A Rant on the Quality of Teaching

In "The Present State of Freshmen Composition" by Albert R. Kitzhaber, he states on pg. 257: "The deficiencies of high school English courses and textbooks and of the professional preparation of many high school teachers of English have now been made a matter of public concern, and rightly so if any large-scale improvement is to be brought about." Now, to backtrack a bit, I've observed how sometimes a person, namely me, can go through something, and then all that week other somethings that point to that first something happen. This week was one of those weeks. I read this essay the day after I saw Kitzhaber's point made reality.

In my 600 class on Monday, I was angered over a high school English teacher's stand on educating her students. She proudly and defiantly said that she had thrown out the traditional ways of teaching in lieu of using Spongebob Squarepants and Family Guy to teach the fundamental mechanics. I had two thoughts when she took her position: 1) This lady has clearly watched Dead Poet's Society one too many times, and 2) Dear God, please don't let this woman teach my children English when they're in high school. Now don't get me wrong. While I am all for finding new ways to make English interesting to naturally bored teenagers, I felt like she, and teachers like her, are the reason why American kids can't perform as well as other nationalities in academic endeavors. These teachers are the reason why our education system has become a joke to the rest of the world! Our kids can't spell, create a grammatically correct sentence, or form coherent thoughts on paper to save their lives, but by God, they can point out the underlying metaphor in The Simpsons until the cows come home.

When I was going for my Bachelor's in Creative Writing a few years ago, I was thoroughly appalled by many of my fellow students. In 300 and 400 level writing workshops, they turned in final drafts of stories that sorely lacked any technical skill or creative merit. Their stories were also full of countless spelling and grammatical errors. Workshops were torture for me because I had to read their work; I was so distracted by all the problems with the drafts that I couldn't even pay attention to the stories. But if memory serves, those stories were so lackluster and unimaginative my brain hurt just to read them. I wondered how people so thoroughly bad at English could have graduated from high school, let alone be studying English as a major. Well, now I know.

Later on, the offending teacher touted how the more traditional teachers needed to retire because they were stuck in their antiquated ways; meanwhile, she was teaching them "the skills they needed to survive in the real world by teaching them tricks to get through their ACTs or SATs so they could get into college." Then she bragged about how she threw out the required textbook and had the kids trained to pull it out whenever the principal came into the room. I felt like asking her how exactly school admissions boards would be impressed with a kid who cited Spongebob as a major inspiration to his/her schooling. I also felt like shouting at her that she was not teaching them real-world skills like she was boasting, but merely teaching them how to cheat the system. I honestly can't believe how she thought she was a good teacher.

My high school experience was not full of cartoons.

In Senior English, the work was hard and deliberately so. My teacher, Ms. Bierbaum, said she was getting us ready to deal with college, and gave us a syllabus. Then a grueling year of Latin roots, Descartes, and Shakespeare followed. We studied the great Renaissance artists like Michelangelo, DaVinci, and Bernini and did presentations on their work. We didn't have PowerPoint back then, but it was fun using the overhead projector to show off La Pieta and David. I loved Edgar Allan Poe, only liked Ernest Hemingway, and absolutely hated The Grapes of Wrath. We studied Truth with a capital T and read Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave". Let's not forget how we also read and discussed the psychology of "Oedipus" and "Electra". If studying the classics and philosophy weren't enough, we also learned about different religions of the world - Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism - and how their belief systems benefited humanity. It was a very challenging year, to be sure, but our teacher somehow found ways to make it entertaining at the same time she made it enlightening. By the time I graduated, I was a much more well-rounded person than when I began 12th grade. Ms. Bierbaum was energetic and passionate and just this side of crazy, and a damn fine teacher. When I become a teacher, that's what I'd aspire to be.

I know not all teachers are created equal. This moronic woman in my 600 class is not indicative of all teachers in the United States. When Dave told our class how he had his students on their desks to act out the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, I thought that was brilliant. I'm of the notion that Shakespeare is better watched than read. But it proves my point that you can still teach the classics and make it fun too. And he didn't have to throw out the whole curriculum to do it either. It just frightened me that she did.