[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday waffle...
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 22:41:42 +0900
On 2005/05/31, at 22:01, Steven G. Cameron wrote:
> Ursula Stange wrote:
>
>
>> Sadly, we can no longer take for granted that our students understand
>> the many cultural references (most obviously the Bible and
>> Shakespeare)
>> that generations of past students were expected to have at their
>> fingertips. I had a student once who wrote, in a final exam, a
>> sentence
>> about Noa Zark. (I shudder to think how this story reflects on my
>> teaching, of course.) Perhaps they learn too much of their language
>> through their ears, and too little through their eyes. More
>> proof: the
>> legions who don't differentiate between 'past' and 'passed.'
>>
>
> **An ongoing dinner-topic conversation in our house. Our eldest, now
> completing his junior year in high school, has not studied Shakespeare
> in either of the past two years -- in honors English. In truth, it's
> difficult to ascertain the curriculum objectives from eclectic,
> unfocused reading selections chosen for his English course this
> year...
Having lived through this transition and, thus, of course, having
only a frog in a well's perspective on what was really going on, I
offer the following observations.
When I was in high school (York High School, Yorktown, Virginia,
1958-62), the "standard academic track" required for admission to
college included four years of English, four years of math, four
years of science, four years of social studies including, in
Virginia, junior and senior courses entitled Virginia and American
History and Virginia and American Government, respectively, three
years of one or two years of two foreign languages. When I started
high school, the English component included Shakespeare in every
year. The four years of math were Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry,
and Advanced Algebra and Trigonometry; the post-Sputnik reforms that
would bring calculus into the high school curriculum just missed me.
Science would have been General Science, Biology, Chemistry and
Physics. Thanks to the same reforms, whose intent was to push
Biology, Chemistry and Physics down one grade, making room for a
second year of AP science (the advanced placement version of Biology,
Chemistry or Physics), I wound up skipping biology and graduated with
a year of Physics and two years of Chemistry. On the language front I
did two years of Latin and two years of German. Having also grown up
in a pious Lutheran family, I had survived numerous years of Bible
study and, at ages 11-13, catechism classes.
By the time I wended my way through college and graduate school and
wound up teaching briefly (1972-1976) at Middlebury College in
Vermont, the collapse of this "standard academic track" curriculum
was well-advanced. I recall a colleague who taught Chinese history
and had, for years, drawn parallels between the role of Nagarjuna in
the spread of Buddhism in China and that of St. Augustine in the
spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. He then had realized one
day that virtually none of his students knew anything about St.
Augustine or the Roman Empire. I myself was startled one day while
discussing theories of knowledge with a very bright student
(graduated Phi Beta Kappa, he did). I suggested that knowledge might
be conceived as an asymptote, approaching but never reaching a limit
called Truth. It was then I discovered that his contact with
mathematics had ended with Algebra I. He was clueless when it came
to the notion of limits on which the calculus is constructed. It took
me a while but I finally did learn that I simply could not and should
not make any assumptions about the knowledge that students brought to
the classroom. They might be sophisticated in ways that, as a high
school student, I had never dreamed of but, at the same time,
ignorant of much of what I took for granted. Even so good a college
as Middlebury was no longer in the business of expanding and
deepening a common culture but, instead, being transformed into an
intellectual supermarket where the students picked out what appealed
to them and could graduate utterly clueless when it came to such
topics as the history of Western (or any other) civilization or, for
that matter, US history.
Cheers,
John McCreery
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