Rant the First
Ironically, ever since I did that rant meme, I've come up with real life subjects for ranting--my colleagues, the weather, static electricity, regular electricity, the university, the universe... well, you can see where this is going.
Anyway, se_parsons wanted to know what's wrong with kids today, and specifically, with my students.
( ranting ahead )
Anyway, se_parsons wanted to know what's wrong with kids today, and specifically, with my students.
( ranting ahead )
Learning to parrot was a survival requirement in grammar and high school (U.S.-based student here; I graduated from HS ten years ago and from what I've heard, that has only become more important over the past decade). Sure there were teachers that wanted us to be original and creative, but they were the minority. One of the worse "outrages" I recall was receiving an F on a poetry analysis my senior year of high school in AP Lit: I wasn't overly enthused by any of the poets allowed for the analysis (because it was obvious that the teacher wanted us to select each poet's "major work" without assigning those "major works"). I took T.S. Eliot and rather than doing The Wasteland--which I'd analyzed in the past, anyhow--I analyzed poems from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Wow, was that a mistake. I had to do a lot of original analysis because I couldn't find "many" (I found *four* for a four-page paper) scholarly sources and I disagreed with the sources I did find. I received the F because I chose "inappropriate" material and because I disagreed with the sources I found rather than parrotting and expanding on those sources (and yes, the assignment was an analysis rather than a scholarly survey). That teacher and AP Lit (although, for the record, I received a 5 on the AP test ;) were the reason that I went into college as a pre-med major rather than an English major--she told us that she was teaching, grading and reacting in the manner that we should expect from English professors at college, and she directly told me in one student-teacher conference that I should avoid Literature in college because I was terrible at writing and analyzing. It was a very demoralizing class, and it took two good English profs at university to help me back to where I'd been before my senior year of HS.
University was an escape for me, because I was suddenly expected to do what I'd wanted to do before. (I actually used that paper from HS as a basis for an expanded analysis of those poems my sophomore year of college, and the prof loved it.) But those who are good at doing what was expected out of them in high school and who have been practicing those skills for many years . . . even if they have the potential to be interesting and engaging students, they have to overcome years of training and, really, fear.
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I am not making this up, btw.
And it was in public school.
My mother raised hell and the grade was raised to the A it deserved because the grading criteria did NOT mention conclusion, it was only graded on format, which was perfect MLA style.
I feel your bullshit English teacher pain.
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About a year ago, I was chattering on about something history-related to the male half and started discussing the schism between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, the effects that had on future developments throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia Minor . . . and received an increasing blank stare in return. This was unusual, because he's pretty well-versed in both later and earlier history (later: after the Reformation; earlier: prior to A.D. 500). He didn't have a clue about many of the historical events I was referring to.
This lead to us pulling out a European history book and many hours later concluding that anything relating to the Roman Catholic Church AND Islam had been carefully removed from his public school history education, to the point where the realization that historical periods like the Renaissance took place under the eyes and influence of the RCC had never occurred (and really, been carefully obscured). He knew so much about later and earlier history because they'd spent more time studying those periods in depth to avoid studying most of the period between 500 and ~1700 (although, later history from a strongly conservative Christian viewpoint, so sometimes his take on a particular historical event is very different from mine).
He grew up in a strongly Southern Baptist area in the U.S., and attended his state's specialty high school for academically gifted students.
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The sad thing, of course, is that parroting is still the route to success, even in college. To be honest, students who are even engaged enough to parrot what I've said back at me score points for it; the ones that really depress me are the ones that stare straight ahead, mouth half-open, and refuse to say anything.
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