This was an unpublished entry that had been lurking with the other drafts.
A couple of years ago, when I was working with autistic children, I learned the versatility of using “head” as part of a compound word. The children were absolute masters. A small selection:
South Carolina would probably be in better hands if governor Mark Sanford handed the reins to another Sanford. They both seem to know about as much about education:
The dispute between Gov. Mark Sanford and state lawmakers over the use of $700 million in economic stimulus money from Washington threatens to become a “constitutional standoff” that can only be resolved in the courts, according to a legal analysis released today by state Attorney General Henry McMaster.
The $700 million is a portion of about $3 billion in cash that various entities in South Carolina, including the state government, are expected to receive under President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program.
Sanford has threatened to reject the money unless it can be used to pay down state debt, but legislative leaders prefer to use the funds as Washington intended, mostly to maintain education spending. (Greenville Times)
Paying down the state debt is a great idea — I’d love to pay down our mortgage debt. However, I wouldn’t sacrifice L’s education to accomplish that, which is exactly what Sanford wants to do.
Sanford says this notion is nonsense, that there would be adequate funding under his budget. Perhaps he’s right. But the worrying thing is that he’s not accepting stimulus money earmarked (I hesitate to use that term, but that’s just what it is) for education. Refuse to accept some other portion of the stimulus money.
Flustered Enraged upon hearing this, I wrote a letter to the governor:
It troubles me that, in this era of waning American international influence, you would consider such drastic cuts in education as would occur if you continue to refuse to use the stimulus money intended for education funding. Our classrooms our crowded; our educational infrastructure is woefully inadequate; our teachers are under-paid — yet you want to force school systems to cut even deeper: up to 480 positions in Greenville County.
The rest of the Western world has surpassed America in the quality of its education: “average” eleventh-grade students study mathematics topics in America that are taught in the fifth grade in Poland, for instance. A six year lag. (How do I know this? I’ve been a substitute teacher in an American mathematics classroom and I lived in Poland for seven years — it’s first-hand knowledge.)
What you’re proposing would only increase that difference.
Please reconsider. The state unemployment rate is significant enough without adding teachers to the fold, and more importantly, our kids can’t afford it.
It seems that South Carolinians are not the only ones concerned, though.
A White House official said Wednesday that only Gov. Mark Sanford can apply for nearly $700 million available in federal stimulus funds, but U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that even if Sanford turns down the money he still plans to seek funding for the state because of the poor condition of South Carolina education.
“To stand on the sideline and say that the status quo is OK there and that the children are well served, it simply defies logic and is not reality,” Duncan told reporters.
Asked if he was developing a plan to send the money to the state in the event Sanford didn’t ask for it, Duncan replied he was, then rattled off several facts about education in the state that bothered him.
Duncan said that only 15 percent of African-American children in the state are proficient at math and 12 percent at reading. He said the state has the nation’s fourth worst graduate rate for freshman.
“Those are heartbreaking results,” he said. “Those are children that if we don’t do something dramatically different for them will never have a chance to compete in today’s economy.” (Greenville Times)
A Greenville Times editorial summed it up succinctly:
Most Republicans in Congress opposed the excessive stimulus bill that greatly expands the reach of the federal government. So did this newspaper in several editorials. But the bill was passed, the fiscally conservative argument did not prevail, and every penny of those hundreds of billions of borrowed money will be spent.
So, as U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham was quoted as saying, the “question is do we use it or lose it?” (Greenville Times)
This leaves us wondering why Sanford is so staunch in his refusal. His name was bantered about as a potential running mate for McCain in 2008; there have been rumors of a planned presidential campaign in 2012. Could this be political posturing? Could this be Sanford’s no-thank-you-to-a-bridge-to-nowhere?
Ten or so years ago, while preparing for the GRE in Poland, I was getting frustrated with the analytical section and how rushed I felt during the practice tests. One evening, I sat down with a cup of coffee and no timing device whatsoever, and I took a practice analytical section — and completed it without a single mistake. It took me almost twice the usually allotted time for the section.
When I took the actual GRE, my analytical results were substantially lower than the perfect score of 800. I attributed this solely to time pressure, and included a note in my grad school applications to that effect: “This test, I feel, was a test not of my analytical ability, but my ability to work under artificial time restraints,” I wrote, or something similar.
Yesterday, while taking ETS’s “Principles of Learning and Teaching, Grades 7-12” Praxis test, I found my mind returning to those long-forgotten themes.
What is the point of a time limit on a professional test? I understand that the administrators don’t want examinees to be there all day, but what is the thinking behind making the time so incredibly short that everyone is frantically working up until the moment time is called?
The PLT test consists of twelve short-answer questions and twenty-four multiple-choice questions. Or, as it’s put on their web site: “12 short-answer questions and 24 multiple-choice question” (my emphasis added). Those twelve “short answer” questions are divided into four scenarios, with each one having a long case history.
Here’s a sample, provided by ETS:
Case History: 7-12
Directions: The case history is followed by two short-answer questions.
Mr. Payton
Scenario
Mr. Payton teaches world history to a class of thirty heterogeneously grouped students ages fourteen to sixteen. He is working with his supervisor, planning for his self-evaluation to be completed in the spring. At the beginning of the third week of school, he begins gathering material that might be helpful for the self-evaluation. He has selected one class and three students from this class to focus on.
Mr. Payton’s first impression of the three students
Jimmy has attended school in the district for ten years. He repeated fifth and seventh grades. Two years older than most of the other students in class and having failed twice, Jimmy is neither dejected nor hostile. He is an outgoing boy who, on the first day of class, offered to help me with “the young kids” in the class. He said, “Don’t worry about me remembering a lot of dates and stuff. I know it’s going to be hard, and I’ll probably flunk again anyway, so don’t spend your time thinking about me.”
Burns is a highly motivated student who comes from a family of world travelers. He has been to Europe and Asia. These experiences have influenced his career choice, international law. He appears quiet and serious. He has done extremely well on written assignments and appears to prefer to work alone or with one or two equally bright, motivated students. He has a childhood friend, one of the slowest students in the class.
Pauline is a withdrawn student whose grades for the previous two years have been mostly C’s and D’s. Although Pauline displays no behavior problems when left alone, she appears not to be popular with the other students. She often stares out the window when she should be working. When I speak to Pauline about completing assignments, she becomes hostile. She has completed few of the assignments so far with any success. When I spoke to her counselor, Pauline yelled at me, “Now I’m in trouble with my counselor too, all because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut!”
Mr. Payton’s initial self-analysis, written for his supervisor
I attend workshops whenever I can and consider myself a creative teacher. I often divide the students into groups for cooperative projects, but they fall apart and are far from “cooperative.” The better-performing students, like Burns, complain about the groups, claiming that small-group work is boring and that they learn more working alone or with students like themselves. I try to stimulate all the students’ interest through class discussions. In these discussions, the high-achieving students seem more interested in impressing me than in listening and responding to what other students have to say. The low-achieving students seem content to be silent. Although I try most of the strategies I learn in workshops, I usually find myself returning to a modified lecture and the textbook as my instructional mainstays.
Background information on lesson to be observed by supervisor
Goals:
- To introduce students to important facts and theories about Catherine the Great
- To link students’ textbook reading to other sources of information
- To give students practice in combining information from written and oral material
- To give students experience in note taking
I assigned a chapter on Catherine the Great in the textbook as homework on Tuesday. Students are to take notes on their reading. I gave Jimmy a book on Catherine the Great with a narrative treatment rather than the factual approach taken by the textbook. I told him the only important date is the date Catherine began her reign. The book has more pictures and somewhat larger print than the textbook.
I made no adaptation for Burns, since he’s doing fine. I offered to create a study guide for Pauline, but she angrily said not to bother. I hope that Wednesday’s lecture will make up for any difficulties she might experience in reading the textbook.
Supervisor’s notes on Wednesday’s lesson
Mr. Payton gives a lecture on Catherine the Great. First he says, “It is important that you take careful notes because I will be including information that is not contained in the chapter you read as homework last night. The test I will give on Friday will include both the lecture and the textbook information.”
He tape records the lecture to supplement Pauline’s notes but does not tell Pauline about the tape until the period is over because he wants her to do the best note taking she can manage. During the lecture, he speaks slowly, watching the class as they take notes. In addition, he walks about the classroom and glances at the students’ notes.
Mr. Payton’s follow-up and reflection
Tomorrow the students will use the class period to study for the test. I will offer Pauline earphones to listen to the tape-recorded lecture. On Friday, we will have a short-answer and essay test covering the week’s work.
Class notes seem incomplete and inaccurate, and I’m not satisfied with this test as an assessment of student performance. Is that a fair measure of all they do?
From this, examinees answer three questions. They’re called “short answer” questions, but they’re really essay questions if one wants to answer the question carefully and thoroughly.
Question One
In his self-analysis, Mr. Payton says that the better-performing students say small-group work is boring and that they learn more working alone or only with students like themselves. Assume that Mr. Payton wants to continue using cooperative learning groups because he believes they have value for all students.
- Describe TWO strategies he could use to address the concerns of the students who have complained.
- Explain how each strategy suggested could provide an opportunity to improve the functioning of cooperative learning groups. Base your response on principles of effective instructional strategies.
Question Two
In the introduction to the lesson to be observed, Mr. Payton briefly mentions the modification he has or has not made for some students. Review his comments about modifications for Jimmy and Burns.
- For each of these two students, describe ONE different way Mr. Payton might have provided a modification to offer a better learning situation for each.
- Explain how each modification could offer a better learning situation. Base your explanation on principles of varied instruction for different kinds of learners.
There are two sample questions provided at ETS’s web site; on the actual test, there are three questions, each one asking for two specific examples of this or that. For each case-history essay section (like the one above, though with one more question), ETS allotted twenty-five minutes.
This might be fine if the case histories didn’t sometimes require multiple readings:
Teaching is a reflective task, and often one’s first response to a situation is not the correct one. It leads me to believe that this test is only about testing how ingrained standard “first responses” are and nothing more. Indeed, any test with a severely restrictive time limit can only be testing how quickly examinees can recall and synthesize information.
One positive emerged from it all: I need to be more aware of how much time I’m giving my own students for tests and exams.
To its credit, South Carolina does not impose a time limit on its main standards-assessing test, the PASS (Palmetto Assessment of State Standard).
“I didn’t do that! I’ll put it on my mother!”
“Well, you see, what happened…”
“Didn’t you see all those others doing it to?”
“But she was talking to me!”
“But he tried to trip me!”
“Well, he knocked my books off the desk.”
“No. No — that is not what I did.”
“What?!”
Sometimes, the excuses pile up. When they all come from one individual, someone who is always in the middle of things but always innocent, we see a life stretching out in front of this him that is so frustrating because he has such a warped perception of everything going on around him. We hope he can begin to look around and start taking some of the responsibility for the negative consequences he faces almost every day, but sometimes it seems the odds are against him.
Currently, three of my classes are finishing up a short unit on persuasive writing. We looked at various types of arguments (argument from authority, reason, emotion, etc.) and, after practicing with a fairly harmless topic (our school’s dress code — everyone, not surprisingly, wrote that the dress code should be abolished), we’re working on something weightier: capital punishment. It’s a cross-curricular assignment: it will also count as a social studies grade.
But the nagging problem with school writing is audience. “Who am I doing this for?” some kids ask, and “Your teacher and yourself,” while a true answer, is not a satisfying one.
How about, “For the world”?
I’ve tried several times to get class-related blogs started. I haven’t always been successful. I’m trying again, though: students.ourenglishclass.net.
The aims are simple:
So if you don’t mind, take a look, give it a mention if you have a blog, visit often, and leave a comment or two.
A teacher workday can disappear faster than a sugar cube in hot water. I had all these plans for today: finalizing grades; re-organizing my room; extensive planning for the related arts class I’ll be teaching this third quarter; listening to Bach’s Mass in D Minor in its entirety. Only one thing got completed, and that was only because I had no other choice in the matter: grades for the first semester are now complete.
Much of this week was geared toward today’s end. It was, in other words, a week of assessment. And as much as I feel an odd sense of accomplishment watching kids take a test–perhaps it’s a perverse sense of accomplishment–I hate what I know is coming: grading. And that dreaded grading leads me to take the easy way out: Scantrons.
I can vaguely justify it with the understanding that all standardized testing requires filling in endless dots. “Kids have got to get used to it,” I hear, and I think, “If they haven’t by now, thanks to NCLB, they never will.”
I walked down the hall with a stack of Scantron sheets, and teachers I passed inevitably made firearm jokes. “Hope it doesn’t sound like a machine gun,” one said. The history teacher put it in perspective: “Storming the beaches of Normandy?”
It is an odd experience, though, listening to one’s test results. Whir whir whir grrr grr grr grr whir whir grr whir grr grr whir whir grr grr grr whir whir whir grr whir grr whir grr grr whir grr grr grr whir grr grr grr grr grr grr grr grr grr grr. “He did badly,” one thinks, hoping for better results with the next Scantron sheet
More than four hundred years separate us from Shakespeare’s time — four centuries’ worth of linguistic change. I was curious what might happen in the course of 24 eighth-graders’ first true encounter with Shakespeare.
We began Romeo and Juliet today, and students acted out the opening quarrel scene. After class, one student came up to me.
“You know how pirates say ‘argh’ and such?” he began, hesitantly.
“Yes,” I replied, wondering where this was leading.
“Well, when Lord Capulet was trying to get Lady Capulet to hand him the sword, was he just, like, saying something pirate-like, or was he degrading her?”
“No,” I answered, smiling. “No, he wasn’t degrading her. He was just being enthusiastic.”
The line in question, of course, is, “What noise is this? Give me my long sword, ho!”
The last two weeks, I’ve been on Christmas break — one of the great advantages of being a teacher. Teaching a new course (English I Honors), I wasn’t planning on having much time to myself as I was planning to, well, plan. Starting Monday, I’ll be leading the class through Romeo and Juliet, and I’ve never taught that particular selection. I did Macbeth when I was student teaching, but “Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” with twelfth graders is a far cry from “What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?” with gifted eighth graders.
I had high hopes for a productive time, especially during the second week, with Christmas behind us. And then L got sick: a moist, lingering cough that kept her out of day care for a week. But one thing you learn having a two year old is that she can imitate anything, including Tata working.
I fancy I can tell a lot about someone from their shopping cart’s contents. Lots of frozen foods or processed packaged foods means little time for and/or interest in cooking. Lots of power tools means new homeowner or generous present. A collection of books on the MLA format means a son or daughter working on a research paper.
Generalizations, certainly, but they’re probably accurate at least occasionally. I look in our cart and I can tell quite a bit. Of course, I have the Cliff Notes to my own life, so there’s not much guess work there.
More revealing, though, can be the conversations in the line. One of the reasons I prefer to Polish in public is the privacy it provides. I certainly wouldn’t want those around me to hear an exchange between L and me like the one I overheard yesterday.
A mother and her two children were piling up frozen foods at the checkout when the oldest daughter — probably around fourteen or fifteen — pulled a copy of Twilight from under a bag of frozen fries and asked, “Do I have to put it back?”
Mother’s response was stunning: “You won’t read it! I’ve never seen you sit and read anything.”
The girl turned the book over in her hands a couple of times, and with a sigh, trudged off to replace the book on the shelf.
The temptations: “Has she ever seen you sit and read anything?” “Wonderful job of encouraging your daughter to read.” The greatest, though, was the most dangerous: as the girl passes me, “Here — I’ll buy it for you.”
Instead, I whispered to L, in Polish for added security, “I’ll buy you all the books you want.”
Shopping cart photo by Dan4th.
I’ve been writing all day. Planning lessons (putting the finishing touches on a unit about the memoir in which we study Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) and preparing materials for my PAS-T notebook. The former I don’t mind; the latter is a hastle.
PAS-T is an acronym for “Pain in the…” — no, rather it’s “Performance Assessment System for Teachers”. It is, in short, a pile of paperwork that I am to provide three different evaluators as they come through my classroom two times each throughout the year for formal observations. My PAS-T notebook is to include things like,
It is difficult to think of this as more than busy work. I mean, how useful can a classroom diagram with comments be to an evaluator who’s sitting in my classroom?
I’m all for accoutability, but this is starting to feel like an extra burden.
Still, I will perservere, and I will get only “Exemplory” ratings because anything else would drive me mad. If I’m to jump through hoops, I want to jump through them while juggling chainsaws and lecturing on Kant — I want to blow people’s minds.
Fortunately, I didn’t spend the whole weekend at a desk; we spent some of it at a table, so to speak: Table Rock State Park, which means more hiking and more waterfalls.
Such a burden.
We often hear schools’ complaints about the lack of this or that resource. I always assumed that was because of lacking something more fundamental: money.
I found out yesterday how wrong that simplistic thinking could be.
My wife brought me a computer from her office some time ago. “It doesn’t have any memory,” she said, “And there’s no operating system installed, but maybe you can use it.”
Can I use it? Of course I can use it. No teacher complains about having too many computers for his students.
The plan was simple: at the beginning of the year, I would take some of the funding I get from the state for supplies, buy a half-gig of memory, load some form of Linux on it, and I’d have a new computer for my room.
In talking to a fellow teacher, though, I learned that it might not be so simple. I went to our school’s IT guy for clarification.
Short answer: sure, I can use it, but no student can touch it.
It seems we have a contract with a particular computer manufacturer that stipulates two things:
Now, it seems to me that if Computer Manufacturer X was really interested in educating students that they wouldn’t really care whether or not we use other computers or use other operating systems. It seems that teachers wouldn’t be punished for taking some initiative to get more materials for students.
But underlying that would be a mistaken understanding of the nature of the capitolistic drive, wouldn’t it?
School is starting up again. I’ve been moved to a new room, which means reorganization. I’m teaching new courses, including English I Honors — a high school class taught in eighth grade. Translation: bright, motivated students. Additionally, I’m coaching the girls’ volleyball team this year. And I’m going through my formal evaluation this year.
In other words, no time. For this, or anything else.
Ideas abound; time doesn’t.
I’m sitting on the back porch with a bit of scotch and a cigar, reflecting on the day-the last day of school. It ended on a positive note, with a few very positive emails from parents and relatively peaceful final classes. It’s fairly amazing how all perceived animosity burns itself out in those final days and students and teachers alike seem more able to see the positive side of school — not to mention each other — than they have for weeks, or even months.
It being my first year teaching in the States, I did a lot of experimenting. I used in-class journals, Moodle, various writing workshops; I tried different forms of classroom management: some experiments were frustratingly unsuccessful, while others were more effective than I’d ever dreamed they’d be.
It was a year of relearning how to be a classroom teacher. It was a year of relearning all the wonderful things from adolescent psych about what thirteen-year-olds can, can’t, will, and won’t do. It was a year of fighting bureaucracy that I didn’t know existed in American schools. It was a year of relearning content-area knowledge, like how to spell “onomatopoeia.”
In trying to determine whether it was a successful year, I’m left wondering what “successful” means. How do I as a teacher measure success? My MAP test scores were higher in all classes in the spring than they were in the fall. Does that constitute success? NCLB says it does. I had a student who was brilliant and brilliantly troubled, and I never managed to make a chink in her armor so that we could string together more than two consecutive learning-filled days. Does that constitute failure? I taught some vocabulary well enough that some students were referring to other students’ disruptive behavior as “superfluous.” Does that constitute success?
This year I realized again what I’d learned years ago in Poland: the immediate, clear successes are few and far between. But there’s no way to know what seeds were planted. Teaching in a small village in Poland afforded me the opportunity to see what seeds I’d planted, because students would often come back years later and tell me what they were using their English for. Some got jobs abroad because of their English; some fell in love with foreigners because of English; several became English teachers. So I simply have to trust that I did accomplish good, that I did teach the 90+ young men and women in my charge for 180 days something, and maybe even something more than English.
“You can’t make me do that! You can’t make me do anything!”
I’ve heard this only a few times, from students who don’t particularly want to do something and resent the fact that I’m trying to “make” them.
“You’re right. I can’t make you do that,” I respond, and then explain what the student’s choices will influence my choices. Sometimes that motivates, sometimes it doesn’t.
Free will is a tricky thing in the middle schooler. It exists — rather, it flames — and then it disappears in a whimper — rather, in flash. Suddenly, I am making students do all sorts of things.
They shout out rude things because I made them: I unjustly accused them, you see.
They lash out at me because I made them: I asked them to do something they didn’t want to do, you see.
One has even threatened me because I made him: I told him to get up and leave his group of friends because of excessive talking.
If only I could figure out a way to make them do what I want them to do…
Luftansa’s European geography game.
My high score (three tries): 27,100. Give it a shot. What’d you get?
At an in-service a couple of weeks ago, we received the little research tidbit that middle-school-aged students have a maximum attention span of some eleven minutes or so. The implication — made very explicit by the presenter — was that our lessons should have activity changes every fifteen minutes or so. You know, in order to keep students engaged and focused.
No mention was made about trying to expand and stretch students’ attention span and ability to stay on task for more than a relative nanosecond. And the notion that we could just say, “Look — today you’re just going to have to focus on this for more than a few minutes” was implicitly ruled out.
Which is good, because in high school, college, and beyond, all you really need is an ability to focus for about fifteen minutes in order to be successful.
A client at the day treatment program I used to work at asked me an odd question one day.
“Is it true that people are going to have computer chips implanted in them at some time?” the boy asked, “Because my foster mom said that that was going to happen.”
“Ah,” I thought, “you just told me an awful lot about your foster mom.”
What I actually said was somewhat more toned down: “Nah, John, that’s not necessarily going to happen, and even if it does, it probably won’t mean what your foster mom seems to think it will mean.”
And immediately I thought that perhaps I’d said more than I should have, for it seems to be a theological/religious statement I made. I did qualify it: “not necessarily” and “probably.” Still, I’m sensitive about discussing anything having to do with religion with students.
When student teaching, I had an interesting exchange with a student about this. He was concerned that I had crossed some line by explaining the Christianization of Britain. I differentiated teaching and proselytizing. “If we’d been discussing the Turkish empire, I would have discussed Islam. If we’d been talking about the partition of India, I would have discussed Hinduism and Islam.”
After all, who am I to make judgments about whether or not the Beast is rising? Who am I to say that chip implants will not necessarily be a sign that the Beast?
I wonder if I didn’t overstep some boundary with that…
I am a sales rep. I have to get my students to buy into what I’m trying to teach them. Psychologists call this motivation; educational professionals from central office call it “activating strategies”. It all amounts to the same thing, though: convince your students that what you’re teaching them is
I don’t really recall any teachers doing that with me. I don’t remember having “activating strategies.” We walked into class and the teacher told us what we were going to be doing that day. I don’t recall the teacher worrying so much about whether she’s “hooking” us. I, for one, paid attention because I knew at some point, there would be some payoff. It was more difficult in some classes than in others, particularly in middle school (or junior high as it was called then), but I had some kind of strange faith that the teachers knew what they were doing, and that I would, eventually, use all this stuff.
Today, though, we talk about hooking students, competing for their attention, differentiating our instruction to keep it fresh and interesting. These are all good and worthy things, but when they start to be the focus of evaluation and training, it starts to be a little much. Add to it standardized testing and NCLB accountability, and you start to get the feeling that students’ failure to learn something is your fault, and your fault alone.
Even not doing homework is your fault. You see, when a student flatly says, “I’m not going to do it,” you have to “find another way to structure it so the student can learn it.” He refuses to do the homework; you have to trick him into learning the information another way.
You didn’t differentiate to account for different learning styles; you didn’t hook your students; you didn’t provide think-pair-share debriefing.
How about, “The students just didn’t do the work”? How about, “The students just didn’t care”? Well, you have to find a way to get them to do the work; you have to find a way to make them care.
I’m not sure a teacher’s job is to motivate, though. We spend all the time motivating and massaging and coaxing, and in the meantime, the Chinese and Polish students who sit in quiet, disciplined rows for hour after hour outperform our students in that Holy Grail of NCLB achievement, standardized testing.
The difference is, to some degree, cultural — a thought that is both soothing and depressing.
In a study entitled “Vanishing Shakespeare,” the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that 55 out of 70 “English departments at the U.S. News & World Report‘s top 25 national universities and top liberal arts colleges, as well as the Big Ten schools and select public universities in New York and California” don’t require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare. Instead, we’re replacing the Bard with Madonna:
Increasingly, colleges and universities envision a major in English not as a body of important writers, genres, and works that all should know, but as a hodgepodge of courses reflecting diverse interests and approaches. See Appendix B.) After redesigning the English major at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, the department’s undergraduate hairman told The Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper that We might not agree on what we think English is, but we could all agree that our curriculum should reflect the makeup of our faculty. Such a philosophy results in course offerings being driven not by the intellectual needs of students, but often by the varied interests and agendas of the faculty. As a consequence, it is possible for students to graduate with a degree in English without thoughtful or extended study of central works and figures who have shaped our literary and cultural heritage.
It’s difficult for me to imagine not studying Shakespeare as an English major. Shortly after I graduated, the professor who taught the Shakespeare course at my small liberal arts college introduced a second Shakespeare course in which students spent a whole semester studying a single play, with the ultimate aim of performing it. It was offered every other year, with a more traditional, 12-play Shakespeare course offered on off years. I wish I’d had the opportunity to take both.
But not to study his work at all? “A degree in English without Shakespeare is like an M.D. without a course in anatomy. It is tantamount to fraud.”