Worst English Teachers / Curriculum

[AstroZon]

I was just thinking about some of the bad English teachers and curriculum that I had in both high school and college. I attended a large high school during the 70s, about 450 students per graduating class. The classrooms had between 30 and 40 students (those crazy baby boom years.)

English in high school was required both semesters, all four years, and it was generally divided into composition and literature. You took composition one semester and literature the next or vise versa. I enjoyed literature more as we read books and would then write an outline or a summery. In composition, we spent the first 2 years just diagramming sentences (which we also did in junior high.) What a waste of time really. Toward my junior and senior years, composition was primarily about tense: Past, Past Participle, Present, Future, Future Perfect, etc. We'd usually take a foray into poetry for a couple of weeks too.

My college classes usually had better structured curriculum although the English teachers tended to be either contemptuous or completely detached. Most only took up teaching until they published their first novel. None ever did as far as I know, but that represented their general attitude. I remember only one really good college English teacher, a Ms. Jones, that knuckled down and worked with me, helping me to improve my writing. Unfortunately, she moved on to another school, and I was unable to take any more courses from her.

 

[tinkerdan]

I graduated high school in 69. What I gathered when I began college was that US schools do very little to prepare a student for college. The funniest part in high school was if you had a counselor to go to and told them you wanted to teach they could give you all sorts of advice. Tell them you want to be an author and the ones I ran into wanted to steer me to something else--maybe teaching--first. That may have changed, but I doubt it.

College in the US relies on students knowing what they want to achieve academically and from there they hopefully will get connected with a counselor who will know which classes are best to achieve that.

If you can get those to line up then you have to learn that there is no pressure in college--they don't care if you screw up and wash out--you are on your own in this and it takes a lot of self motivation.

And oddly enough the minimum requirements for Teaching English Grammar might be a bit deficient in what you are going to need to become a successful author. And depending on what your masters is you might have to dig into more work to get everything you need.

 

[picklematrix]

I was educated in Scotland. The teachers did an admirable job of attempting to get us inspired about subjects. I learned a few useful things in english, nothing too in depth but the curiculum in scotland at the time was fairly well balanced.

 

[AstroZon]

I was educated in Scotland. The teachers did an admirable job of attempting to get us inspired about subjects. I learned a few useful things in english, nothing too in depth but the curiculum in scotland at the time was fairly well balanced.

It's nice to hear that. Please pass on my kudos to the Secretary for Education and Skills.

Education has improved in the US as well - at least from the 70s. I think diagramming sentences is becoming passe in most school districts - or at least limited to middle schools. IMO, straight out writing teaches more about grammar than the more mechanical approaches. It's best to just do it.

 

[AstroZon]

The funniest part in high school was if you had a counselor to go to and told them you wanted to teach they could give you all sorts of advice. Tell them you want to be an author and the ones I ran into wanted to steer me to something else--maybe teaching--first. That may have changed, but I doubt it.

I remember the counselors! A musician friend of mine told his counselor that he wanted to be a rock star. The counselor pulled out a set of these new glossy career guides with various occupations and what they entailed. They actually had one for rock star, and this was in the 70s.

 

[WarriorMouse]

My 3 yrs of required high school english classes were HELL!

All three years I had the required reading list done and all reports submitted within the 2nd month of classes. All three years I had the extra credit reading list plus reports done within the 4th month of classes. All three years I had the required essay's written and submitted by the 6th month of classes. All three years I got sent off to do remedial sessions on punctuation ,composition and grammer. All three years I only passed by the skin of my teeth.
Quite frankly I believe the majority of the arbitrary rules, requirements and exceptions they tried to force me to learn were complete and utter B.S!
I learnt very early on in my education years, teachers don't like students who ask questions. Especially students who ask WHY?

That's why my quote under my Chrons name is what it is. After I finished high school, I started educating myself. High school, in no way! prepared me for the real world.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

I suspect these things vary a lot over time, geography, and subject matter. but, like OP, my high school and college experience was in the 70s and I had similar experiences. I think that, in that period in the U.S., the English lit/comp subject area attracted by far the worst teachers.

I think a lot of them got on the educational path that led them to that job because because they liked being perceived as "intellectual" but didn't want to do anything requiring real skull sweat. And when they caught on to it, they resented that the U.S. had gone through a cultural shift during the 60s and that the uppity social climbers from the science & engineering fields had usurped much of the status they had expected to have.

In high school I had a real Mrs. Grundy type - puritanical, censorius, sanctimonius, certain of her omniscience - and amazingly ignorant. She pontificated on subjects she knew absolutely nothing about. Two examples:
1. She claimed "There has been nothing new in mathematics since the ancient Greeks - well, except for Einstein."
2. I used the word "entropy" in a composition. Correctly. She knocked off 20 points claiming that "just to be sure" she had looked it up, and I'd used it incorrectly - that it meant "wither". I presume she just resented that I'd used a word she didn't know. Beyond telling her she was wrong, I didn't push it, because I already held her in total contempt & wasn't worried about the grade. It didn't seem important. My father happened to see the paper and asked about it. He saw what I hadn't - that the silly woman was thinking of "atrophy" and had just lied about looking it up. And attached just as little importance to it as I did.

In college, for the third freshman comp class I had a pretentious ass cut from the cloth. He was amazingly vehement for example, in asserting that no animal but man ever used tools. Why he fancied himself an expert ethologist or felt called upon to lecture his captive audience of EN 103 students on the subject, I can't imagine. I dropped his course & he asked me why. I told I planned to take it the next quarter with a different prof. Some people don't deserve polite lies. He told me I "shouldn't be limiting my intellectual horizons" and I laughed at him.

 

[sknox]

Education is wasted on the young. It certainly was wasted on me. I don't really remember any of my English classes--I didn't learn English until I took Latin, starting in my senior year of college. I also learned a great deal about writing from my history professors. The English classes were an utter waste.

But I don't blame any of the teachers. A teacher can only teach; it's the student who must learn. I remain convinced that the absolute worst years in which to try to teach anyone anything in a formal, structured setting are the years that end with the letters t-e-e-n. During my teen years, I learned at a furious pace, but I was learning things outside of the classroom. People that age should be given resources and an open pasture, and watch them tear up the joint.

We can't do that, of course. One of the chief functions of compulsory public education is to remove young people from the work force. A second crucial function is to keep them off the streets. These functions the education system continues to perform. A third function is acculturation (in America they used to called it education for citizenship), but that role has largely been usurped by various forms of mass communication. Here, too, the teachers are largely blameless. Theirs is a thankless job, but a blame-filled one. If they do their job brilliantly, it is no more than what we pay them for. Let a student fall short, and the blame fans out faster than a California wildfire.

FTR, I graduated from high school in 1969 with a 1.9 GPA, which in today's world would mean failure. I simply stopped trying, because I knew the community college system would take me. So why waste time with high school assignments? After a false start, I fell in love with learning. I got a 4.0 for my first two years in college, and went on to get my M.A. and Ph.D. in history. The school system had nothing to do with any of it. It was the student who had changed.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

Education has improved in the US as well - at least from the 70s.

That is debatable.

"According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), test scores for 17 year olds have not improved since the early 1970s. That is, the average 17 year old in 2012 got about the same score in reading and math (287 and 306, respectively) as a 17 year old in 1971 or 1973 did (285 and 304, respectively). Scores have bobbled up and down a point or two over the years, but, statistically speaking, they’ve been indistinguishable from each other."
High school test scores haven't improved for 40 years; top students stagnating - Education By The Numbers
People who like to claim it's getting better usually point at scores of younger children. The problem with that seems to be that the scores of younger children improved some time back, but it STILL doesn't result in a gain that is maintained through the end of high school.

I think diagramming sentences is becoming passe in most school districts - or at least limited to middle schools.

Well, I'm no historian of education, but I think diagramming sentences has always been characteristic of grammar school, not high school. It's something my contemporaries were doing at 10, 11, or 12 years old, not later.

IMO, straight out writing teaches more about grammar than the more mechanical approaches. It's best to just do it.

I'm no educational theorist either, but that never struck me as the main point of diagramming sentences anyway. It's a big help with verbal logic; with comprehension; with recognizing ambiguity, etc. I suspect it helps more in developing the kind of mind that makes a good lawyer than the kind that makes a good poet.

 

[chrispenycate]

I was educated as a technician/scientist. Oh, I passed English language and English literature, but maths, physics and chemistry were way ahead as preferences. Fortunately my father was a pedant, and taught English to bone-headed secondary modern pupils… I was supposed to be a proper technical illiterate.

 

[AstroZon]

Well, I'm no historian of education, but I think diagramming sentences has always been characteristic of grammar school, not high school. It's something my contemporaries were doing at 10, 11, or 12 years old, not later.

I can't claim to remember completely the curriculum of my high school English classes (1973 - 1977) but I do remember diagramming sentences almost exclusively for the first 2 years.

The 70s weren't the best years in American education. History was replaced with Social Studies, "self paced study" was one of the progressive mantras of the day, and English suffered from all sorts of experimental approaches. Still, political correctness hadn't neutered the literature side of it yet. We read The Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet, and A Farewell to Arms. Yet an argument can be made for an obvious anti-communist bias: Anthem, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World. They wanted to be sure that we didn't foster the next revolution.

But you're right that bad educational practices still go on today. Study Groups are IMO, a lazy teacher's best tool. "You kids teach yourselves. I'll be in the teacher's lounge woofing down a banana nut muffin and a K-Cup or two."

Education is wasted on the young. It certainly was wasted on me. I don't really remember any of my English classes--I didn't learn English until I took Latin, starting in my senior year of college. I also learned a great deal about writing from my history professors. The English classes were an utter waste.

I agree completely. I too learned more about my native tongue from foreign language study than from English classes. Also, I was a history major in college, and I wrote significantly more than I ever did in my English composition courses.