[Ohiogift] Must Read (from the UK)

[Gifted and Talented in Ohio Discussion List]

  [Gabriella Gruder-Poni was published in The Concord Review in 1992, and graduated from Hunter College High School and Yale. She is Italian, and has a Master’s in English from University College London and a M.Phil from Oxford, where she was in Merton College. This is an account of her experience in a teacher training program at Oxford—WHF]

…"It is an attack on the defeated policies that seek to preserve the appearance of success by lowering standards, and a defence of these core values in education: the need to read so as to understand the world in which you live, the right to inherit great literature, the value of raising yourself to equality rather than sinking towards it. There are recognisable figures here: the trendy teachers, the jobsworth functionaries, the bemused students, and the exasperated, disbelieving parents."

“On one occasion a [mentor] teacher held up a handout I had prepared. ‘What’s wrong with this?’ I couldn’t answer. ‘It’s all text!’ she exclaimed.”

r the reader organisation
The blog of the Reader Organisation
The Reader Gets Angry
September 17, 2009

Below you can find the full version of Gabriella Gruder-Poni’s essay, ‘Scenes from a PGCE’ published in The Reader 35.

In the magazine we printed the shorter piece under the tag line ‘The Reader Gets Angry’ partly to draw attention to Gabriella’s important essay, and partly as a warning to the faint of heart. This is indeed a furious argument against the slow forms of stupidity that large organisations are capable of maintaining on principle. It is an attack on the defeated policies that seek to preserve the appearance of success by lowering standards, and a defence of these core values in education: the need to read so as to understand the world in which you live, the right to inherit great literature, the value of raising yourself to equality rather than sinking towards it. There are recognisable figures here: the trendy teachers, the jobsworth functionaries, the bemused students, and the exasperated, disbelieving parents. One character you may not know yet—but you will certainly know her by the end of the piece—is Gabriella Gruder-Poni herself who keeps protesting throughout her training course.



It begins:


Two months into a PGCE in English [at Oxford University], I noticed that the Year 9 students in my school, considered one of the best in the county, had trouble with basic vocabulary: ‘envy’, ‘lament’, ‘fiend’, ‘distinguish’, ‘negative’ and ‘eternal’ were Greek to them; no wonder they found reading frustrating. So I brought from home a stack of vocabulary books that I had used in middle school. With their witty exercises on usage and notes on etymology, these books had awakened in me a love for the English language, and I hoped they would do the same for the students I would soon teach. In the spirit of sharing a good book, I lent one of the volumes in the series to the convenor of my PGCE. A few months later, instead of returning the book to me, Mr.F— summoned me to his office. ‘Why did you lend this book to me?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you would be interested’. How wrong I had been: far from being interested, he was outraged. The book was ‘dreadful’ and ‘frightening’. I was almost too surprised to argue, but I did mention my own positive experiences learning from the books—here he seemed momentarily embarrassed – and using them to teach English composition. Wouldn’t learning new words make the students better readers and writers? Not at all; the books were ‘boring’, ‘dangerous’ and flawed, because they did not include all possible definitions of the words. ‘You have to start somewhere!’ I thought, but didn’t say so. Hoping to placate him, I said, ‘Well, if you don’t want me to use them, I won’t’. ‘Oh, you certainly won’t’. Finally, he exclaimed: ‘They’ll never need these words!’ Thankfully, the interview came to a close soon after, and I left with his words ringing in my ears: ‘They’ll never need those words’, never need words like ‘assail’, ‘assimilate’, ‘mishap’ or ‘ostentatious’. Why not? Didn’t he expect them to read and write? I began to suspect that my students’ woeful ignorance might be a consequence of attitudes like those of Mr. F—. After a demoralising first term, reckoning that I was not going to learn anything, nor was I going to get a chance to help the students, I considered dropping out of the PGCE. But a friend convinced me to think of myself as an undercover reporter, and I decided to stay. ‘They’ll never need those words’ – these words are the reason for this article.

===================


The Reader Gets Angry
Scenes from a PGCE [Post Graduate Certificate in Education at Oxford]

Two months into a PGCE in English, I noticed that the Year 9 students in my school, considered one of the best in the county, had trouble with basic vocabulary: ‘envy’, ‘lament’, ‘fiend’, ‘distinguish’, ‘negative’ and ‘eternal’ were Greek to them; no wonder they found reading frustrating. So I brought from home a stack of vocabulary books that I had used in middle school. With their witty exercises on usage and notes on etymology, these books had awakened in me a love for the English language, and I hoped they would do the same for the students I would soon teach. In the spirit of sharing a good book, I lent one of the volumes in the series to the convenor of my PGCE. A few months later, instead of returning the book to me, Mr. F— summoned me to his office. ‘Why did you lend this book to me?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you
would be interested’. How wrong I had been: far from being interested, he was outraged. The book was ‘dreadful’ and ‘frightening’. I was almost too surprised to argue, but I did mention my own positive experiences learning from the books—here he seemed momentarily embarrassed—and using them to teach English composition. Wouldn’t learning new words make the students better readers and writers? Not at all; the books were ‘boring’, ‘dangerous’ and flawed, because they did not include all possible definitions of the words. ‘You have to start somewhere!’ I thought, but didn’t say so. Hoping to placate him, I said, ‘Well, if you don’t want me to use them, I won’t’. ‘Oh, you certainly won’t’. Finally, he exclaimed: ‘They’ll never need these words!’ Thankfully, the interview came to a close soon after, and I left with his words ringing in my ears: ‘They’ll never need those words’, never need words like ‘assail’, ‘assimilate’, ‘mishap’ or ‘ostentatious’. Why not? Didn’t he expect them to read and write? I began to suspect that my students’ woeful ignorance might be a consequence of attitudes like those of Mr. F---. After a demoralising first term, reckoning that I was not going to learn anything, nor was I going to get a chance to help the students, I considered dropping out of the PGCE. But a friend convinced me to think of myself as an undercover reporter, and I decided to stay. ‘They ’ll never need those words’—these words are the reason for this article.

One of Mr. F---’s objections to learning vocabulary was that it would take up valuable class time: ‘How much time did you spend on this in school?’ ‘About two hours a week, but we were younger and probably in secondary school the students could do most of the work at home.’ I should have realised that this was a pipe dream: in four months of observation, I had witnessed the teacher assigning homework about four times.


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‘So you were planning on spending an hour a week on vocabulary?’ ‘I suppose so.’ ‘That’s too much.’ If one hour a week on vocabulary was too much, what, then, was there time for? Here’s a sample of the lessons I observed or heard of: * In a Year 6 ‘literacy hour’ the students were to read a biography on the website ‘biography.com’. Unfortunately the website, sponsored by a television station, directs the reader to profiles of entertainment celebrities, its speciality. So the students spent half an hour madly clicking around from one celebrity to another. One of the few students who didn’t choose a pop star was a remarkable boy from Sudan who had been a refugee for most of his life.

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He chose Nelson Mandela, whose biography was one page long (to Britney Spears’s three pages). In the second half of the period the students were to give one-minute presentations on what they had learned. Maybe because Liban was shy about speaking in public, maybe because English was his third language, he gave a confused presentation, mentioning, for example, that Mandela had spent decades in prison without explaining why. ‘He was very brave’, he kept repeating. I was sure the teacher would pick up where he left off, and I remember well the homilies my primary school teachers in the U.S. and in Italy gave on exemplary lives–of civil rights workers, antifascists, people who had sheltered Jews in the Second World War. I was always very moved by these stories, and often we students came back the next day with our own stories, having quizzed parents and grandparents. But this teacher gave no such homily on the life of Nelson Mandela. Instead at the end of the period, she stood up and gave her own presentation–on Sean Connery. 

* The teacher wrote the word ‘SPY’ on the whiteboard, and the Year 7 students in groups collected words they associated with the word ‘spy’. At the end of the lesson, the students reported their results to the teacher, who wrote their words on the whiteboard. In the second lesson in this unit, the teacher handed out pictures from magazines, and asked the students to decide, in groups, why the people in the pictures would or would not be good spies. In subsequent lessons, students invented their own spy identities, devised special gadgets, and wrote instructions on how to use their inventions. This six-week ‘spy file’ unit culminated in a costume party, where students took pictures of one another in their spy outfits and made fake identity cards for themselves.

A Year 8 class was broken into pairs; each pair received an envelope containing little pieces of paper with the names of different ‘text types’ written on them. The students were to pick a piece of paper out of the envelope and tell each other the order of the planets following the conventions of that particular ‘text type’. So for an hour the children said things like, ‘Add Mercury to Venus and stir’ (recipe) or ‘Great pass from Earth to Mars!’ (rugby match commentary) or ‘Turn left at Jupiter and go straight until you reach Saturn’ (travel directions).

* A teacher handed out to Year 10 students one sheet with pictures of celebrities and another with statements such as ‘Britney Spears is wearing a red hat’ or ‘Robbie Williams has the nicest smile’. These fifteen year-olds were supposed to label the statements ‘fact’ or ‘opinion’.

* In a science lesson, students were to sit still, sway, and finally run around, representing solid, liquid and gaseous states.

The year before I enrolled in the PGCE there had been a small scandal in the press surrounding a student who text messaged an essay to her teacher. It was agreed that those who criticised the student were old fogies, and Mr. F---encouraged us to come up with ‘creative’ ways to ‘integrate’ mobile phones and computer games into lessons. One student teacher did a presentation on using text messaging in a poetry unit; when the ‘spy file’ teacher was recruited as a ‘literacy expert’ by another school, this student teacher was hired in her place

* In an A level class, students drew illustrated maps of the places described in the book they were reading. In another lesson, the teacher picked objects out of a bag and asked her students to explain their significance in the book; then she covered all the objects with a cloth and asked the students to make a list of as many objects as they could remember. Here, at last, the lessons centred on a work of literature which the students were actually expected to read, although most of class time was devoted to making sure they knew the sequence of events in the novel. Two overriding themes emerge in this sample of characteristic lessons. First, there’s the pursuit of topicality: ‘Students are interested in mobile phones and celebrities; therefore, we’ll give them lessons about mobile phones and celebrities.’ There was no notion that education ought to expand one’s horizons, or that students might even enjoy being introduced to new ideas. The teachers were all fatalists: the students are as they are, and we’re not going to change them. But their fatalism was self-righteous rather than regretful. Time and again I was reprimanded for rocking the boat. Once I prepared a worksheet on paragraph structure for my Year 8 students. The worksheet included a paragraph on Leonardo da Vinci, and the teacher objected that Katherine, the weakest student in an outstanding class, ‘won’t have heard of the 1500s or of Leonardo.’ To me that seemed an excellent reason to introduce Leonardo to Katherine; for the teacher, it was self-evidently a reason not to do so.

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His own handouts for that class concerned hair care and school policy on stationery. Another time I taught a lesson on biblical allusions in The Handmaiden’s Tale to A Level students, and the supervising teacher accused me of showing off. I eventually came to suspect that the real reason for the banishment from the classroom of anything that smacked of culture was the lack of interest not among students but among teachers. For the students, especially the younger ones, regularly showed themselves to be curious about subjects other than gadgets and celebrities, giving the lie to the teachers’ assertions that times past and distant places were ‘inappropriate’ material for lessons. The second theme is an absolute lack of faith in words. Pictures, objects, role-plays: these were considered memorable and compelling. But not words. Methods that didn’t involve words were approvingly called ‘learning by doing’. Clearly, a lecture on knitting or gymnastics would not get one very far; but what does ‘learning by doing’ mean in the study of English, a subject that consists entirely of words? How can one ‘do’ English without reading, writing, and discussing? The assumption that students were beyond the reach of all but the simplest words and sentences informed every lesson. I was often asked, for example, how the students would understand what I was teaching them; at first I would regularly answer, ‘I would explain it, like this... And if they didn’t understand, I would explain it another way, like this...’ But I soon realised that my supervisors were sceptical of any teaching that involved explanations; when they spoke to students they gave instructions, never explanations.

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To use an analogy: in teaching addition one might walk a class through some examples: 2 + 1 = 3, 3 + 3 = 6. Then one might give the students problems to solve on their own: 3 + 1 = 4, 2 + 3 = 5. In the schools I worked in, the problems students were asked to solve were identical to the ones the teachers had given as examples: one would tell the students that 2 + 2 = 4, and then ask the students to solve 2 + 2. How could one gauge if a student had understood a concept or was simply parroting what the teacher had done, I once dared to ask when I was accused, as usual, of expecting too much from my students. I was given no explanation, other than that ‘in a comprehensive school the example must be identical to the application’. This meant that there was no opportunity to practise; a student had just one chance to mimic what the teacher did. In manual labour there’s no great difference between practising and mimicking, and it sometimes struck me that English was being taught as if it were factory work. Curiously, of the four units on writing I observed, three culminated, after many weeks, in one-or two-page instruction ‘manuals’. I couldn’t help thinking that students were being educated only insofar as it would enable them to give and to receive instructions.

To give a concrete example: I was supposed to teach the semicolon to a class of Year 8 students—a very good class, I might add. The semicolon, I said, was used to join two closely related clauses—I had explained what a clause was—for balance or contrast. For example: ‘Pools cool us in summer; fires warm us in winter’. ‘The concert was over; the band went home.’ After discussing the examples and taking their questions I asked them to write sentences with semicolons. By the end of the lesson I was satisfied that they understood how to use the semicolon, but somewhat nervous because my lesson was not identical to the one outlined in the notes the supervising teacher had given me, in which students were asked to write variations on a single example: ‘Some say...; however,...’. As the students packed up I asked
one boy, ‘Do you feel like you understood how to use a semicolon?’ The boy nodded. I must have betrayed some anxiety because he added, ‘Don’t worry, miss! You’re a good teacher!’ The supervising teacher thought otherwise. This article is not a brief of self-defence, but my supervisors’ criticisms of my teaching are worth mentioning because they are so revealing. In this case, I was reproved for having given an explanation, and for not giving a formula for the sentences students were to write. ‘You have to consider why they need the semicolon for this project.’ ‘Surely they’re learning the semicolon not just for this project’, I thought. I was criticised for having implied that the semicolon is like a weak full stop, which, in fact, it is. Mr. B---warned me against exposing secondary school students to ‘abstract ideas’, a
reference, I suppose, to ‘balance and contrast’. What is an abstract idea? Don’t the basics of arithmetic and grammar involve abstractions? I think he had in mind any kind of learning that went beyond mimicking formulae; he might as well have warned me not to expose the students to ideas, full stop. Then he recommended teaching the students one use of the semicolon each year all through secondary school. There are really only two uses of the semicolon, and as I was trying to figure out if he could possibly be serious he said something much more shocking: ‘This is a mechanical way of writing, but it will get them a C at GCSE, which is all these students need to do what they want to do in life’. A C at GCSE? But these were very good students!

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And they were only twelve years old-how did he know what they wanted to do in life?! I was almost too shocked to smile and nod as he tried to impress upon me how dim the students were, how useless to explain ‘ideas’ to them. His remark reminded a South African friend of the founder of apartheid, who notoriously said that blacks didn’t need to learn mathematics. After that lesson I was forbidden to teach that Year 8 class again. Occasionally I heard Mr. B---regaling his colleagues in the staff room with tales of the stupid things his students had said. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Do you take no responsibility for your students’ ignorance?!’ When I think of Mr. B—‘s cynical sermon and the attitudes it represents an image comes to mind of a healthy child being strapped to a wheelchair.
Time and again I was told that even the little I expected of my students was too much, even when the students proved themselves capable or showed interest. When I gave three weak Year 10 students fifteen minutes to find three adjectives to describe the tone of a poem, they came up with two plausible adjectives; but the supervising teacher told me that even that was asking far too much of them. The students are infantilised even by basic aspects of classroom organisation. As a primary school pupil in Italy and the U.S., I took most of my notebooks and textbooks home every day; in the comprehensive schools I worked in, students up to GCSE never took their notebooks home—each teacher was responsible for the notebooks of nearly 200 students. Of course, almost no homework was assigned, but even so, making students responsible for their own notebooks has an important symbolic value; it says, ‘This is yours. Take care of it.’ The justification for keeping notebooks in school is that students might lose them, but that’s like not letting a child learn to walk because he or she might fall. (And somehow notebooks occasionally went missing anyway.)

I mentioned the students' limited vocabulary. They were equally held back by their ignorance of grammar. If I pointed out that a sentence lacked a subject or a verb, they had no idea what I was talking about. Not teaching grammar is like not publishing the laws of a country; if I have to introduce a grammatical concept when a student has made a mistake I seem arbitrary and pedantic. If, on the other hand, I point out a mistake to a student who has some understanding of grammar, the student himself can explain what's wrong and fix it. The mistake, not the student, is in the dock. But grammar is so out of fashion that even the teachers don’t know it. In my nine months in secondary schools, I heard grammar terms mentioned twice. Once, Mr. B---talked about the ‘passive tense’ (not ‘voice’), and on the other occasion Ms C---asked, ‘What is the noun in this sentence?’ when she meant ‘subject’. To be sure, ‘subject’ and ‘noun’ are related categories, as are addition and multiplication, but a teacher should know the difference. When I noticed that students were confusing ‘who’ and ‘whom’ I took advantage of Ms C---’s brief absence from the classroom to teach them the difference; I knew she would disapprove, especially since she had written ‘to who’ in one of her handouts. Some students later asked me, ‘Why haven’t we been taught this?’

There’s one last good reason to study grammar: it’s a way to get used to a specialised vocabulary, to words that don’t obviously correspond to things, in a word, to abstractions—Mr. B---’s bugbear. As such, the study of grammar is good preparation for adult life: in one’s role as citizen, worker, tenant, or patient, one occasionally needs to stand up for one’s rights, and at such times it’s essential not to be intimidated by bureaucratic language. By studying grammar, students learn at a very young age—preferably in primary school—that technical terms are not magic spells. There was a sequel to the run-in on vocabulary that I had with my supervisor. Baffled by his vehemence, I trawled the Internet looking for reviews of the books I had lent him. I found some by students and some by parents. 
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Unwisely, I emailed him excerpts from the reviews. Far from swaying him, the reviews only provoked him further. In a meeting, he again called the books ‘dangerous’ and pointed out that some of the reviews had been written by Christian home-schoolers. So what? (I didn’t say that.) He harangued me for my ‘extraordinary lack of subtlety in thinking about vocabulary acquisition, in spite of your credentials’. (I was occasionally twitted about my academic credentials, even though I never brought them up. My supervisors at the university could scarcely believe that anyone with a postgraduate degree would want to be a teacher—an insult to their profession, I think.) Curiously, Mr. F---recommended that we introduce our students to Polari, a kind of slang spoken by gay men in London up to the 1960s. The examples he gave of Polari were funny and intriguing, but I had to wonder why Polari took precedence over words that the students might come across in books and use in their own writing. Perhaps it was because the book I lent to him demanded to be studied, and study–in the sense of poring over, thinking through, and making a body of knowledge one’s own–is something I never once came across in my whole year as a PGCE student. In conferences with teachers, any plan I put forward to require my students to study was dismissed out of hand, as if on principle. I also suspect my supervisor subscribes to the theory that considers a linguistic standard a pernicious notion, and language a hodge-podge of dialects spoken by different identity groups, none of which ought to be privileged above the others. He has co-authored a paper entitled ‘Silencing Differences? Teaching the literacies of class and sexuality in the U.S. and the UK’. To quote from the abstract: “Relying on a postcolonial interpretive frame, we will examine how academic literacies seek to produce normative identities–aligned with the transparency of self in a self/other relation–that connect all too well with public and corporate narratives about the purposes of schooling. . .Specifically, we argue that movements to standardise literacy education far from providing the equal playing field of the meritocracy they are purported to offer only continue to disenfranchise those already most marginalised from schooling by undercutting students’ critical potential to alter culture rather than conform to it.”

Which is Mr. F---’s real reason for wishing to keep secondary students in ignorance: this perverse belief that illiteracy is something precious that ought to be preserved, or the contempt for students that he betrayed to me? Who knows. He never expressed these views to the assembled PGCE students, but he had no reason to worry: comprehensive schools, so far as I could tell, pose no threat to illiteracy.

* * *
Looking back, it seems to me that I should have realised very early on that I was in a hopeless situation; but I was blinded by optimism. My first officially observed lesson came right at the end of a Year 9 unit on war poetry. For the sake of variety, I chose two excerpts from All Quiet on the Western Front and The Good Soldier Svejk to read and analyse. The students were clearly engaged and interested; even the observer said so. Nonetheless, the texts I had chosen were ‘too hard’. (I don’t know anyone who has read All Quiet on the Western Front as an adult, but never mind.) I was
informed that class discussion was ‘not an acceptable’ format. Why? Not all students were contributing, and since they weren’t taking notes, they wouldn’t retain anything of the discussion. But even those who weren’t participating or taking notes might get something out of a discussion if they were listening, I thought. (‘Listening skills’ are
actually part of the National Curriculum.) My offer to teach note-taking skills—skills I was taught at age nine in an ordinary state primary school in Italy—was not welcomed. The ban on class discussion was a big disappointment for me. Most of my history and literature classes in high school were in discussion format, and I had enrolled in the PGCE in the hope that I would have an opportunity to practise this most essential skill. I had also looked forward to getting to know my students as students, as thinkers.

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How was that going to happen if we weren’t allowed to exchange ideas and interpretations? I suspect the reasons for the ban on class discussion go beyond the question of how many students were participating or taking notes; during the course of the year I came to realise that my supervisors harboured a deep antipathy to debate. After my run-in with Mr. F---on vocabulary, I did my best not to antagonise any of my supervisors, but it was too late: they could tell I was sceptical. In one unpleasant interview Mr. F---said, ‘It’s clear that you’re cooperating, but it’s clear that you still have your own ideas. This must change.’ I admitted to having opinions but said that I was happy to be proved wrong. That wasn’t enough for him. ‘They’re beliefs, not opinions.’ He insisted on the distinction, even though I made no attempt to defend myself. ‘You’re wrong, you’re just wrong.’ All that was missing in that meeting was a bright light shined in my face. My lesson on All Quiet on the Western Front was finally deemed unsatisfactory because I wasn’t thinking enough about ‘the students’ needs’. My supervisor never elaborated, but soon I came to see that many students did indeed have desperate needs: about one third of them could barely read. Before my year in a comprehensive school I hadn’t understood what functional illiteracy was; I’d never imagined that there were so many intermediate stages between not reading and reading.

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But many of my students were mired in a twilight zone between literacy and illiteracy: they knew the letters of the alphabet (if not always their order); they could sound out most monosyllables; and they could understand short, simple sentences consisting of short, simple words. Anything beyond that and they were at sea. This meant that anything that might engage their interest was too difficult, or at least, too difficult to be enjoyable, and so they fell further and further behind. In view of the illiteracy of so many students, one might imagine that a lot of class time would be devoted to remedial reading. Nothing could be further from the truth. Widespread illiteracy was an acknowledged fact in the school, but it was never treated as an urgent problem; at the university education department, student illiteracy was politely ignored, even though it governed (often arbitrarily) every assumption about what was and was not possible.

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The lessons I observed were indeed geared to the weakest students, but not in the sense of teaching them what they needed to know—to read—but rather of keeping them busy, and occasionally of enabling them to pretend they could do what in fact they couldn’t do. For the first time in their lives, the students in Year 10 were expected to write a literary essay. It wasn’t the department’s choice; the directive came from above. The chosen work: Frankenstein. But the book never actually entered the picture. First the students watched a video on Mary Shelley’s life. Scary scenes fro the novel punctuated the breathless narration. Then the students were given synopses of selected chapters; they made PowerPoint presentations on the synopses. After a few more activities designed to familiarise them with the plot of the novel they were deemed ready to write their essays. The teacher then posted the department’s essay outline near the whiteboard, which prescribed not only the topic of each paragraph, but even the content of each paragraph, including examples and quotations to be used. Students could even request fill-in-the-blanks ‘writing frames’. No wonder the teacher saw no connection between class discussion and writing! The students weren’t composing their own essays. And no wonder my suggestion that we look at essay structure and practice writing outlines was dismissed as a waste of time and potential source of confusion. (‘In a comprehensive school, the example must be identical to the application.’) I can’t remember what the topic of the essay was, and it hardly matters: the outline was a hodge-podge of ingredients the department knew the examiners would be pleased to see—not surprising, considering the view of the head of the
department that ‘the traditional nineteenth-century essay–you know, introduction, body, conclusion’ had been consigned to the dustbin of history. So there was a mandatory paragraph on ‘historical context’ that had nothing to do with the first or any subsequent paragraphs. To prepare for this unit I was given two essays from the previous year that had earned the mark of A*. In one, the very first sentence lacked a main verb; most sentences thereafter were ungrammatical tangles. In the other, the ‘historical context’ paragraph mentioned Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as an important influence on Shelley. How was that possible, when Frankenstein was published in 1819 and The Origin of Species in 1859? And then I saw that the notes Ms C---had given me on Frankenstein also mentioned this fictitious connection. The explanation was that Shelley mentions Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, and his experiments in electricity. The teacher had mistaken Erasmus for Charles. I had prepared for this unit with high hopes, feeling lucky that I had been assigned to help teach a unit on a literary work. When I realised that reading and discussing the novel were out of the question, and when I was scolded for mentioning the Romantics and their fascination with the Alps, I lost all hope and resigned myself to taking all my cues from the supervising teacher. Some of the students weren’t as easily discouraged. Carla, one of a handful of students who decided, on their own initiative, actually to read the novel, wrote a long and thoughtful essay in which she mentioned, among other things, Rousseau’s Émile–a piece of the historical context that was actually relevant.

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‘She puts us all to shame’, I thought. The teacher’s reaction, ‘You know Carla–always does more than she has to.’ And yet Carla and dozens of students I met like her poured themselves into their work time after time, in the teeth of little or no encouragement. It was like unrequited love.

* * *
I couldn’t help thinking that every activity was assigned to minimise the vast difference between the good students and the students who were lazy or could barely read. The bar was set so low that no one could fail to get over it—in fact there was a race to the bottom between the laziest students and teachers who could not accept the possibility that some students might fail an assignment, and it might be a good lesson for them too. In fact there was no notion of ‘failure’—teachers had given up that (negative) incentive to work hard. And therein lies the paradox: if one honestly believes that all students can reach the same level, one also has to believe in hard work, for there’s no other way to overcome initial differences in achievement.

But hard work had been thrown out of the window. By the same token, the lack of a sense of urgency about student achievement could be justified if the teachers thought talent was all that mattered—the talented child will do well in any event, and what’s the point of teaching the basics to the talentless—but one thing is certain: the teachers I worked with were indifferent to talent. And when schools don’t do their job the importance of background is magnified: students from illiterate families are much more likely to remain illiterate in a school that expects only the minimum from them, than in a school that placed real demands on its students.

The high number of semi-literate students helps explain the popularity of games and pictures. In the comprehensive schools I worked in, the first time students were actually expected to read a book [fiction—WHF], cover to cover, was in Year 11, although even then special arrangements were made for the semi-literate; the book was Of Mice and Men. Once, chatting with a Year 11 student who was not in any of my classes, I asked how much time they had spent on the seventy-page novella. ‘Four and a half months’. ‘Half a year?!’ I was too astonished to be discreet. ‘I would shoot myself!’ The girl nodded and smiled stoically. I read Of Mice and Men in Year 8, and my class spent a couple of weeks on it. An informal poll among acquaintances revealed that everyone had read the novella between Years 8 and 10, and no one had spent more than a month on it. At A levels again, students spent five months on The Handmaid’s Tale. I can’t begin to imagine how bored and frustrated the literate students must have been.

By May, I was still making mistakes. I was criticised for over-emphasising the dictionary in a Year 8 lesson: ‘Use a dictionary as a last resort. Otherwise, it’s like flipping through a phone book to decide whom to call’. After a Year 9 lesson: ‘Why didn’t you ask what pop star the poet looks like?’ ‘I did, and they said Mick Jagger.’ Needless to say, that line of inquiry led nowhere. (On that occasion at least I was commended for picking a poem that sounded like rock lyrics. I was trying.) After I read one of Grimm’s fairy tales to my Year 7, the observer asked, ‘Why didn’t you prepare them more?’ ‘I always thought fairy tales were accessible–almost by definition. But what should I have done?’ ‘Well, I don’t know what these children’s home lives are like...’Do you have a wicked stepmother? I couldn’t believe what he was recommending. That particular observer prefaced his remarks with, ‘I’m sure you know much more about fairy tales than I do’. I was sure I didn’t. But his remark epitomised the education professional’s insecurity, his resentful conviction that knowledge is irrelevant to teaching.

In May I met with the parents of my Year 7 students in routine parent-teacher conferences. My supervising teacher, Ms E---, sat next to me and occasionally intervened. This was my second placement, so parents often turned to Ms E---,knowing that I had been teaching their children only for a few weeks. I had prepared reading lists for Year 7, and planned to say to almost every parent, ‘Nothing will improve your child’s writing skills more than reading. Here’s a list of books he or she might enjoy’. I did this with the first family, and they seemed appreciative. But after they left, Ms E---said to me, ‘Don’t give that list out to anyone else.’ I was too shocked to dissemble. ‘Why not?’ She couldn’t possibly have objected to the content of the list, which featured titles such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Anne of Green Gables. ‘This is a comprehensive school, and these are working class families. These people don’t go to the library regularly. Don’t give them the list.’ Well, if that’s the case, I’d be happy to give them an excuse to go to the library, I thought. But I knew it was pointless to argue. I did, however, manage to get permission to offer reading suggestions to students, if they approached me individually. Over the next few days a steady trickle of students came up to ask for the list. The parent-teacher conference was a revelation, because I saw that some of these supposedly bovine parents were sceptical about what was going on in school. Turning to Ms E---, they said: ‘Couldn’t you assign more homework? His little brother, who’s seven years old, gets more homework than he does.’ ‘She’s starting to read books like Black Beauty and Tom Sawyer…’ (‘Those are on my list!’ I thought to myself.) ‘..... by Jane Austen, which is the most challenging book she’s read so far.’ ‘... I mean when I was her age we were reading the Iliad. I guess times have changed.’ (This last statement was from the mother of a girl who seemed to be in a constant state of suppressed impatience, and no wonder: when I gave her the list, she told me that the last book she’d read that she liked was Life of Pi.) Four years will pass before these children are asked to read a book cover to cover in school, four delicate years between childhood and adolescence, when a child’s natural, spring-like curiosity must become habitual if it is to survive. It’s like the transition in human history from gathering roots and berries to settled agriculture. I was hopeful for some of my youngest students, especially after hearing their parents. But maybe I shouldn’t have been: years of academic deprivation take their toll; the saddest thing was to see how indolent and incurious many of the older students were. As horses that worked in coal mines for years would go blind for lack of visual stimulation, so young people lose their thirst for knowledge for lack of intellectual sustenance and stimulation; they gradually shut down just when they should be blossoming. Every time I suggested teaching a topic that couldn’t be called hard but that might begin to make up for years of wasted time, I was told it was impossible, because this was a comprehensive school, these students weren’t like me or the people with whom I had gone to school. A school that takes all kinds shouldn’t be able to argue that its students are special, and have to be treated like invalids. Whereas schools in the late nineteenth century were the catalyst for social mobility, the schools in which I worked were devoted to nothing so much as social stasis.

The professionals who supervised me subscribed to two contradictory beliefs: that they had nothing to teach the students, no knowledge to impart; and that the students’ origins were their destiny. I’m convinced of the contrary: I’m sure I have a great deal to teach my students, but I do so in the expectation that one day they will be my intellectual equals. One wonders why people who believe teenagers are too set in their ways to change become secondary school teachers, why people who have no faith in words become English teachers. When I think of my former students, I wish I could be optimistic. But I dealt with professionals from two universities and three schools, and everywhere I encountered the same poisonous combination of classism and anti-intellectualism.

1. Regulations limit English homework to half an hour in the lower years and just over one hour for the older students per week—hardly enough time to complete a meaningful assignment. I don’t know who set these limits, but it’s only fair to point out that it would be a superhuman task to mark regular, substantial homework from 200 students.
2. I should mention that Liban was an exception. I worked in two schools, and briefly came into contact with three others, and all but three or four of the students I met were born in Britain of British parents.
3. When I was nine, my teachers, far from thinking that we pupils had to be kept ignorant of Leonardo, organised a class trip to the Museo Leonardo da Vinci in the town of Vinci. I’ll never forget the carcass of a bat, wings intact and extended, that Leonardo had used to study flight.
4. I was even criticised once for asking, ‘Does anyone have any questions?’ The reason, I understand now, is that such a question comes from, and might lead to, an explanation.
5. Around this time I spoke to an Italian friend who was volunteering as a homework helper with a Catholic organisation that had brought to Italy a number of war orphans from the Congo. One of these orphans was a particularly eager student, so she was placed in one of the best high schools in the city. She was doing well in Italian and Latin, but needed help with Ancient Greek. No one stopped to ask, ‘When will she ever need this?’ She might become a poet, a translator, or a teacher, in Italy or the Congo, or she might not, in which case her study of Greek will have been what it was always meant to be—an excellent mental exercise, and the key to another world.
6. Here are the most memorable reviews: ‘In my school Book 2 is fifth-grade material. We do the exercises for one reason, to learn...I recommend this book because I believe it has really helped me this year. I have thrived as a student and as a person.’ ‘I believe this book has the ability to change a child’s perspective on learning vocabulary words. Not only is Wordly Wise fun, but it’s a great challenge. It’s a helpful tool and I would pass this book on to anyone who needs it. I am 17 years old and to this very day, I still remember the words I learned from Wordly Wise when I was 9 years old.’
7. Class discussion is an important way to foster an intellectual community among students. In an Internet search for kindred spirits, I found a high school class’s electronic bulletin board. One student had posted the following, addressed to a classmate: ‘We’ve been in the same advisory group for several years, but this year I finally got to know you as a student!’
8. There was one student who needed a colour-coded schedule to get her through the day.
9. On one occasion a teacher held up a handout I had prepared. ‘What’s wrong with this?’ I couldn’t answer. ‘It’s all text!’ she exclaimed.
10. To be fair, I should say that students were allowed to borrow a departmental copy of
Frankenstein—probably because it didn’t really matter if a copy or two were lost, since so few students took advantage of the offer.




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“Teach with Examples”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Academic Coaches [2014]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh at tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

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