I do not want students to parrot back information. I would be happier with a student that analyzed a work throughly and came up with an incorrect interpretation that one that went to Spark Notes parroted back information. But that is not what is going on. The students are engaging in surface level analysis and coming up with incorrect interpretations. If they are even doing that much. More likely they are reading Spark Notes and misinterpreting that. I don’t know how many students I have overheard talk about how they have not even read any of the books assigned, much less analyzed the books. And many of the students lack the basic skills to analyze literature. Before you can analyze verse poetry you have to know how to read it. If a teacher does not want to lay the ground work for reading verse poetry, she should not teach it at all.
And you would be right to say my interpretation of Frost was simplistic (same for my comments on Fitzgerald), but that is because I was giving a one sentence analysis. But my points stands, “The Road Not Taken” is not advice about nonconformity.
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Again, what did I teach that was not on the lesson plan? The plan said to have the students read the poems aloud. I assumed that meant to read them correctly. I did not attempt to teach the students how to read the poem correctly or anything about scansion. I just asked if they knew how. If a student was mispronouncing words should I just let that pass? When the teacher assigns something to read aloud and a student incorrectly reads it by not pausing at punctuation marks, should I just let it go?
If someone says she really feels like Rosa Parks was really brave considering she like went against the what was expected of black people even before the civil rights movement started and that school board case (Brown), her feelings are wrong.
Well, of course, but if they turned in a paper that said that probably Gatsby faked his death because it was the only way he and Daisy could be together, and that she probably leaves Tom a few months later, I’d tell them that it was wrong, that there was no evidence of that, and it totally leaves out what happened to George. With some kids I’d be gentle and lead them to that conclusion themselves, with others I might be pretty blunt and sarcastic about it, depending on how well I know the kid. But I wouldn’t admit it had validity just because it was a nice thought.
I do find that kids take a lot of comfort in the idea that while there may be several right answers, wrong ones exist as well. When English teachers give the impression that everything is subjective and nebulous, a lot of kids assume that that means that it’s all an ass-kissing popularity contest and they refuse to play.
Exactly. I think there is a huge problem in this country that we haven’t decided what English is for. The state guidelines are so monstrously bloated and vague as to be meaningless. These are the 18 TEKS for senior English in Texas: each has 4-13 specific attachments that come after it:
No one can teach all those things in a year. You can cover them, ticking each off a list, but that means you don’t teach anything, you just talk real fast to a bored audience that retains nothing. No one wants to do that, so everyone constructs their own idea of what the course should be. The problem is that no one agrees what the course is for: the buzzword of the moment in my district is “disciplinary literacy” , the idea being that we should construct our classes to mimic the “real work” of our discipline, that we need more of an apprenticeship approach. It makes sense if you are teaching science or math, but for English I keep saying, what is my field? They are apprentice whats? Some, like the OP, seem to think they are apprentice Literary Critics, but I can’t see justifying 20% of their education to preparing for that field. Some seem to think they are apprentice tech writers and office workers, needing to be able to craft memos and write directions and interview successfully, but that seems terribly limited to me. I tend to to take the approach that they are apprentice citizens, and that they need the skills it takes to be good voters and community members and leaders, and apprentice adults, who need the skills to communicate with loved ones and build meaningful connections and to enjoy art and literature and beauty. But there is no agreement at all about why we have English class, and what it is supposed to do, and in my experience if you ask a room of English teachers this question they inevitably view it as an attack on the existence of English class at all, and so refuse to ponder how it could be narrowed, as if survival depends on the stance that English provides all things to all students.
In the face of this, the AP exams have become a de facto way to narrow your Honors English class without admitting that you are. They are pretty good tests–rigorous, and they do seem to test what they claim to test, and overall test scores seem to follow my own assessments of the kids’ abilities, once you correct for those with test anxiety. Teaching kids how to excel on the tests is a feasible goal that gives focus to a course, and since it isn’t a bad test, it doesn’t make you feel dirty or anything. And with the AP test the way it is, scansion just isn’t worth the hours and hours it takes to teach it (and it does take hours and hours. Non-teachers and new teachers always underestimate how long it takes to teach something by an order of magnitude. I am convinced this is because when we all remember learning, we remember the moment when we "got it’ and not all the moments that lead up to it).
I’m not sure one really needs to understand the rhythms to appreciate them. The rhythms should come out when reciting a poem aloud in a natural way. More jarring to me is someone who tries to overemphasize the differences between stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem, in order to underscore the rhythm. The rhythm of a poem should be subtle and musical, not hamfisted. I think if most people speak a poem with their natural stress patterns, the proper rhythm will come out. I’ve always felt the effect of rhythm as more of a subconscious undercurrent, that can be used by the poet to create tension, drama, interruption.
I think you are greatly underestimating the time it takes to teach scansion. I don’t know why it’s so hard, but while you can teach a kid to get a general sense of the rhythm and pattern of a poem by ear, it takes weeks and weeks to get a whole class to understand scansion to the point that they can write and speak meaningfully about it, to get them past the level of learning where they simply recognize the pattern and instead construct arguments about what that pattern might mean. I agree, scansion is really cool and it opens up a whole new level of understanding poetry, but it’s the thing that takes the longest to get to even a functional understanding. Instead, you teach how the use of figurative language, imagery, diction, and syntax all also work together to also convey meaning. Then, if you have a kid that eats that up, you take them aside and teach them scansion.
In Texas, at least, a class with a co-teacher means that around 50% of the class has extreme learning differences: mentally retarded or a severe learning disability. These kids will be so low that they aren’t even getting credit for English II or World History or whatever, the class is instead dual-described and those kids are enrolled in something like “Principles of English II” or “Principles of History II”. The people that work with them every day have the best sense of what they can learn and what a reasonable expectation is, and while there are certainly some special ed teachers that don’t expect enough of their kids, if you are a passing visitor, I’d withhold judgment.
No letter is an aspirate and no letter is a liquid. Letters are all silent. They are ink on a page or pixels on a monitor.
All good points. It seems like he hasn’t. (I doubt any state has a high school curriculum that includes phonetics.)
And it’s important to realize that “reading” out loud is not really reading–it’s speaking. It engages a different part of the brain. So, yes understanding meter of poetry is helpful to understand it, but that the students couldn’t apply it to how to read it out loud effectively could have nothing with the teacher’s pedagogy.
Have you ever heard Dylan Thomas read his poetry? The meter seems to the last thing on his mind.
The best thing I got out of high school was critical thinking skills. Historical dates, terms of poetics, etc. are easily forgotten but easily recovered from an encyclopedia.
Probably one of biggest traps new teachers face (especially English teachers) is the inability to see the subject from the student’s perspective. Learning is recursive, and you can’t just say, “This is how a good essay is written. Now go home and write a good essay.” What’s obvious to the teacher is still something that the student needs experience over time as an extended process.
I’d agree without reservation.
Well, with a slight caveat.
I’d challenge the student to support it with the text. And if the kid could provide sufficient textual backing to argue it, even if I thought the point was absurd, I’d let it slide. I think we’re pretty much in accord, as you specifically mentioned a lack of evidence as grounds for calling something wrong. I agree with that, and I’ve always made it a point that any interpretation must be grounded in text, or it’s garbage.
That doesn’t mean, however, that if a student applies and inventive or even a strange interpretation to text, I’d necessarily say that it’s wrong. I’ve seen, for example, that it’s quite possible to run a Marxist literary analysis of The Hobbit. While I’d classify that as something I certainly don’t agree with, if a student presented such a thesis and defended it with textual citations, I’d be pleased as punch.
I’d be happy to point out sources of disagreement, and why I didn’t find their view persuasive. And I’d certainly demand that logically and rhetorically they were as tight as a drum, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that they were wrong. Heck, part of what I teach my students is that a strong piece of persuasive writing must not only make a point, and support that point, but be able to identify and refute conflicting claims. I think that a process of literary analysis where a student advanced and defended an odd view would be a valuable enough lesson in literary criticism and persuasive writing, that a valid pedagogical goal could be met.
YMMV.
Heh, exactly. I got my M.Ed. at UT and heard the war stories. I’m actually currently looking into Texas’ TTC program as I’ve previously been teaching at a New England private school and never bothered to gain state certification. I’m not looking forward to the loss of freedom I’ll suffer or the rather restricted choices I’ll have to design my own curriculum, but I need to make the kind of money that’ll let me start a family.
That bit of rambling aside, I’ve got more than a few bones to pick with top-down educational reforms, overly broad sets of standards, etc… I, personally, believe that the function of an English teacher is, certainly to teach children how to interact with prose and poetry. But it’s also about building life-long learners who can communicate their ideas well, in addition to being sophisticated consumers of information rather than passive data-tubes. I believe that education is inextricably linked with citizenship, and the strength of the Body Politic is measured, in large part, by what sort of role its members are able to take on. In short, I believe that language is the fountainhead of almost all of human culture and achievement and that my job as an educator is to make sure that my students can take full advantage of the tool that is language. I have to admit, I could not possibly care less if they can tell what the denotation of ‘litotes’ is, as long as they understand the flow and power inherent in various styles of persuasive writing.
I have never had much use for the ‘factory model’ of education anyways, where we’re expected to take students and make them into good office workers, or what have you. I personally view that as an abrogation and dereliction of my responsibilities as an educator. If a student graduated while not knowing that it is essential (and why it is essential) to check the actual primary source that’s being reported on in any bit of newspaper infotainment… but they knew a template for sending a business letter?
I honestly believe I would have thoroughly failed them.
I think I love you.
And not to rag on the OP, but I’m really glad that the English teachers who had the biggest impact on me taught how I teach, and not how he thinks. I got my lit crit bullshit out of the way in college. I learned the real lessons in High School.
Yep. That’s part of why I’ve been trying to find out what training the OP has and how much actual exposure he has to the developmental facts of individual students as well as where any individual teachers were eventually going with a day’s lesson. I can easily see, for example, using a day on which I had to be out, in order to get students thinking about the emotional component of poetry. And then using that as a jumping off point to build something bigger. Without knowing how any given teacher was using an individual lesson, especially in the context of a lesson they specifically planned to be given by a substitute teacher, I’m not willing to say that they didn’t meet their instructional goals.
Just out of curiosity, what meters would be the exception (in English)? I mean, I know in some cases where a regular rhythm will throw an unstressed word into a stressed position, and, thus, the inclination would be to stress something that, out of context, might not normally be stressed, but I can’t think of any meters that go aggressively contrary to normal speaking patterns. I know you brought the dactylic hexameter up, but one need not force the rhythm for it to appear. It naturally reveals itself in speech without any special effort.
Through the ages, you get different views on this issue from even the poets themselves. In general, the past preferred a less naturalized reading than we do today. This is not without exemptions, or course. I think you’ll find that an artificial emphasis on the beats in performance is common in rap and other styles that evolved from the tradition of Black American balladry. Adherents of free verse tend to exert pressure that leads people to naturalize stress patterns almost out of existence, while free verse readers often fail to acknowledge the artificial devices they use in reading such as the imposition of rising and falling tone. Who you gonna believe? I recommend reading both naturally and with an awareness of scansion.
It helps. Tremendously. Yes, in principle, the rhythm that is built into a poem is made from and should arise back out of the natural tendencies in the language. But historically poets have differed greatly on how much the reader is supposed to artificially inflate stress, and their differing opinions don’t necessarily make any of them wrong. So, for particular poems the answer to how much to emphasize metrical patterns cannot be “never.” On the other hand, I do think the answer is almost always going to be “think about it.” Learning scansion gives you the tools you need to think about it, both by understanding how the language works and also understanding what was going on in the mind of the poet himself.
It is clamorous to hear somebody hammering away at the stresses, but it’s not scansion’s fault. Scansion is a tool of awareness, and the remedy to bad reading is always more awareness. By our modern prejudice, we want our artificialities marshaled into the likeness of a natural sound, but poetry is artificial. Like most arts, it is all the better if we can keep a straight face when denying its artificiality, but Nature Art distaineth. A poem should be read to sound natural without making the dolorous mistake of actually being natural. Scansion is a vital tool for understanding the difference, important even if you already have a knack for the sound of language, because without it we’re straining our necks looking up at the shoulders of giants.
Exactly. Teaching children how to winnow the wheat from the chaff, how to analyze information and how to synthesize a worldview consistent with new information is absolutely key to long term educational success.
I believe it is telling that the OP apparently does not understand/use Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Good Gods… brings back memories from when I was a first year. :smack:
I don’t think I’ve ever had a more humbling, enlightening or challenging experience.
Just a note from the other side, I guess, but I learned the baby-lit-crit stuff in my AP English classes in High School, and to me these seemed like the “real lessons.” Someone was finally equipping me to understand, and explain, the way the texts are designed, and the way they affect me and others, and what I bring to my understanding of them and so on. It was really empowering, and had a lot to do both with the way I came to understand life in general and the way I decided to make my way through life career-wise.
The AP essay tests were one of the very few times I felt like what I produced for a test was something really interesting and something I could be proud of rather than simply something I had produced for someone else to tick off. To this day I regret not having asked for a copy of the essays I wrote. Not that I think they were so great, but just that they would have been really nice to have as mementos of something that had such an effect on the future course of my life.
I do not think dactylic hexameter works well with English. When a person first starts reading poetry in this meter, he probably needs to be somewhat conscious of the meter. It will take a few (probably more) lines to get into the grove of it if he does not have experience in reading it, especially if there are a lot of variant feet. It will reveal itself, but it should be clear for the beginning. But I would not advise someone new to reading verse poetry to try to force the rhythm. Doing that will just confuse them. It is just something that takes a little experience.
He’s using strong stress beats in syllabic verse, often 4-5 beats in seven-to-ten syllables, and artificially inflating the stress on those beats and downplaying even the already weak syllables to affect timing between beats that would not come out in a more natural reading. In other words, the recordings of Dylan Thomas show an obsessive concern with meter.
By the way, until you answer my questions as to how long you’ve actually observed these students, what knowledge you have of best practices, state standards, specific teachers’ long term lesson plans, etc… there really isn’t that much to talk about. I’m going to point a few things out here and then, if you don’t want to engage with the meat of a pedagogical discussion, that’ll be that.
Until you answer my questions, I can’t even know if this is generalized, long term behavior or if kids are just playing the perennial game “fuck with the sub”. I certainly can’t find out if various teachers’ instructional strategies are or aren’t working as you’ve presented nothing in context.
And unless you can identify teachers’ long term strategies to deal with a lack of participation, you’ve told us nothing. You need to provide that info and not ignore the questions.
You base this on what pedagogical theories, exactly?
Answering that one isn’t really necessary, the question itself pretty much rhetorical and should get you involved in reflection, a process that any solid instructional strategy is grounded in.
The reason it’s rhetorical, by the way, is that I’ve taught poetry without mentioning a word about “how to read it”, and had my students succeed admirably. So I know for a fact that your claims are hot air.
I’m curious (and you should be too), as to what basis you have for making sweeping pedagogical claims.
Nope. Even in this thread, we’ve already seen two competing interpretations, both fairly well supported. The poem itself deals in ambiguity, caveats and qualifiers, as well as shifts in perspective and time. That’s the important part, and a discussion of how that works is the important lesson in limited space.
You are, in short, missing the forest for the trees.
Do you honestly think that if the teacher had wanted you to force students to read poetry with proper rhythm and dramatic presentation (or as you incorrectly call it “correctly”), he/she wouldn’t have made a note of it?
I wanted to clarify that I do not think teaching students how to think is a bad idea. I think it is a great idea, but from what I have seen this phrase is just a code that lazy teachers use. FinnAgain sounds like a great teacher that is really concerned with his/her students.
Unfortunately, this is not what I am seeing. I know my experience is limited, and I am not trained as a teacher; however, I can recognize that a lot the teacher I have seen are not pushing their students. Today I subbed in a history class. What was the assignment for the day? To watch A Knight’s Tale. I can understand leaving a movie for the class to watch, but it should at least have some educational value. And apparently the students had watched War of the Worlds recently. I know this because the students were complaining that AKT was not as good.
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I’d agree without reservation.
Well, with a slight caveat.
I’d challenge the student to support it with the text. And if the kid could provide sufficient textual backing to argue it, even if I thought the point was absurd, I’d let it slide. I think we’re pretty much in accord, as you specifically mentioned a lack of evidence as grounds for calling something wrong. I agree with that, and I’ve always made it a point that any interpretation must be grounded in text, or it’s garbage.
That doesn’t mean, however, that if a student applies and inventive or even a strange interpretation to text, I’d necessarily say that it’s wrong. I’ve seen, for example, that it’s quite possible to run a Marxist literary analysis of The Hobbit. While I’d classify that as something I certainly don’t agree with, if a student presented such a thesis and defended it with textual citations, I’d be pleased as punch.
I’d be happy to point out sources of disagreement, and why I didn’t find their view persuasive. And I’d certainly demand that logically and rhetorically they were as tight as a drum, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that they were wrong. Heck, part of what I teach my students is that a strong piece of persuasive writing must not only make a point, and support that point, but be able to identify and refute conflicting claims. I think that a process of literary analysis where a student advanced and defended an odd view would be a valuable enough lesson in literary criticism and persuasive writing, that a valid pedagogical goal could be met.
You obviously know that as a sub, I do not get to observe these students long term or have access to the long term lesson plans. But, it does not take this information or knowledge of the state standards to recognize that there a lot of problems with high school teaching. There are some great teachers out there. I subbed for one a couple of weeks ago. One of the other teachers in the department was telling me about how her students would get into heated debates on the books they were reading. He made it sound like the students in these classes were way too intense about English instead what he should be trying to achieve.
Just because there are competing interpretations and ambiguity in the poem does not mean there are not incorrect interpretations. I would be fine with students discussing the poem and coming up with incorrect interpretations as long as they are engaging the work at a deep level. (It almost goes without saying that when people engage in analysis of literature that they will not be able to correctly interpret every work.) But I object to is the idea that people cannot make mistakes (or that the mistakes are totally unimportant) in their interpretations.
Do you honestly think a verse poem should be read without any sense of rhythm?
I do not know what you are dubious about. I did not try to teach them anything about reading verse poetry.
No idea what happened earlier to leave that post empty. This is what I said:
I suspect we are at more or less the same place, but my teaching style may be a little more caustic/sarcastic than yours at times.
I love teaching in Texas, and you can have a lot of freedom, provided you are a talented teacher and reasonably stubborn. Also, I think you get a lot more freedom in the cities than in the suburbs. Certainly I designed every aspect of my course, and because it works, the parents love me, and I act like I know exactly what I am doing, no one says anything.
That bit of rambling aside, I’ve got more than a few bones to pick with top-down educational reforms, overly broad sets of standards, etc… I, personally, believe that the function of an English teacher is, certainly to teach children how to interact with prose and poetry. But it’s also about building life-long learners who can communicate their ideas well, in addition to being sophisticated consumers of information rather than passive data-tubes. I believe that education is inextricably linked with citizenship, and the strength of the Body Politic is measured, in large part, by what sort of role its members are able to take on. In short, I believe that
Well, to be fair, that’s not what I meant when I was talking about lit crit bullshit.
If you weren’t looking at things through the lenses of structuralism, post structuralism, postmodernism, etc… it doesn’t quite qualify.
What you’re talking about is normal literary analysis that should be going on in most classes starting as soon as 7th grade. 6th grade can be a bit rough, as the developmental stage will still leave many children in a position where they’re not at all comfortable with abstractions and are much more able to deal with concrete facts. Looking at plot-details and training students to use text (and only text) to back up their claims is a good level for 6th grade. Towards the end of the year, dealing with symbolism is possible as long as you differentiate your instruction sufficiently, but it can still be monumentally frustrating for a teacher. Or, well, me at least.
Not true at all. I made sure that I had a good level of communication with any subs and that they’d know what I expected to get done and where I was going from there. There are also long term subs.
You hadn’t given specifics.
Not only do you need that knowledge, as well as the standards, you need to know a good deal more to determine what’s broken, what the limitations of the system are, and what are reasonable responses.
Without proper knowledge, you wouldn’t tell an architect what was wrong with his structural designs, would you?
Actually, if there are competing interpretations which are all equally supported by the text, you cannot claim that only one is “correct”. Moreover, the ‘point’ of many works of art is the ambiguity itself. Not playing with that a bit in favor of preaching a dogmatic interpretation can rob some pieces of its richness.
First, as I’ve been trying to point out, unless you know what the individual students’ learning profiles are, what their previous knowledge is, what the arc of the teacher’s planned instruction, what’s normal for children their age, etc… you really don’t know if they’re behind or not. Poetry takes some learning to master, and even if they’re used to basic literary analysis of prose, those skills don’t always carry over to poetry, especially since it can be intimidating.
As for mistakes being unimportant, in a very real sense they are. Mistakes are learning experiences, and the process of teaching a student how to refine their analysis of any given work is much more important than making sure that they get the “correct” interpretation of any individual work.
You told a student to stop reading, made him read “correctly”, asked the students about their knowledge of scansion… but you never actually told the student what you were expecting of him? You didn’t model the behavior you were looking for? You didn’t scaffold the learning process for the other students?
Did you really, pretty much, just say “Wrong. Do it again?”
I’m unaware of any way that you could tell a student to “stop and read it correctly” if you didn’t also “teach the students how to read the poem correctly”. Not if you were teaching a class properly… which has kind of been my point. If you don’t grok how to teach, or the reasoning behind pedagogy, or what running a class is like when you have to design and implement lesson plans and diagnostic measures? You’re really not qualified to point out flaws let alone suggest solutions to them.
