Read Two of These and Call Me in the Morning

Here's an impassioned essay from our good friend Josh Corman. Read on to find out what they are (or are NOT) teaching kids in school these days.

Enjoy. Comment. Tell him what a jerk he is. We don't mind. But seriously, give this a read. It's great stuff.
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When I tell people I’m a teacher – a high school English teacher, no less – they often look at me as though I’ve just told them that my dog has died. They tilt their heads and purse their lips and nod solemnly, and I imagine that when we’ve parted company, they turn and mutter to each other. “Poor bastard,” they say.

They might say this sort of thing for any number of reasons. They might see the current generation as so far removed from their own understanding that they can’t imagine engaging with a group of high schoolers for even ten minutes. They might think about how they acted in high school and feel deep sympathy for anyone who has to put up with dozens of sixteen year-old versions of themselves. They might even know something about current educational movements and pity those of us who very often feel enslaved by convoluted, unrealistic legislation and pervasive standardized tests.

I appreciate their concern (and yours, if you have any). However, despite the many fears and worries I have about my job, these are not at the top of the list. No, that unpleasant designation is reserved for the frightening trend towards descriptivism in education. I first encountered the concept of descriptivism in David Foster Wallace’s essay-slash-review “Authority and American Usage,” in which he examines, among several other convoluted subplots concerning the use of the English Language, the battle between what he calls “descriptive linguists” and “prescriptive grammarians” to determine the proper function of English dictionaries.

Hey! Wake up, you!

Ahem. As I was saying, DFW points out that on one side we have the descriptivists, who feel that a dictionary should work like a thermometer, in that it should take the temperature of English usage and reflect accurately what it observes. Descriptivists, for example, would be quick to include “facebook” as a verb, because that’s how people use it.

Prescriptivists, as the name suggests, would act more like doctors, prescribing how the language should be used. They would be decidedly more suspicious of “facebook,” particularly in verb form.

The piece got me thinking (that’s what essays are supposed to do, right?) about descriptivism and prescriptivism in a different part of our culture, that part where I live and breathe - the realm of education.

The current movement in U.S. education law and philosophy is towards “standards-based” grading. Basically, every subject comes equipped with standards (“Students will analyze the use and function of literary devices - metaphor, symbols, allusions, juxtaposition, etc. - in appropriate texts” one might read). Teachers teach those standards (which are sound, if often vague), then they assess students on mastery of those standards. If they “meet” expectations, they move on; if they do not, remediation awaits.

On paper, this sounds brilliant. Students can move at different paces and are freed from legalistic frustrations like, say, losing a letter grade for writing an essay in pencil as opposed to pen, and have a clearer sense of expectations to boot. However, since a skill like “analysis of the use and function of metaphor” can be taught using any piece of writing that contains a metaphor, those English teachers eager to adopt the “standards-based” approach can simply replace those pesky novels with smaller, less complex pieces. Select chapters from longer works would fit the bill, or perhaps simply a more non-fiction centered curriculum (indeed, this is the solution championed by the new standards).

One of my colleagues this summer said to a room full of fellow English teachers that she loved this approach, because “some of those chapters in To Kill a Mockingbird are pretty boring for a student. This way, we can take the most interesting, enjoyable material and not use those parts that aren’t relevant to students.”

A friend and fellow teacher who was sitting next to me in that room placed a hand on my arm and whispered, “It’ll be okay.” A boiling rage coursed through my veins. The betrayal! An English teacher, giving up on the novel. Treason! I thought. Sedition! Heresy!

But, technically, what my wayward colleague says is true. Reading a whole novel for the mastery of a single standard isn’t necessary. But the implications of a view like hers are at best depressing and at worst the stuff of an Orwellian nightmare.

Frankly, I don’t give a damn what students find enjoyable. Do we worry about how much they enjoy history? Let’s leave out all the boring bits, y’know, tariffs and the like. We’ll keep the wars and assassinations and go from there. And what about Algebra? They never seem to like the quadratic equation, but I’ll lead with slope-intercept form and we’ll see if we can’t coax them into it. Obviously, no sane educator bases his curriculum upon what students like best. This approach is descriptivism at its worst: look at what students already do, and cater to it, the reasoning seems to go.

Before I collapse into seizures, I’ll turn this one over to the more-than-capable Ms. Flannery O’ Connor: “The high school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present.... And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”

Boom. Roasted.

And then, that misused word, “relevance.” A useless term in the hands of so many educators because, for them, it translates roughly into “something with which students have had immediate, literal experience.” By this definition, a given short story is only relevant to my students if it’s about red-bull fueled Call of Duty marathons or young people bonded by their horrible taste in music. Pardon me, but “relevance” is bullshit. I’ve never owned a slave or rafted the Mississippi or been a socialite or packed up my life and moved my starving family across the country looking for employment or vowed to avenge the death of my father at the hands of my usurping Uncle or scavenged a post-apocalyptic wasteland with my son in hopes of keeping alive the flame of basic human decency. Does that render Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath and Hamlet and The Road useless to me because I have not already lived them? Students don’t need to read about themselves. Believe me, they are too concerned with their own immediate realities as it is.

My other major concern is about what the standards (the ones we’ll be using to teach your kids, if you have any of schooling age or plan on procreating in this country) are incapable of measuring.

No matter how hard I search, I can find no standard that reads “Students will develop empathy and emotional maturity through the sometimes laborious task of reading thematically complex fiction,” none that reads “Students will come to understand something fundamental about themselves or the world around them by encountering a powerful novel or play,” or “Students will become life-long readers, devoted to finding and engaging with works that have a profound spiritual, moral, or psychic impact on their lives.”

When we stop expecting students to engage with art in ways that produce immeasurable results, we sell them short, lessen the true value of their education, and weaken the foundation on which they will build the rest of their intellectual lives. When we become more concerned with what students find enjoyable than what might actually make them better, stronger, more thoughtful, more compassionate or insightful individuals, then we as educators devalue our profession, and remove from it that last drop of magic that it holds.

I, for one, will still expect my students to read novels, even when they don’t like them. I don’t recall liking Great Expectations, Huck Finn, Macbeth, Heart of Darkness, or The Tenth Man when my teacher prescribed them in high school, but I’ve gone back to them all, because there were others I did connect with, and those connections led me to believe there had to be others I’d missed. I’ve become a voracious reader of myriad types of fiction, a person who seeks a challenge in what he reads because he understands that struggle begets growth, and immediate gratification isn’t always the best kind. I’ve become a better person because I have exposed myself to the view from others’ eyes and considered the problems of people who are unlike me in any way. Believe it or not, I am a better friend, a better husband, and a better father because of fiction.

I’m so glad my teacher didn’t ask me if I’d prefer to read something else.



By Josh Corman