With a nod towards my dad's comment on the previous entry, which can be found here,
I think, for the record, that this marks the first time anyone related to me has posted here, so let's just all pause and appreciate it for a moment.
Because I started writing this as a comment and said "Actually, there's a post in here..." let's just talk about this for a bit.
Starting with Hemingway, the comment relating to whom amuses me greatly, since hey, who else in the family wears flannels? ;) I understood, at the end of the month or so we spent reading Old Man and the Sea, pretty well what Hemingway was trying to say, and how he was trying to say it. My issue with it is that the act of reading it was so insanely boring that it scarcely mattered what he said, I wasn't in the mood to listen. I think the same thing about The Pearl. Steinbeck's a great author, but that story was horrendously bad. It's all very good, as I've said, to write stories about Great And Important Subjects In Life, but great literature should be MORE than that - there should be a deep and compelling plot to go along with it, which neither of them had, IMHO.
By contrast, I'm thinking of, say, Catcher In the Rye, which would have been directly relevant to a bunch of HS kids. I think Gatsby has a lot less universal appeal at the age, but it was fun. I'm sure Ender's Game would get some reaction. I'd love to see something like Starship Troopers or The Forever War taught well. We'll come back to that in a bit.
If I'm picking on Mr. Elliott, I don't mean to be...much. It's just that there a couple of things he had an irrational love for, poetry among them. He has a little speech, along the lines of:
"Stories are like coffee. Take novels, which are like Folgers. You drink them for the caffeine, not the taste. Short stories are like brewing your own coffee to get better, more refined taste. But poetry is like espresso - just the pure essence of coffee."
He tells it better. He should, it's his.
Now, I disagree, as it happens, since I like my longer stories more (also I am a Coke drinker, and hate coffee, just to carry it further). My issue with most poetry is that, much like a lot of literature these days, is that it's trying WAY too hard to be something, when it really isn't. Of course, then sometimes you get Thomas or Kipling.
In any case, I don't place a lot of blame on Mr. Elliott's head, since I thought he was actually one of the better teachers at MHS. With the exception of Mrs. Hall in 7th (that lady sure could teach), and my 207/208 prof at OSU whose name I forget, he was the best of them. The less we say about English/Reading classes in grade school, the better, perhaps.
I hated (and hate), The Old Man and the Sea and The Pearl, but I learned some fairly useful skills from them. I certainly got a lot more from English than I did from Social Studies (which to be sure was what it was - no HS history book is going to teach ME about WWII) or, dare I say, Health (which gave me an abiding hatred of 1980s after school specials).
No, my real issue is that so much of the material is just so bad, badly presented, or both. I haven't the foggiest idea who to blame for those HS lit books, but they were pretty awful. And a few points on that.
1. The books in question were used 1995-1999, and I'm pretty sure all of them dated to something more like 1988 or a bit further back. I believe the latest thing we read in any class dated to 1959 (Alas, Babylon), which was a good 30 years prior to the book's date, and getting closer to 40 by the time I got there. Considering what has come since 1959, that's something of an issue. Salinger would've made that cutoff, but Heinlein and Haldeman would not. All of that literature from the civil rights movement, from Vietnam, and so much else, that was lost to us. At least in the first two years, it was like being forever stuck in the 1940s.
Too, how much of it was so dissimilar to anything I might actually read for myself? Sure, we read the Hobbit, and half of us got Alas, Babylon while the other half got Day of the Triffids, but aside from that, you've got Mark Twain and Shakespeare and Beowulf. And I've got so much more expansive tastes than most, too. Again, this is where we start talking about Heinlein and Haldeman. James Clavell and Alex Haley were probably too large for an HS class (although Roots or the Autobiography of Malcolm X would've been pretty useful), but Tim O'Brien, or Ender's Game. I hesitate to recommend Lord of the Rings because I find them dry, but you know, something.
At least for the first two years. I understand that you can't do much about American Lit, because it is what it is, and for as much as I despised all of it, there's a certain value in learning that body of work. Similarly with the British Lit we got as seniors, only it doesn't really need the help, because when you have Shakespeare, King Arthur in general, and Beowulf, you'll do ok. In fairness to my English texts, I was actually fascinated by my British book, because all the stuff was actually GOOD.
We could make it that way ALL THE TIME, is what I'm saying. It's just that hardly ever happened.
2. Too, touching on both the system and on something Suzanne said here, there's this whole thing set up in academia where literary form is pretty much trapped in the 1940s with a bunch of dead white guys and can't get out. The writing half of OSU was really atrocious about it, in fact (yes, lectures about "thou shalt not writeth genre fiction," I mean you). It's kind of like one of those horror things where you get trapped in a house with zombies, only none of these people would stoop to write like that (well, maybe they WOULD, since Poe did it first).
I suspect, though I don't entirely know because I never got far enough in my English classes to know, that there's a secret initiation ceremony in your junior year where you are forced to burn a bestselling fiction book while swearing on a copy of Moby Dick that you shall enjoy and espouse nothing written after 1960, and anything after 1950 only grudgingly respect. My own classroom experience bears evidence to this, but too, I found my English Praxis II, the test designed to judge your fitness to teach unto the youth of tomorrow, quite telling. Either you had read the Six True Books, or you had NOT read the Six True Books, and you failed the test.
Fortunately, The Great Gatsby (along with, IIRC, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, To Kill A Mockingbird, a collection of poetry I have never heard of, and a novel I have never heard of) was one of them, and I had just read it for fun and because I didn't get it in school, so I did reasonably well.
And it wasn't just "pick one of these books and write an essay on it" (although there was that), it was "In Book That Nobody Has Ever Heard Of, what happened when the protagonist's sister did that one thing with the stuff?"
It strikes me as impossible that a test this important could be this badly written, meaning that it was expected that you had read the books in question. Which I find both irresponsible and indicative of a much larger problem.
3. It may be, that had I become an English teacher, I would have reversed that trend amongst my students. Perhaps not. It is not, after all, just up to me. Those pesky creatures, parents, have their say, as do school boards. Maybe the school, as I suspect was a problem for MHS, just doesn't have the money.
I suspect, though, from having talked to a rather younger breed of English teacher in years since, that we may be escaping this. We shall see.
Teacher Man (not to mention Angela's Ashes and 'Tis) WERE truly amazing books. Could have used them in school. Alas.
Too, Sarah's commentary on all of this would likely be instructive, as someone who seems to have experienced nothing like the wasteland us public school types went through.
I invite, as always, comment.
Posted by Dwip at April 15, 2007 3:10 PM