I teach English Composition and the immensity of my task can be summed up in the two sentences I am about to read you. One student was struggling mightily with ideas and came up with this long, complex, almost incomprehensible sentence -- but the sentence does make sense --I f you read it two or three times.
"In this light, the trend that Greer rightly identifies as beginning with the Renaissance of an art that increasingly has a very stylized, very sexualized version of feminity as its subject should be seen not as an attempt to demean women but as a countereaction to the culture's overemphasis on masculinity and the supposedly masculine virtues of rationality and competitive individuality."
After wrestling with that sentence -- and many sentences like that sentence in that paper -- after explaining to this writer that simple is better, that less is more, than one should not tax a reader so, I begin reading the next paper which opens with the following sentence: "Nowadays I get along with my parents pretty good." I burst out laughing -- but this is tragic. Here is another sentence from that paper: "If I did not follow my dad's orders, like not being too noisy or don't bother him while he is watching TV, than I would get yelled at...."
How can I stand in front of a class containing these two people and give a lecture that does not either bore student one to tears -- or sail right past student two? How can I, coherently, teach these two people to write. And I could, if there were only two -- or ten -- in the class. I have four classes --around-eighty students -- students who are at every level of competence.
And let me add another big problem. This is the second semester of a two semester sequence. Some of the students in my classes were with me for fifteen weeks -- last semester. They know exactly what I'm looking for: tightly organized paragraphs: a clear thesis that is supported by well developed, illustrated, paragraphs.
But I suddenly see that many of my colleagues did not teach such matters. They focused on Comparison & Contrast, Classification, Description -- and treated each essay as a separate, unique, entity. They did not focus on the over-arching structure -- which I believe to be central to any kind of paper.
But that's not my point -- and I am sure there are many things I did not teach -- my point is that I have a point of view -- other teachers have very different points of view. We hand students to each other in the middle of a school year--and each of us realizes that what we expect every student to know at this point--has not been drilled into the students who sit before us. So part of class is reviewing material we taught before. Former students are bored and new students are initially puzzled -- and resentful: Why does every English teacher have a different set of requirements. Why can't these people make up their minds.
Partly because each of them is of several minds on how we should teach and what we should teach. After all, think of the range of students who sit before us.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein