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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

How does the teaching of literature affect our relationship to it?

  
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
14:34 / 16.02.05
Consdiered Headshopping this, but what I'm really interested in, is how being taught literature has affected your relatinship to reading.

Are there authors you'd never have discovered? Did it put you off someone for life?

And am blatantly riffing off this, and the fact that it was said in the Thomas Hardy thread (who I can't bear to consider reading after being fattened on it as a teen) by Vincennes:

In fact I have a real problem with the teaching of English Literature in the UK, but that's a rant for another time.

Rant away, dear?

I have also been discussing with various friends my difficulties with 'Poetry'. Which, given that I have half a lit degree, are a bit ludicrous.

But basically, I don't 'get' poetry/have mental blocks on it being 'difficult'.

Discussion with a schoolfriend reminded me that we weren't taught poetry at all before A level, which seems rather late to be introducing it.

More later, but anyone have any thoughts?
 
 
Loomis
14:55 / 16.02.05
Just a quick reply for now, but I would agree that the age at which you're introduced to something can have a profound effect. I had a cool teacher who introduced me to Macbeth and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner at the age of 10 and it opened my eyes to how exciting literature can be.

And from then on, I enjoyed just about every text I had to read for school classes, despite varying qualities of teaching. We did fairly well-known stuff on the whole. T.S. Eliot and Keats, Shakespeare, Huckleberry Finn, The Crucible, Heart of Darkness. I'm sure that as long as we had English classes with anything decent in them, I would have gone and read these texts in my own time eventually. In the years that have followed I've certainly spent a lot of my own time filling in gaps that I only realised existed thanks to studying English Lit at school and uni.
 
 
Axolotl
15:43 / 16.02.05
Actually that was me in the Thomas Hardy thread and I'm more than happy to rant away though with the proviso that this is based only on my experience of English Literature up to A-level and may well contain glaring errors to those with more knowledge in the field.
Right first some background: ever since the age of about 5 or 6 I have been a voracious reader, starting off with the Marvel Transformer comics but rapidly moving on to proper books. I read the Hobbit in primary school (the spiders gave me nightmares and when Thorin died I was so upset I cried) and throughout my childhood I kept up the habit. I generally read adult science fiction and young adult novels and stuff. English at school was always very easy for me but I never enjoyed it.
We studied Shakespeare, which I really enjoyed, but we always spent too much time on each play. By the time you've studied a play for 3 months you never want to see the damn thing again. Perhaps a compare and contrast method with more of his plays should be implemented.
In fact over analysis of the set books is a theme that continually annoyed me throughout school. We could have covered many different writers widening our understanding of english literature as a whole, but instead we would spend months on one book. This means that I can talk in depth about the use of pathetic fallacy in "The Mayor of Casterbridge" but have absolutely no idea about the development of the novel or even of Hardy himself.
The poetry section of the course (especially at A-Level) was unbearable. Edward Thomas may have many fine points as a poet (though I doubt it) but out of all the war poets is he really the best one to teach to a bunch of 17 year olds with his obssession with rural life and flowers? Why not Sassoon, Owen or even Kipling?
The choice of books was terrible as well. We did "Moon Tiger" by Penelope Lively which I loathed by the time we were done with it. I think I quite liked it the first time I read it, but wouldn't have chosen to re-read ever again, let alone for 2 months. We did "The Mayor of Casterbridge" as I have mentioned elsewhere. "Oranges are not the Only Fruit" which when I was 17 I loathed and am not too fond of it now, though I can see that it does have some merit, even if it's not my cup of tea. "An Evil Cradling" by Brian Keenan (account of his time as a hostage in Beirut): A book where for the vast majority of the time he spends locked in a single room. Fun stuff.
While all of this does have literary merit none of them are what you would call fun, especially for a 17 year old boy. I often think that English Literature is set up very much as a female subject, though that may just have been my school, and I am more than willing to admit that.
So having over-analysed books that I disliked at best, loathed at worst throughout my school days I have given up on literature. I read only for pleasure and 95% of what I read is genre fiction. I would never consider picking up a Booker nominee or winner and in fact shy away from any book that might be considered literature.
I seem to have lost the thread of any cogent argument I was trying to put forward and it is somewhat of a rant but hopefully it will provoke discussion.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
18:39 / 16.02.05
Hah. I loathe Thomas Hardy with a vengeance that can only be leftover from a 15-16 year old...I've never been back to his books, which may well be great...
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
18:39 / 16.02.05
Hah. I loathe Thomas Hardy with a vengeance that can only be leftover from a 15-16 year old...I've never been back to his books, which may well be great...
 
 
doozy floop
20:38 / 16.02.05
This really interest me, as I studied English lit at university (and soon, fingers crossed, will be continuing that in a postgraduate sense), but just hated the subject at school. As a teenager I would no more have picked up a book in my free time than I would've done a few maths problems.

I think the overanalysis of literature at school level that someone mentioned earlier is a good point - from 14-16, I studied two Shakespeare plays and one novel, and spending a whole year on one novel, tearing it apart limb by limb, does not foster much of an appreciation for the book except on a purely "learnt" sense (i.e. reproducing that which we have been taught to find interesting therein), nor an interest in literature as a whole, I believe. A broader approach may well have been far more interesting to most of the students and could have introduced much more of a desire to read widely.

At school (as opposed to university) I was definitely put off certain authors for life and it took some time away from literature as an academic subject for me to decide to return to it.

That said, it's an almost impossible task to select works that would be successful to teach to 14-18 year olds - you can please some of the people all of the time and all that. I'm not sure which texts I would suggest to replace Hardy...(but my goodness something should!)
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:07 / 17.02.05
I often think that English Literature is set up very much as a female subject, though that may just have been my school.

We had the same problem with Domestic Science. How exactly is a female subject set up? I don't understand the disctinction...

My English teachers tended to get around the limited number of set texts by having us read around - so, for example, we were answering exam questions on the White Devil, so we ignored it for the first year and read The Duchess of Malfi instead, and had a quick peer at the Revenger's Tragedy. That's something you can only do if you are confident of your ability to get your pupils through the exams, of course, and I suspect that a school that had to stick to the national curriculum and other such absurdity might find it simply administratively impossible.

So... at the risk of sounding difficult, is the problem here that the exams need to be passed, so the teacher has a duty to devote as much attention as posible to getting the kids to pass the exam, but that will mean that even slightly above-average children will get bored. On the other hand, there's also the question of intellectual curiosity and what a teacher is meant to do - make kids more able to accumulate qualifications, or make them more able to talk intelligently about a subject, or what?

Context does seem very important... for example, my understanding of English literature, as an entity and also as an academic discipline, is massively informed by being taught other languages and other literatures at the same time. I still don't entirely understand, for example, how people read Paradise Lost without reading Homer and Virgil - which are, of course, excluded from the English literature syllabus. Now, this is in part a Reception question rather than a literature question, but I think it's interesting and worthwhile to think about it - IIRC, at GCSE level most non-classical languages work on fluency rather than literature, so the same cross-currents don't necessarily exist, but does even looking at the mechanics of another language affect how you look at language? I mean, I peaked at about 16, when I was being taught to read literature quote unquote in four languages at once, and it was profoundly interesting to see how different languages did things differently.

Maybe being taught, being taken through books like The Mayor of Casterbridge, say, also helps you to think about what you can read and how. Like Phyrephox, I spent years reading science fiction and almost nothing but, in part because I enjoyed them, but also because it was in the main very easy, and you could take pride in having read two or three books a day - that child's urge for quantitative success. To what extent can we be confident that we would have moved into other areas - other ways of enjoying text - without being taught?
 
 
doozy floop
18:43 / 17.02.05
I'm curious at the idea of Literature currently being taught as a 'female' subject - it's something I've heard others say before and I've never really got to the bottom of it. Is maths taught in a 'masculine' way, then? Illumination?

Haus, what you say about the understanding of other languages altering/improving one's approach to literature I find odd... English is my first language and I've 'learnt' literature in French and Latin too, but never really linked the texts together in the way you suggest. Knowledge of other languages unquestionably expanded my interest in and understanding of language in a general sense, but never in connection with literature, if that makes any sense. (Possibly not.) I suppose I've never seen much of interest in the different ways that ideas are expressed in different languages - possibly my fluency isn't of a high enough level.

Teaching literature... So many schools/teachers have no real choice but to focus intensely on exams, which I think does lead to some of the overexposure of limited sources that causes resentment and a general dislike of the subject. I didn't start reading widely until my school days were comfortably gone so I'm inclined to say that being taught literature (pre-university) didn't really introduce a great deal to me, but then again, who knows what I'd've started reading without that Hardy lurking in my murky past...
 
 
lekvar
20:31 / 17.02.05
One thing I've noticed about the teaching of literature, at least in the States, goes hand-in-hand with the point made above, courses are taught firstly with the aim of ensuring that the pupils can pass a test, and secondly to teach an appreciation of literature (which mainly consists of the teacher pointing out recurrent themes, motifs, historical precedent). Rarely is literature taught as an enjoyable activity. As a consequence, I know a number of people who don't like reading.
I was brought up in a household where reading was a recreational activity, but the dry, humorless curriculum used by most Lit teachers turned me off to a number of authors that I've only recently bothered to reacquaint myself with.
Has anybody else had a similar experience?
 
 
alas
00:54 / 18.02.05
I liked the reading we did in school. I especially liked being read to as a child--our teachers read to us just about every day until I was in the fifth or sixth grade (11 or 12 yo).

I still love hearing a voice reading words in my ears. Ooh. It's the rhythm, the rhythm, the intimacy of the valves opening and closing for me me me.

Damn. I just think sometimes I'd like to sit and read books aloud with my college students and never say a word.
 
 
Axolotl
14:04 / 18.02.05
I shall try and explain my comments regarding English literature being taught as a "female" subject, though oce again with the proviso that this was merely an impression I got when I was taught english at my school, and thus am more than willing to accept that it may just have been my own personal experience.
Obviously some subjects have a gender bias, more men choose science subjects at school than women (though I believe this is beginning to change) and in my school I felt english literature was a subject that was considered "feminine" in so far as the class (post gcse) was mainly female and that all but one of the teachers were female. I wondered why this should be so and came (jumped?) to the conclusion that it was partly due to gender divides within society and partly to do with the way english literature is taught and the books that are selected. Things like Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and so on are often set texts for the exams. I would suggest that these books are more likely to interest teenage girls than teenage boys. Obviously in the above I am using broad stereotypes and hasten to add that it is not a state of affairs I condone, or neccessarily see as a problem with the books themselves (as opposed to being a problem with teenage boys) but it does explain (I hope) what I meant.
Lekvar - your post sums up more succintly and eloquently what my problem is with the teaching of english literature: The lack of joy in the subject. Reading is fun, so why was my english literature course so dull?
 
 
lekvar
19:13 / 18.02.05
Goodness Gracious Meme- I have the same problem with poetry, and I've only just recently started trying to work my way through it. I've never felt that poetry was taught worth a damn. Too much focus on Iambic Pentameter vs. Whatever Isn't Iambic Pentameter, not enough focus n the joy of using language.

Alas, is there anything to keep you from having your students read the material aloud? I've had to do it in college courses I've taken. [elitist] I've always been amazed at fellow students who don't like reading aloud, but they're usually the ones who can't pronounce the long words. [/elitist]

I thought that was what you were getting at with the description of Literature as a "female" subject, Phyrephox. I'd always had the same impression. I suspect it's an internalized gender bias as opposed to an external one though. Feel free to tell me I'm misreading.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
13:58 / 19.02.05
Too much focus on Iambic Pentameter vs. Whatever Isn't Iambic Pentameter, not enough focus on the joy of using language.

Gawd, yes, that chimes with my memory too well!

As I said above, chatting with a friend, we agreed that we'd not been taught any poetry before the age of 17, which seems way too late to introduce an entirely new form to students, (and incidentally in our school meant that if you hadn't chosen English Lit A level, you wouldn't have been exposed to poetry at all.)

I suspect there was a patronising assumption that if you weren't going to take A level, you were too stupid/would gain no benefit from learning poetry.

Grr, actually, I'd forgotten about how angry that makes me.

But then (thanks Haus) teachers/department were stuck with the demands of the Nat Curriculum, which I can remember at the time our teachers/media bemoaning.

I do know from friends that in the 90s the NC was changing pretty much every year, and in a subject like Eng. Lit, this was catastrophic.(actually, probably in most subjects)

Friend and I were talking with her mum, who remembers that the requirements changed during our 2-year A level course.

*Dreams of Eng lit teaching that could tell the NC where to shove itself*

And having the time/ability to read around a syllabus sounds wonderful. (and yes, that is jealousy you can hear dripping from my words!)

I remember A level in particular feeling very much like a production line where we were stuffed with a syllabus and some books, one after the other.

But I'm intrigued/somewhat peturbed by your idea that people cannot study literature without studying it in several languages at once? Particularly if the alternate option is not studying it at all?

Obviously, it's marvellous if you can do that, but if not, does that invalidate what can be learnt/taugh by good English-language literature teaching? Also, what if you're able at studying literature, but rubbish at learning non-mother tongue languages?

On the good, at A level I certainly was introduced to things which I've loved ever since.

Alas, yep, I have happy memories of us taking parts in Death of Saleman/Antony & Cleo, and the work really coming alive.

And, at primary school of 'carpet time', where at teh end of every day, we sat on the carpet and were read a story. Magical. Why don't we do this for adults/older kids?

Also being taken to see the Alchemist, done at the Barbican by the RSC. Wonderful. Remember that we were the only people laughing at some of the dirty jokes, a wonderful spectacle, utterly engrossing.

The first time I(most of us) had ever been to the theatre. A great introduction. And, memorable to the point that I remember that the director was a young chap called Sam Mendes, and actively followed his career, which is not something it would ever have occurred to me to have done.

(He's done pretty well for himself!)
 
 
alas
15:30 / 19.02.05
Of course I have my students read aloud and I read aloud to them a little in every class, or nearly. I mean: I'd like to do nothing but read aloud. No discussion at all, just listening. For a whole term.

There is something holding me back from such a radical step, alas, alas would be fired, probably.
 
 
ibis the being
16:52 / 19.02.05
One thing I've noticed about the teaching of literature, at least in the States, goes hand-in-hand with the point made above, courses are taught firstly with the aim of ensuring that the pupils can pass a test, and secondly to teach an appreciation of literature (which mainly consists of the teacher pointing out recurrent themes, motifs, historical precedent). Rarely is literature taught as an enjoyable activity.

I must have been unusually fortunate throughout my educational "career," as they call it, because that was never my experience. Beginning in 9th grade, first year of high school, I started on the Advanced Placement "English" (literature not limited to English lit, plus basic grammar and essay writing) courses. These were college prep courses designed to prepare us for the 12th grade AP exams, which, if you passed with a high enough score (4 or 5 out of 5) could count as college credit.

I don't know if the American AP courses encourage reading comprehension and deeper understand of the text (as opposed to memorizing plots and parsing syntax), or if perhaps I just lucked out with excellent teachers. I loved every single one of my high school English classes, I can remember nearly all of the books we read, and I never disliked the way they were taught, only disliked certain texts or authors (eg, John Irving).

Each year, each with a new teacher, was slightly different - one prof assigned gold standards like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Jungle, Romeo and Juliet. One liked to give us great African American authors, Richard Wright, Zora Neale-Hurston, Ralph Ellison. God, I loved every minute of it.

I've heard fellow students complain of "over-analyzing" texts many times throughout the years, but I never have felt that way about literature classes. Talking about books is so pleasurable to me it's almost sensual somehow, like sharing a meal - nearly like sexual exploration - my appetite for it is immeasurable. I remember once in ninth grade we spent almost a week talking about the description of one particular building in Germinal, and I was completely absorbed by it. In a way, I always regarded my English teachers as smarter, better-informed friends with whom to chat about a subject we both loved - books, words - rather than boring didacts.

The only time I've ever felt completely exasperated by overanalyzation was in college-level writing workshops, which is something else I think.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
00:28 / 21.02.05
Well, yay. I don't mean to be unsympathetic, but I think teachers and teaching might be getting it in the neck a bit in this thread... I never enjoyed CDT, but that wasn't really the fault of my CDT teacher...

Must abed, but quick correction:

But I'm intrigued/somewhat perturbed by your idea that people cannot study literature without studying it in several languages at once?

I didn't suggest that, which would be a ver' odd contention. I just said that I didn't understand how people read Paradise Lost without reading Homer and Virgil - specifically because of that paticular work's relationship with epic. Of course, a lot of the people reading PL in my English class weren't reading H&V, and they clearly did OK - it was more that the experience specifically of reading that work was enriched by understanding its antecedents and models better - like an understanding of Mrs Gaskell (which I don't have) apparently enriches Northanger Abbey. It's about useful comparisons, and thus about having a coherent curriculum, rather than a simple need for multiple languages - you can certainly do that within a single language. An obvious example would be not dropping them into poetry for the first time at A-level...

Incidentally, on the "female subject" - all my English teachers were men, but then so were all my fellow students, so that may not be a great example.
 
 
doozy floop
17:35 / 21.02.05
It's about useful comparisons, and thus about having a coherent curriculum, rather than a simple need for multiple languages

This makes a lot of sense - I suppose, one of the things I find most fascinating about literature now is the ways in which it can shed light on social & political mores and so on, which surely has to be approached by looking outside of the text as well as inside. We did consider this to an extent at school but it was never suggested that different texts could be brought together and compared to enhance that, or that extra-curricular reading might help.

Of course, if I hadn't spent my school years getting away with doing exactly what was required and no more, I might've made that giant leap of reasoning myself and bothered to do a bit of work that I hadn't specifically been instructed to carry out. Bit of stretch for me as a teenager though. *sigh* lazy bugger, mea culpa.

I did love the subject at university though. We had hundreds of course options; we could set our own essay questions; I was introduced to more fabulous books from all over the world than I previously imagined could even exist.

Things like Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and so on are often set texts for the exams. I would suggest that these books are more likely to interest teenage girls than teenage boys.

See what you mean, although I know folks who studied things like Lord of the Flies - more likely to interest the boys than the girls in my fairly uninformed opinion. However, all my teachers were female and, er, so were all my classmates, so what do I know?!
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:24 / 22.02.05
Of course, if I hadn't spent my school years getting away with doing exactly what was required and no more, I might've made that giant leap of reasoning myself and bothered to do a bit of work that I hadn't specifically been instructed to carry out. Bit of stretch for me as a teenager though. *sigh* lazy bugger, mea culpa.

That raises a very interesting question - to what extent teaching of literature is expected to drive or supplant non-curricular experience of literature itself. This is a bit unformed, but...

We're getting a thread within this thread saying "I did not enjoy being taught English literature, as a result of which I do not read, and I blame my English teachers for that", to which my response is, to some extent, walk on it.

To put it another way, reading and writing, because they are things that pretty much everyone, at least on Barbelith, needs to do at some point, are possibly taken as universal, innate and monolithic skills. As such, it is easy to assume that one is simply naturally gifted, rather than acculturated, and therefore that if you cannot perform any task associated with ther processes of reading or writing then it is through a lack of volition caused by bad teaching. I think that's perhaps true to an extent, but it's not complete.

So, if you spent your youth reading sci-fi, for example, then find that the forms of reading and response required for lessons in English literature, are not enjoyable to you in the way that reading sci-fi is, and go back tpo reading sci-fi exclusively after English A-level,it might be that nyou don't like reading things that aren't sci-fi, our responding to things at a level of detail beyond, say, discussing it with a friend or on a message board. To say "my love of literature was killed by having to study texts at length and in greater depth than they should be studied" is a bit of a tricky sell - others have expressed a love of literature through devoting years of study to a single author, or a single piece of work, and so on. Maybe the particular level of detailed study required for GCSE, or for A-level, was a level that wasn't attractive?

Likewise with I've never felt that poetry was taught worth a damn. Too much focus on Iambic Pentameter vs. Whatever Isn't Iambic Pentameter, not enough focus n the joy of using language. I can see what this is intended to mean - that there was too much syllable-counting and not enough work on language, I'm not surbut it feels a bit like a complaint that learning French focuses too hard on knowing how verbs decline. Isn't understanding the metrical structure of a poem often important to understanding why and how the joy in language functions? Again, reading poetry in other languages may make this clearer, especially languages whose poetry has differences of accent and ictus built into complex rhythmical structures, but I'm getting how exactly this complaint functions, you know? My teachers certainly taught me to spot an iambic pentameter, but their point was that that got you maybe one mark out of 50 or whatever, and that you had to talk about what the iambic pentameter was for, what it was doing there, how it made the verse work - stuff like that.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
13:58 / 22.02.05
The coherence point is a very good one, and one that I've heard bemoaned by teacher friends as appearing to figure *nowhere* in all the demands may by the NC.

And yeah, I apologise for my rather unconstructive grumpiness in this thread, I'm bad-tempered atm and it's spilling out.

Doozy's point is also a good one, I guess I'm thinking unrealistically, as a 30 year-old reasonably-educated/self-driven reader about 'back then'.

At which point, the kind of free-flowing, emotionally-characsmatic mirage I seem to have in my head in this conversation would have resulted in my doing no work and failling all my exams.

That said, I *do* think there's a useful conversation to be had here.

Something I've been neglecting is the difficult of teaching wide ability ranges and interest levels in a group.

Was talking about this with a friend who was a Maths teacher, and he suggested that there's an issue specific to compulsory/core skills subjects. In that, you're planning a curriculum, to deal with the people who are incredibly able and may go on to spend their lives working in the subject and those with very little ability and no interest*.

Which is nightmarish. You're trying to keep kids who are way ahead from tearing their eyes out with boredom, find some way to make your subject accessible to those with very little ability and also make it not too difficult to teach to those with no interest.

Do we have many/any school-teachers on Barbelith? Or are they too busy/tired?

Are many of these questions simple economic? More money=more teachers with more time/motivation& smaller classes/better resources, more ways to vary subject teaching....all of which make a school attractive, therefore allowing for student selection?

*goes off to read the teaching thread in HS*


*bold-ing indicating that I don't think ability/intelligence or lack of equals interest in any simple way
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
14:43 / 22.02.05
I think it may have a lot to do with smaller classes and better resources... My school was GPDST, girls' public day school, hence private, selective and all-female pupils, and I not only enjoyed my classes, apart from Thomas Hardy, but had access to a broad range of literature in the school library and was encouraged to read it.

F'rexample, I don't recall when we started doing poetry in English Lit at school (but I know we did various poets for GCSE - Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, R. S. Thomas (my favourite at the time) and Thomas Hardy. In addition to our set texts at A-Level (very traditional) we read Blake in class, I think principally because our teacher really liked Blake... I had a bit of a head start with poetry anyway, as a result of years of speech and drama, for which I had to learn about metre, enjambment, feet, etc. and for which I had to read and memorise quite a lot of poetry, some of it quite respectable. I'd been reading poetry for years by the time I got to A-Level, in children's anthologies etc., so it wasn't alien to me at all...

At A-level we were also encouraged to read outside the curriculum - I remember reading the Oresteia as an adjunct to studying Othello in class.

But - small classes, pupils all with a relatively high degree of knowledge and enthusiasm... it's a winner, really.

I never feel that my experience of learning English at school has stopped me reading and enjoying writers I might otherwise have approached with an open mind, with the exception of Thos Hardy.

However - I do sometimes feel that the nuts-and-bolts approach to GCSE and A-level English has left me without a way of approaching a text holistically and yet critically... if that makes any kind of sense. I mean, that I find it relatively easy to say whether I liked something or not, and why; but usually I find that I can't produce a decent analysis of the work as a whole, of its themes, concerns, etc. Maybe my brain just doesn't do that very easily, and never would have done. But I sometimes think that years of going 'alliteration, metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia'/'pathetic fallacy' has moulded it to a certain extent...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:04 / 22.02.05
I never feel that my experience of learning English at school has stopped me reading and enjoying writers I might otherwise have approached with an open mind, with the exception of Thos Hardy.

(flippant threadrot)Look, I don't want to be controversial, but Hardy seems to be the gold standard of books we hated when taught at school. Is it possible that our teachers were not at fault here? Is Thos. Hardy just... a big pile of Thoss? (/flippant threadrot)
 
 
Olulabelle
21:36 / 22.02.05
I was going to start a thread which relates to this subject (and I may still) but what I was going to say is very relevant to this thread so I'm posting it here.

A UK body, the QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) is currently hosting a discussion on how the subjects of English Language and Literature are taught in the future, specifically between the ages of 14 and 19.

They are asking for submissions of up to 2 A4 pages on the subject, and the discussion is open to anyone.

There is information on it here on the QCA site if you want to make your points and I really think it's an excellent opportunity to say something of value to a body which may actually listen.
 
 
sleazenation
22:35 / 22.02.05
I'm surprised no-one has yet mentioned Dickens...

I'm about to make very apparent how much of a good thing it is that I'm not a teacher by enthusing a bit about poetry, something that I was taught in my bog standard primary school from at least the age of 9 in the guise of 'descriptive writing'. And far from being about reading, we were taught poetry with a triple whamy of listening, singing and writing it.

While some might think that trying to make a subject 'fun' is amongst the most grevious transgressions a teacher can make in regards to his or her subject it was very much this approach that has left me with an abiding affecting for the form... particularly some of Christina Rossetti's stuff such as No, Thank You, John (G'wan Goodness Gracious Meme, it's a knock back in the form of a poem with some biting turns of phrase)...

I'd also like to big-up Goblin Market, but at 567 lines, it might be a bit long for those not already up for a longer poem...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
15:59 / 23.02.05
Good point Sleaze, and as I'm no longer using a thread as rant, I can actually talk sensibly about this.

Yeah, at primary school, we weren't taught 'poetry' but did lots of singing *and* writing.

Is this the coherence thing? in that, back then at least, the primary school curriculum was much more flexible, which fewer speicific subject lessions. We did singing, and writing in 'english' and 'music'/'drama' lessons spaces, and I remember enjoying and writing poetry.

eg, the school had (still has I think) a book of poems written by students over the years, and I remember being very proud/excited when I got to copy out/illustrate a poem I'd written for it.

I can even remember bits of it!
 
 
Tryphena Absent
08:20 / 24.02.05
I think they really dumb English down for secondary students. It's no wonder that so many people take pride in the idea that they've never read a book when their first contact was through school.

I started English lessons as a rebellious five-year old. I learnt to read Tintin books before I started school so Roger Red Hat was a bit of a step down. Then they put me in to remedial reading lessons because my refusal to read was taken as inability. This confused me a lot since I knew I was a few years above most of the people in my class reading-wise and I could spell better than most of them as well.

Generally I found that school English was always like that- too flaky to teach you where to put commas and what a noun was, too controlled to actually give you interesting stories to read. No one really paying attention to what you didn't understand and thinking that your problems were completely different to what was really going on. The people who excelled tended to be people who wanted to do well and were good at the subject rather than people who really liked English.

'A' level English was okay but I screwed up the prose side because I really disliked the novels and we spent so long on them. There's only so much Mayor of Casterbridge and -damn that L.P. Hartley novel... 'the past is another country they do things differently there'- that you can take before you want to stamp on them. At university level they moved quicker, took us through everything at lightning speed and picked a pattern apart in a way that I'd never been taught before. Concentrating on a small part of the novel and the representation of themes made so much more sense to me because I'd always read fiction so quickly. Honestly I'm sure I would have been capable of that type of learning at 'A' level and that kind of systematic approach could probably be applied to 15/16 year olds without too much trouble... especially considering that most of those classes are streamed.

English at school is confusing- teachers ask for your opinion on the way the Mayor treats his wife, which makes no sense because academically this should be a rigorous subject. It's about pulling apart texts and examining a language, working in your own opinion minimally until you understand how essay writing works. The morality of the Mayor of Casterbridge should be treated with only a little attention but it's hammered around and then people wonder why half the kids in a year group can't get their heads around essay writing. But they're confused by mixed messages- saying you should only write about this, this and this but then asking for a student's opinion every 10 seconds is totally inconsistent and it leaves people without an instinct for the subject floundering. If people are going to be interested then they have to be interested in the subject and not the individual stories and the only way to get them interested is to teach the subject and not the stories.
 
  
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