings and trainings. After trainings, we need more time set aside for planning!
Michelle is nicer than I would be. I think many teachers are lazy and would rather copy the vocab sheets, pass out the dictionaries, and then sit at there desk and read email. Too often at trainings teachers argue with the presenters, witness as to what goes on in their classroom and why what the presenter is saying will not work. Several elementary teachers in my district came back from a day with Tom Romano last year, put on by the Heart of Texas Writing Project, and complained to their principal about how useless it was. I was there it was great. They wanted something they could copy and pass out to their students, and bitched when they didn't get that. Sigh.
This act of "mentioning" you uh . . .mentioned. . . reminded me of my Junior English class in high school. Mrs. Wilks started and ended her year-long American Lit class the same way for about 92 years (not quite but close, honest). Our first assignment was to find the authors' names of 100 classic American novels-- fastest 10 to find all the names got bonus points (Oh, if I only had Google back then). Our final assignment was to write everything we had learned during the year.
I'm split on this topic. One one hand, yes teachers are sometimes lazy. Usually this stems from an acquired cynicism after being micromanaged for a few years and not feeling respected, or maybe from a mediocre performance (i.e. not many aha moments) because of a weak pedagogical knowledge base, who knows. Sometimes it's a bad Monday and you just want them to sit there and do a worksheet and shut up. No one promised school would be a fantastic, exciting journey, in fact our culture sort of upholds the idea of school being prison-like, something you "have to do." That kind of mentality is a long time in changing. On the other hand, mentioning or skimming the surface of classic texts without diving down to the murky bottoms can spark a few mental twigs and, if the classroom has cultivated inquisitive minds, lead to a jumping-off point for further (independent) study.
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