Unenthused Teachers
Monday, 21st June 2004
I was reading this article on the BBC about a week ago and it kinda seemed important (although obviously not important enough to write about straight away ;)). The Children’s Laureate has said many teachers are failing to enthuse their pupils with a love of reading. The main reason given for this is that the teachers do not love reading, or fail to show any enthusiasm for reading, literature of the material being covered.
I can see straight away how this happens seeing as it happened to me. In second year of secondary school (so, when I was 12) we had an English teacher who didn’t seem to care about teaching English - especially not English Lit. This became particularly apparent when she picked a book that she hadn’t read and didn’t intend to for us to study one term. And my grades plumetted (I still blame her for the fact that English was my worst subject at GCSE - by quite a way)
However there is another level to this, which was certainly employed at my school. For English class, before I hit about 15, one lesson a week was a “reading lesson”. You took in a book, and for that hour, you read it. And then, once a term you had to hand in reviews of the books you had read, and you had to have read a certain number of books. Which killed reading, because it became a chore. As soon as reading became a chore people started coming up with ways to cheat. One girl made up books under her own pen name, someone else would write up chapters of one book as separate books, other people just wrote up books that they had read at some point rather than recently.
I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this. On the one hand there’s the argument that if it’s a chore and not fun then kids will try and find a way out of reading, and on the other hand you have to have some system for checking that kids are reading or they won’t.
However, it’s quite noticeable how much worse English people’s English is than most people who’ve been taught English somewhere where it’s not necessarily the main spoken language (admittedly most of my experience is northern europe and I have no idea if this is exceptional or not, but it’s certainly noticeable) And we’re worse at learning other languages too. Meri can speak 4 languages fairly fluently and bits of a couple of others. I’m fairly sure Mili is fluent in at least 3 languages. And yet I’m exceptional (at my school at any rate) for attempting to learn both French and German at GCSE.
Anyway, I’ll leave you with a couple of quotes
“Two languages in one head? Who could do such a thing”
“Well the Dutch speak 4 different languages and smoke marijuana…..”
Eddie Izzard - Dress to Kill - ~1998
“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”
Texas Governor Ma Ferguson - ~1924
Rich:
I think that you’ve touched on a more general issue: as soon as people realise that they’ll be rewarded according to the value of some simplistic metric then they will “game” the metric. One example from my own education comes to mind: first year undergraduate chemistry practicals.
The metric for synthesis experiments was the yield of the desired reaction product. I would do the experiment, measure my yield, and write it up. Other people followed a different method: do the experiment, look up expected yield during lunch break, falsify data, write up. This sort of thing was rampant in physics practicals too. And, of course, through honesty I (and a few honourable others) did worse than those who massaged the figures. I can see why they’d want to grade the practicals, but unfortunately they chose a method that at least partly measured not how skilled an experimenter was but how dishonest they were.
The situation is even worse than this, of course, because any emphasis on simplistic scoring schemes distorts the education of at least some of the students, even if they aren’t actively dishonest. If important consequences (jobs, research studentships, and so on) flow from those numbers, then people will make an effort to improve those numbers even if the cost is a less deep or broad understanding. So you’d get curious situations like people not putting any effort into understanding spacetime structure in an introductory relativity course because it wouldn’t be on the exam and they could get away with just learning a few equations whose meaning they didn’t understand.
The point of education should be passion, understanding, technical skills, knowledge, originality, but never, ever getting good exam results.
Indeed, the situation is yet more general: some workplaces award promotions or pay rises on the basis of similar easily exploitable and counterproductive metrics. For example, I hate to think of the effects of measuring software engineer productivity in terms of lines of code!
Thursday 24th, June 2004
at 12:13 pm
Tony:
I had an absolutely excellent English teacher at school. He was a small bald man with mad scientist tufts of white hair around the ears and tiny round spectacles. He didn’t seem like, and was far to sprightly to be, an older man though.
When not teaching, he would recount the utter wierdness of acting Shakespeare in his youth.
The passion for reading *oozed* off of him, no matter what the book. He’d happily admit that he’d only finished reading it the week before we started (generally the case in English Curriculum), but still knew the damn thing inside out.
English was my highest scoring subject thanks to that man, and I can still recite the poem that won me a medal.
Friday 25th, June 2004
at 2:46 am