Why I Hated English Class
How do you find the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle? If you have any recollection of this being hammered into your head year after year during grade school, you know that you square each of the other two sides, add the numbers together, and then take the square root. a2 + b2 = c2
This is a problem that has a convergent solution. You have a classroom full of 30 kids, and if you've done your job correctly, all 30 of them should be able to use the formula above to figure out that if a=3, and b=4, then c=5.
I actually hated a lot of the stuff that teachers made me read in high school. The literature we had to read was supposed to give us perspective on the world, on the human condition, and actually make us feel the value in expressing ourselves through writing.
One problem with this is that a lot of books that are good at doing this are banned from the public school system. But censorship is not the issue I want to talk about.
The problem was the aim of the teachers. Reading and interpreting literature should never be treated like the hypotenuse example above. It's all too possible (and very likely) that all 30 of the kids you force to read some book they didn't ask to read will arrive at 30 different conclusions. It's a divergent exercise.
Classroom discussions were often lectures by the teacher, instructing us what the author "meant" by analyzing themes, character motives, and plotlines so that all the students in the room would "learn" how to arrive at the correct interpretation of the book.
If the point is not to be moved in a unique way by the prose, or to glean insight or inspiration from the small things, then why not just read the Cliff Notes?
If an English teacher wants to grade me, mark me down on my correct use of grammer or spelling errors, but don't give me a lower grade because I didn't reach the same conclusion about The Great Gatsby as you.
This is a problem that has a convergent solution. You have a classroom full of 30 kids, and if you've done your job correctly, all 30 of them should be able to use the formula above to figure out that if a=3, and b=4, then c=5.
I actually hated a lot of the stuff that teachers made me read in high school. The literature we had to read was supposed to give us perspective on the world, on the human condition, and actually make us feel the value in expressing ourselves through writing.
One problem with this is that a lot of books that are good at doing this are banned from the public school system. But censorship is not the issue I want to talk about.
The problem was the aim of the teachers. Reading and interpreting literature should never be treated like the hypotenuse example above. It's all too possible (and very likely) that all 30 of the kids you force to read some book they didn't ask to read will arrive at 30 different conclusions. It's a divergent exercise.
Classroom discussions were often lectures by the teacher, instructing us what the author "meant" by analyzing themes, character motives, and plotlines so that all the students in the room would "learn" how to arrive at the correct interpretation of the book.
If the point is not to be moved in a unique way by the prose, or to glean insight or inspiration from the small things, then why not just read the Cliff Notes?
If an English teacher wants to grade me, mark me down on my correct use of grammer or spelling errors, but don't give me a lower grade because I didn't reach the same conclusion about The Great Gatsby as you.