[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday waffle...
- From: Ursula Stange <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 14:19:23 -0400
I was in high school in Chicago in the mid-sixties (honors classes (I
took the u out of honours to honour the time and place)) and never
studied Shakespeare. But this seemed a scandal to the other English
teachers at the time, I seem to remember. Mrs. O'Brien's mind was
entirely on grammar and composition and we studied hardly any literature
for four years. Perhaps that's why I like to read. She was the most
senior English teacher and could thus demand to teach the honors
classes. I never knew whether she didn't like literature herself or
whether she understood somehow that bright kids were probably better off
finding it by themselves. She did, I remember, hand out some excellent
reading lists, some of the titles of which are still among my top ten
books. (She'd have cluck-clucked at that last sentence).
Ursula
North Bay
John McCreery wrote:
>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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