Re: teachers in trouble in VA

["George N. Schmidt" <Csubstance@AOL.COM>]

In a message dated 9/1/01 10:14:41 AM, Victor.Steinbok@VERIZON.NET writes:

<< Is there as wise English teacher out there who can illuminate my por
>beclouded mind on these two issues?

I am no English teacher (not even native speaker, at that), but
poetry is not restricted to the English language. Every country
teaches poetry, some with a nationalist twist (as poetry is the
easiest genre to subject it to). It is also often used to
discriminate by social class, since not everyone has the same access
to it. >>

September 1, 2001

The kind of illumination you're requesting can't come from anyone who's
actually studied literature and worked with intelligent young people to teach
and learn it. What you're really asking is for our generation to birth a
Swift, Carroll, Orwell, or Twain to do justice to the absurdities of the
Testocracy and its College of Cardinals.

There are lots of tricks to teaching poems, a few to teaching poetry, and
almost none that work regularly when you're pretending to teach poems in tra
nslation. At some point in my teaching, I finally realized what I was
teaching were "poems", since the notion of an entity called "Poetry" --
Wallace Stevens' "supreme fiction, madam..." -- sailed beyond me at about the
third iteration of "The Emperor of Ice Cream" or "The Red Wheelbarrow."

You can teach things that poems often have (rhyme, rhythm, metapor, other
figures of speech -- although to become pedantic about any of them makes the
teacher quickly ridiculous).

You can teach that different languages lend themselves to different rhytmic
and prosodic possibilities. (I learned a great deal about prosody by
listening to "The Iliad" in Greek, a language I do not understand). You can
even teach what some poems (not all, see "Red Wheelbarrow" as an example)
"mean" or "say" or "tell."

You can review the classical myths underlying some of the metaphors and
images of many modern poems. (If you do this too closely, by the way, you'll
go places you might not want to get far in. You might discover, for example,
that Yeats' lovely poem "Among School Children" -- "Oh, body swayed to music,
oh brightening glance, How can we tell the dancer from the dance..." is not
the whole poem -- is really something of a predatory rape fantasy whose
victims seem to be elementary school girls in a Catholic school. This is an
analysis some of my students and I mused about more than a decade ago, before
thinking went completely out of fashion in Chicago's public schools).

To reduce the wonders of our greatest poems to multiple choice questions is
to turn sirloin into bean soup. Bureaucrats and Testocrats can do it, but
don't expect gourmets to sanction it (unless they become well paid mandarins
and simply nod and smile at every idiocy mouthed by the Vallases of
Virginia).

Most of the courses I taught during my time (most of three decades) as an
English teacher were not "English Literature" (which was for our 11th
graders, which somehow I rarely got), but the notion of using Herbert (as
opposed to, say, Donne) as an example of a "Metaphysical Poet" begoggles and
boggles.

Even assuming that one has gone deeply into the Canon of English (i.e., Great
Britain only) poets during high school, there are dozens who would (and
should) have been covered before Herbert. Pick ten from each century
beginning with Shakespeare and then try to rank them to see where Herbert
would be (were he on that list at all).

...which only goes to show, if anyone here needs that showing (other than La
Folle de New Jersey), that teachers, parents and students must have access to
the tests once they have been administered.

Otherwise, a decent discussion of whether Herbert's poetry fits somewhere
between first and 12th grade becomes another hysterial flaming about, you
guessed it...

TEST SECURITY!!!!!!!

As George Cunningham said in regards IRT, this whole thing is getting
theological. At least with IRT scholars and the public can go over some of
the math (as well as the "items").

Now we're on the far end of things...

Let's discuss poetry in the abstract, then test kids on it in the concrete,
then refuse to discuss what we've tested in relation to anything...

Sounds like those famous legends about debating the number of angels who can
dance, sit, get laid or simply fart and burp on the head of that Midieval
pin.

That we're actually doing this with a straight face beguiles and bedevils the
intellect.

Also, intelligent teachers, with a love of their subject, are already heading
screaming for the hills in larger numbers than ever before, just when the
Testocracy notices that nobody dares walk into a classroom any more...

George Schmidt

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the ARN-L list, send command SIGNOFF ARN-L
to LISTSERV@LISTS.CUA.EDU.