Tuesday, September 07, 2004
(8:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
I'm with Lars
From Spurious:A sense I share with many of my friends: we have been excluded from a great education – it passed us by, we don’t know Greek or Latin and teach ourselves French and German by reading texts in those languages. Until we can read but can barely speak those languages. Then we missed closed tuition in writing itself – in grammar and proper form. Born in late 1960s or early 70s, schooled at comprehensives, we missed the strictness of an old fashioned education.I had always been under the impression that British schools were better than American schools, but it sounds a lot like Lars went to Kankakee High School. During my brief time as a substitute, I thought I was doing something horribly wrong since the kids were so misbehaved, but every time I talked to a real teacher, they all told me that that was just how it was -- after one particularly bad class from my perspective, a teacher who was somehow trying to get some work done at her little desk in the corner told me that the class had actually been remarkably well-behaved by their standards.
Example: during my English ‘A’ level, we learnt about texts not by our teacher instructing us on this or that chapter of Iris Murdoch or L. P. Hartley but by drawing what we felt or to making a mock radio documentary. Meanwhile, the teacher would leave us for a smoke. Second example: the two years until ‘O’ level, our exercise books went unmarked, our teacher, keen on amateur dramatics, fond of reading passages from Hemingway in a drawling accent, left us alone for our lessons. Where did he go? Meanwhile, what did we write? Well, nothing at all. What did we do? Lark about. The same for virtually any subject, since the teacher, if he or she was bothered, was too busy trying to maintain order in troublesome classes to teach anything. And besides, they themselves were the product of our kind of school.
And at another school, when I subbed two weeks straight for a math teacher, I was told that on the return of their normal teacher, students had asked for me to come back, by name, by my difficult-to-pronounce name. I was able to do geometry and algebra with no problem, but I prepared for trig and calculus feverishly during the easier classes, doing all the homework right then -- I almost considered taking it home. At one point, I had done a problem wrong and had no idea how to fix it, and neither did they. I was an English major in my undergrad, for those who don't recall, and they somehow experienced my inept mumbling in front of the board as an adequate explanation of their math problems. I recognized the kinds of misbehavior that went on at that school -- the kids were all white and all bored, just like at the high school I attended -- and thought of it as a "better" school, but I know that they spent most of their days sitting on the tops of their desks with their feet in the chair, making resentful token gestures toward finishing their ten minutes of homework a night, asking for hall pass after hall pass.
We have already long-since reached the point where the substitute teacher is the norm. No lectures anymore -- the kids won't pay attention. They can't relate to those old methods -- as though every child comes to school having attained a thorough knowledge of the evolution of educational philosophy. Even my best teachers in high school, the ones who did the most to supply me with that miscellaneous knowledge that I still falsely assume that people can reasonably be expected to have gained from high school -- the ones who lectured, whose assignments weren't always patronizing -- even their classes featured a whole lot of time to socialize and a whole lot of time for the teacher to wander off and do something else.
The key word in American education is "bullshit," as a verb (transitive and intransitive). The bar is lowered to the point that the ability to fill an empty piece of paper or three minutes of in-class discussion with groundless speculation is considered a real talent. Supplementing your text with a word you looked up in a thesaurus and dropped into a sentence without ever having seen it used, and thus without any clue what it really means, is even better. [N.B.: Hey, kids, I guess a thesaurus can really be a valuable resource, but it's only the beginning. The key here is that once you find your word, you should probably go look it up in the dictionary to see what shades of meaning it might have. And the dictionary legalism people have! As though a dictionary definition simply ends the conversation. In reality, most dictionary definitions, especially those of complex ideas like "love" or "fascism," are only a beginning to further study. The meaning of a word is finally its use, and so the best way to know the meaning of a word is through reading a wide variety of texts that use it. I'm not saying you have to go through that process every time -- a lot of times, the dictionary is at least adequate -- but some acknowledgment that that is how things are done would be nice.] I only survived by reading and writing continuously, on my own, with alacrity and zeal, motivated in no small part by my scorn for the lazy, soulless people who surrounded me.
Every time I walked into a school, then, I wanted to write on the board, "Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish," then lecture on the topic -- because if you're going to have to be a substitute teacher anyway, you might as well take some risks.
