Educational Concerns
In response to this post which I linked to on a mailing list I’m on, I recieved this reponse from a public high school teacher.
I looked over your reading list and chuckled. I had to read most of these
same things in college. The irony of this is that NOW, my high school kids
have these same selections in our anthology and are expected to handle this
material just as I did in college. I think sometimes we are pushing our
kids too far, too fast. This is a problem with states where testing is the
end all, be all marker for education. Now it’s hard to get my kids to read
at all because they were so burnt out in middle school.
I understand where this teacher is coming from. The class that I took this quarter was marked as a sophmore level college course for a reason. You have to have some understanding of literature and how to interpret older language style into modern day terms just to be able to understand it. Expecting high school juniors and seniors to read this material is just insane.
Standarized testing is not something that I am overly fond of. I think that it has its place and its purpose as a guide for how well students are retaining what they are learning, but they cannot be the end all be all measure of how well they are performing. Testing places a large amount of pressure on students. It pushes them beyond their boundaries and out of their comfort zone. A student that knows the material well in the classroom setting will often hear the word “test”, and everything that you wanted to know about that student to use as an indicator of teacher performance just goes right out the window.
There has to be a better way.
Even more than that I am concerned that high school students are being pushed too hard in some cases, and not enough in others. My local school district is not at the top of my list for being well-thought out in terms of what they teach the children.
June 17, 2005 5:05 pm 
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By Dave Justus, June 20, 2005 @ 10:52 am
I didn’t notice any difference in the reading level between High School or college but I did notice a differnce in the quantity of reading required and the depth of analysis expected.
Although I must say, I found the community college to be less strenous and easier than my highschool was.
I certainly think that High School kids are, and should be, capable of understanding the works you site.
A bigger question for me, and one that relates to the ‘burnt out’ question about reading is if these are what we should be studying. I understand a appreciate a desire to teach the ‘classics’ but I don’t know that we spend enough time getting kids to enjoy reading with contemporary and, frankly, more enjoyable books before we push them into this sort of material.
By Random Gemini, June 21, 2005 @ 12:16 pm
My friend is being asked to teach these things to kids while they are reading these works for the first time. They are being expected to walk away with an in depth understanding of the level that was demanded of her in college.
This is why her comments are so disconcerting to me. They have no framework to base their understanding of these works on. Without that most basic framework, it’s impossible to understand. Especially in terms of poetry, and fully half of the list on the cited link is poetry. How can you ask a high school student why the enjambment at the end of a line in a poem is important, when they don’t even know what enjambment is?
The simple answer is, you can’t. All you can do is try to cram it into their heads as fast as you can while not slowing down the speed at which you pace through the assigned anthology.
Much time is spent at the primary school level, simply encouraging children to read. The local school districts here pass out copies of Harry Potter at the book fairs, along with the Lemony Snickett books and many other contemporary children’s stories. This is a switch from my elementary school access to literature. I was handed Grimm’s Fairy tales and “Ricky Ticky Tembo” and expected to understand them at 8 years old. I think that a fair amount of time is spent simply encouraging children to love reading these days. But, you can’t just get them to like reading and then slap them with a copy of Anais Nin’s “House of Incest” as a high school junior and expect them to get as much out of it as a college sophmore would. It’s a complete shock to the system and is an unfair expectation of high school students, given the level of reading they have been expected to comprehend up to that point.