Want to help me be a better English teacher?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I teach high-school English at an independent (private) school in the US. In this setting my colleagues and I have the freedom to design and implement our own curricula, and we can re-examine and change what and how we teach from year to year.

Over the past couple of years I have started to wonder whether my teaching should be more informed by the requirements of the workplace and less by the academic conventions of my subject. I’m not sure that the answer is yes. I emphasize analytical writing about literature pretty heavily, but I think that I do a good job of teaching my students that the critical thinking involved in forming and proving a thesis is a broadly applicable skill even if they do not go on to write English papers for a living. However, I’m wondering whether I should make more of an effort to teach other writing skills such as summarizing, or paraphrasing complex language, or something else that I may not even have considered.

Similarly, in thinking about my teaching of critical reading skills, I’ve come to believe that my students need to read and understand more complex non-fiction. To that end, one of my senior electives for next year is “The New Yorker”: we’ll be using both current and past issues of the magazine as our text for the class and examining and discussing the articles. On the other hand, I do still believe in the intellectual value of reading and analyzing fiction, although it might not be what most people do in their work lives.

So my questions for the Dope community are these (feel free to answer some or all as you choose; anecdotes welcome): What are the reading and writing skills that are regularly required of you in your professional life? Are these different from or the same as the skills you need or want as an informed citizen or as a person who reads for pleasure? Did your secondary (high) school education teach you these skills? If not, how did you learn them? I am also very interested in responses from college and university students to the same questions.

(I also intend to start a Café Society thread asking for elective suggestions, if anyone is interested in that conversation.)

2

Professional life (office work): getting to the point and expressing yourself clearly without misunderstanding when writing. Reading the whole damn email and not only the first sentence when reading. Tailoring your answer to the expected audience (an email to a coworker is different than a flyer to our customers).
For meetings, taking notes and discussing properly.

As an informed citizen, critical thinking skills are important when reading for information. Debate skills are also good, but good speaking requires so much it should be taught in a seperate class if possible (we had some discussions in my German class, but not nearly enough.) This is not related to a debate club where the aim is to win!

Reading for pleasure means other critical skills - recognizing a metaphor and so on; spotting cultural references, and most important, to love reading. Some courses (and teachers) are so concentrated on analysing that they take all the fun out of the fiction/ poetry.

Understanding literature, a lot comes from reading for fun, or reading articles that point to new aspects of a work I didn’t notice before.

I couldn’t get from your OP whether you teach 1 year or the full 4 years, and our schools are structured very differently (mandatory curriculum, 5th-12th grade).

But the following would be what I expect a pupil to learn in English class:

Basic English literature, that is: major fiction, drama (shakespeare, obviously) and poetry. Reading, knowing the basics, drawing comparisions, basic analysis

Dictation, grammar, word use: should have been done up to 8th or 9th grade, but if not, polish those. Good grammar and choosing the correct word are important to express yourself correctly.

Critical reading: reading a factual text and answering comprehension questions (though we did that mostly with foreign languages, I think). Evaluation of sources, biases, agendas and logical fallacies go there.

Arguing: the famous dialectic essays we had to write in (9th? 10th? grade). That is, you are given a topic and have to write an argument con-pro of five pieces: Introduction (what are you are arguing about?), the con-arguments, the turning point, the pro-arguments, the closing summation.
You need to read up on facts in order to present good arguments.

Related to that: oral discussions with note-keeping. Everybody particaptes, and you point out bad discussion styles in order to correct them.

Normal Essay-writing (what I did on my holidays, what would I do if I were king) should be finished with in 6th grade. Maybe a short exercise on how to sum up what happened with customer X.

A small part was also “writing business letters according to the DIN rules”, though that’s also part of typing class. But formulating a good letter is more language part. Private letters are part of 7th grade, I think.

A lot of fun can be had with “so bad it’s good” as teaching: using The Eye of Argon for proofreading, riffing a bad movie or purple prose of Romance novels. That’s both part of critical thinking and teaching good style: you can’t write well or appreciate good books if you can’t distinguish between good and bad! That means exposure to a lot of good books, though - a well-stocked library.

3

Have the students start an advice column.

This might sound frivolous, but if you got other students in the school writing questions, you could then filter through the clowns and other nonsense but get a couple of good questions.

  1. They would have to research the topic.
  2. They would have to learn how to respond thoughtfully and with compassion.
  3. They would get an idea of how powerful words can be to help or hurt someone.
  4. It is excellent practice in dealing with future problems with friends, family, customers and clients.
  5. It could be fun.

With all the bullying going on, and all the issues kids that age have to deal with, I can imagine an advice column written by their peers would be a popular read. I can also imagine other staff would be interested in seeing how students would handle certain problems and issues.

4

Does your school offer any AP courses? I teach AP English Language, and it’s a wonderfully flexible course to adapt to “real world” applications: the focus is entirely on rhetoric, both the analysis of non-fiction persuasive works and the construction of persuasive texts. You don’t have to teach any fiction at all.

In terms of specifics, I find a unit on informal fallacies is really useful for the kids.

5

Whatever kind of writing you want your students to do, you need to provide them with copious examples of it, and spend time studying those examples. It doesn’t make sense to have students read a lot of novels and short stories, and then turn around expect them to suddenly produce a good academic essay out of thin air. And I’m not talking about one token bad example, to point out pet peeves that bother the teacher. I mean a thorough rhetorical analysis of academic writing–if that’s what you want them to produce.

In the same spirit, don’t have your students read the cannon of famous essays by people like George Orwell, etc., and then wonder why they can’t adhere to the stipulations of the mechanical five-paragraph essay that is so prevalent–because real essayists never wrote five-paragraph essays.

That said, much of the critical thinking necessary for academic writing also come into play with “real world” writing. What you’re really doing is teaching the different conventions of written discourse communities.

6

I don’t have any suggestions, but I want to commend you for thinking about your job and how to improve as a teacher. Many teachers just stick to a curriculum year after year, but the very good ones learn and change and try something new once in a while, and those are the teachers students will remember as being a good influence on them.

Don’t be afraid to fail - you can always use that to teach from too! My cousin is a grade 3/4 (split class in a very small school) teacher, and last year she was mentioning a spelling game that she decided to try (I don’t remember the mechanics of it). It was a complete flop - it was way too easy so no fun at all and turned into such a mess of trying to improve it that it led to three or four days of discussing, refining, writing up official rules, etc. So her complete failure as a teacher turned into a hugely educational moment where students had the chance to discuss and share and cooperate to develop something that was fun and educational. IIRC they went and presented their final, official rules to the other grade 4 class and played the game, and everyone had fun. :slight_smile:

7

That’s a very good point that I forgot because our research paper was not for language class, but for our Major subject. There are many older threads were teachers at colleges complain that their students haven’t the foggiest notion how to write a research paper - all they did were essays.

So make a list of 30 topics, each student can choose from (more topics than students)
take them to your university library and arrange a tour with the librarian beforehand
Do several hours on “How to do research -no, googling is not everything” and “Why copy-pasting from wikipedia is not real work” and “dead-tree books contain information, too” and “how to use databases that collect articles” and so on.
Tell them to do regular progess reports, so they can learn to portion their work.
And tell them about plagiarizing, and why it’s a no-no. (And that while the internet has made finding and copying things easier, it also has made it easier for teachers to find out plagiarism, too!)

Give a large part of the year’s grade to this project and several months time so they can do thorough work.

8

Now that I have some more time, a little more detail.

You need a vision of what your class is FOR. It can’t be too big–you can’t teach them everything they need–and it needs to be a coherent piece, not just a laundry list of skills. For example, I want my kids to be subtle and sophisticated thinkers who understand that the world is a complicated place and who can pick apart a given issue discuss those complications with nuance. That’s it. That’s more than enough!

Once you have that vision, you start to think about what skills they need to reach that vision. So to reach my vision, my kids need to be able to read complex texts from the 18th C on, they need to have experience with seeing complex ideas discussed, they need a precise vocabulary that can make fine distinctions between things, they need to be able to take apart other people’s arguments and see how they work, they need to be able to construct their own arguments.

Then, and only then, should you start thinking about specific units and assignments. Everything–everything–you do needs to be aimed at these skills. If you really understand where the kids are when you get them and where you want them to be in the end, almost any assignments will work. If you don’t understand those things, no assignments will.

9

Do a unit on following written instructions first.
This will please the teachers who use written instructions often and help the students in those classes.

I’m a retired H.S. science teacher so I know of what I speak.

10

Do a unit on writing instructions.

I used to work as a process standards documenter. I walked around the building and wrote down the steps each task required. Have students choose an everyday task, such as vacuuming or doing the dishes and assign them to write step-by-step instructions so that an alien could land on the planet, pick up their directions, and know how to do the dishes. This will be super useful to the future writers of owners’ manuals and assembly instructions, if anyone ever hires an American for such jobs ever again.

11

This is an excellent idea!

I’d also recommend emphasizing proofreading. Catching errors in resumes before employers see them will help your students get hired. Catching errors in their e-mails, presentations, reports, etc. will help your students avoid being fired.

Have them read about the Mars probe which was ruined because it used both metric and English measurements. Millions of dollars were wasted.

12

This will surprise you, but the best training I received was being forced to write against a deadline for radio news. Something about the short time frame forces you to get better at word choice. There’s no time to dither. Also, the fact that your work is going to be read aloud causes you to write short. punchy sentences that are easy to understand. Finally, it forces you to rank the importance of the details correctly.

Those abilities have paid off hugely in both of my careers (19 years, broadcast engineer, followed by 16 years, lawyer). Try assigning in-class-and-hand-it-in assignments from time to time and make this point: “You get extra credit for handing it in with a beginning, middle, end.”