Last Class — Despairing Rant Against Test-based Curricula
On the first anniversary of my last day teaching,
July 17, 2014
Intro to Lit is over and my teaching career is over, too. It seems very anti-climactic to me that my 35 years teaching ended not with a bang, but a whimper. 20 grocery store cupcakes and a packet of napkins. On the other hand, a Bang can be a gun or a bomb and that would be worse than sharing cupcakes and sending everyone home after 30 minutes because the movie I’d planned to show (no, not Stand and Deliver) wouldn’t play because I did not have permission to install Silverlight on the college computer. $10 down the drain, but now I can watch Sidney Poitier in Raisin in the Sun any time I want. That has been exactly once in my life… so… I wanted out of there, anyway. That never happened before, but I knew I was done.
The parade of sad ignorance lasted until the end. We read poetry by Langston Hughes (“A Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Harlem”) and once again the basic historical background was lacking for them to get the jist of the poems. If this were high school, I’d figure on teaching that first, but at college? They all know that Martin Luther King was a great man, but I learned yesterday that they do not really know why. They did not know of the riots and the deaths around the Civil Rights Amendment. They did not know that white supporters of Black rights were killed alongside their Black brothers. In their minds it was ALL the Blacks vs. ALL the Whites.They did not know about the burning of Watts or the “pray in” in Selma or the murderous demonstrations on the streets of Harlem where blacks and whites marched and died.
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I wrote a worksheet they would be able to do for extra points. One of the questions asked about the significance of the rivers Hughes mentions in his poem. Several of my students had no idea where these rivers are — the Congo, the Nile, the Euphrates. Thankfully, they were OK with the Mississippi.
The Negro Speaks of Rivers By Langston Hughes
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Another absolutely dispiriting experience except for the fact that some (five) of the students are happy to be learning. Since that’s the whole point of teaching, I left the class with my spirit lifted slightly that at least by 5 pm, the Iraqi girl knew that the Euphrates runs through her native land and it is the cradle of civilization.
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The worksheet also asked them how the poem “Harlem” was prophetic and asked if it was a warning or a call to action. Warning of what? Call to what action? When I brought up the question for oral discussion, my students looked at me as if I’d asked something completely impossible. We’d spent time on the history of blacks in the US from WW I on. The students had SOME context, but I realized that I was wrong in assuming they’d learned about American history of the 50s and 60s in their relentless diversity training.
Harlem by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Because of this poem I’d planned to show them A Raisin in the Sun on the last day. That didn’t happen. It’s just as well…
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Any of you who read this who are public school teachers, I’ll be straight with you. I lay this at the doorstep of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and now Common Core. I know teachers are somewhat forced to teach what and how they do. I know their lives are assessment and evaluation driven. But this is creating a nation of ignorant people who mistake a quick answer from Wikipedia accessed on their cell phone for knowledge.
I don’t know who but teachers themselves can stop this. Who else can? Parents? I think parents are as test and evaluation driven as our school systems and I know that parents are more (irritatingly) involved in their kid’s school life than ever. To what purpose? I, too, have been descended upon by helicopter parents who think interfering with the work of the teacher is OK. It’s not OK. Teachers are already trapped between districts and administrations with certain demands and students who need to learn.
Teaching must be a horrible job, these days, because of these pressures.
Or are our teachers, too, so poorly educated and so ignorant that this is actually the BEST they can do?
I’m seriously asking. I know at the university where I have taught for 15 years, the GPA needed to get into Liberal Studies (teaching) is very low; a C. It’s well known that the lower paying professions do NOT attract the most intelligent students. This has gone on for a while, that teaching has paid poorly. Has it evolved to a situation in which very ignorant people of average or below average intelligence are now teachers? Has the politicization of education exacerbated this? I seriously want to know; are teachers today even intelligent enough to challenge our most intelligent students?
Or is there validity to NCLB BECAUSE our teachers are just not very good?
Are parents interfering because they must? In my soul I cannot believe this, but more and more I’ve been wondering what’s actually been going on. My summer class truly frightened me.
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I have been giving my books to my students over this last week. Today I decided to give the three books I’ve kept from my senior English class in high school to a student who wants to be a high school English teacher. She did not show up for class today, but she could not manage those books, anyway. They are three tragedies by Sophocles, Aristotle’s Poetics, and Edith Hamilton’s Greek Mythology. Those were my high school texts — Advanced Placement English, true but that’s supposed to be college freshman English, a class this girl has passed or she would not be in this summer lit class!
I’ve watched the tide of ignorance engulf my students in the past ten years. I can almost pinpoint a year — sometime in 2009 my students (university level) were no longer able to identify facts in a business problem that involved prices on merchandise. The prices would be facts (just one example). “How do you know that’s a fact, Professor? Isn’t it all subjective?”
“Sure it’s subjective if you can prove to me that when you go into a store you can choose any price you want to pay for a shirt, then the price is subjective. So IS it?”
“Why are you tricking us? We want As!”
That’s been my life for the past 7 or 8 years, worse and worse each year.
As a teacher I believe in the John Dewey idea of meeting a student as his/her point of need. That’s usually been a pretty reasonable point. It also establishes my job description for a class. “Where are they NOW? What do they need to get HERE by the end of the semester?” That has always been my map. Find that the first week or two of class and then bring them along, whatever it takes, to the place they need to be. As NCLB has become more pervasive (longer in a student’s academic life) I have had to take them farther and farther along a road that interests them less and less. Why? Because any test-focused curriculum is BORING — mechanical, rote and mind numbing; I’ve had students say to me, “This is the first time I have liked school.” I’ve had students write, “Thank you for changing me.”
The current educational system has forgotten that a fundamental human joy is learning.
We love it. It is in our biological imperative to learn, discover, try, test, question; it is our nature. Few of my students feel joy — that is something I also have had to teach them — so they can be excited by a challenge, thrilled by a discovery, moved by ideas, touched by beauty. No test-based curriculum can do ANY of that. It seems to me that our current school system is stealing from our young people a vital element of their humanity.
Originally published at marthakennedy.wordpress.com on July 18, 2014.
