Old Conflicts

“So what do you do?”

“Actually, I teach English.”

(False heartiness) “I guess I better watch how I talk.”

From a listener, with an edge of resentment: “I could never figure out why we always had to look for hidden meanings in English.” ( from Peter Elbow's What is English? (1990) New York, NY: The Modern Language Association of America, p. 111)

Elbow presents this fictional vignette to illustrate the defensiveness on the part of students and teachers regarding the subject of English.  The first and third speakers surmise that the only purposes of English teachers are to be guardians of grammar and mysterious literary interpretations.  This was written twenty years ago but I bet that it still rings true with many English teachers today, not just me.

Essays returned to students bleeding with cryptic annotations such as c.s., awk, frag, shift, and missing or misused punctuation marks clearly illustrate that English teachers are the centurions of language usage.  Similarly, the revelation in literature like that rusty bicycle pump in James Joyce’s “Araby” symbolizing the corruption and deterioration of the Catholic Church in Ireland at the turn of the 20^th Century solidifies the English teacher’s mystical powers over literature.

These less than enjoyable experiences follow students well beyond their school days. The second speaker begins the sentence with a defensive “actually” to counteract the impending disbelief and inevitable backlash normally associated with the revelation of career choice. The fact that teaching English was a deliberate choice rather than the repercussion of an inability to be a journalist or any other profession associated with English may come as a surprise to some people.

Elbow goes on to ask why people feel “downright fear or anger…about their English classes?  After all, most people found math harder than English and Chemistry more boring” (p. 111).  He goes on to answer this question by explaining that grammar and literature are “agents of gentility and good taste” (p. 111) which are then used as “mechanisms for discrimination” (p. 111).  

I bring this up because I think as English teachers we sometimes suffer from these stereotypes that have been around for a very long time.  Of course, we all know teachers that fit the stereotype, and then there are those that try to break out of it.  The point is that many of the problem that we might see in English, or problems that we feel as teachers trying to teach this material, is that these conflicts have been around a very long time.

This week, I will be focusing a bit more on these conflicts.  I was not aware of them until I started researching them but I could feel them when I taught and when I tried to decide on curriculum choices for my students.  I could feel them talking with other teachers in different disciplines and with other teachers at different levels.  Being aware that these conflicts merely existed was enough to help me better understand my own thoughts and ideas about teaching writing.