A Few Questions

I have been talking with several teachers about what is fundamentally “wrong” with the curricula and structure of their classes. I’m not as much an activist as an idealist, and I’m trying to get a survey of two things when I engage in these conversations: (1) how my own notions and imaginative formulations are measuring up against others’ opinions got by means of experience; and (2) what problems and discrepancies are currently floating around among the teachers. Most of the teachers in the MTC are very conscious of what they don’t like, and very eager to talk about their own theories and creative solutions. I’ve talked with teachers about all kinds of things. I’ll give a few brief examples, highlighting some questions that fascinated me to give y’all a flavor of the conversations:

• Cultural Literacy. Shakespeare and current rap music may have more in common than is normally assumed. Is it more helpful to introduce students to meter and rhythm by first studying rap music (RAP being originally an acronym for, surprise, rhythm and poetry) or by starting immediately with Shakespearean English, which is difficult enough lexically, let alone in the finer terms of rhythm and meter?
• Inclusion of dialectical and idiomatic language in the English classroom. How helpful is “standard” English if it not presented as somehow contiguous with what students hear and speak day-to-day? Would it be more helpful to teach the “standard” in a similar way as a foreign language, so that students can “translate” between the two? How much creative talent for writing is suppressed by the suppression of dialectical and non-standard English? (I learned “standard” English in my eighth grade Latin class and again in my Attic Greek tutorial at college.)
• Interdisciplinary approaches to mathematics. Mathematics these days has largely lost its status among what are called “the liberal arts,” which is often reserved only for “humanities” classes and especially not the sciences—much to my dismay, because of my fondness for finding the influence of mathematics on literature. Why is the logic and analysis of the English classroom presented without a relationship to those very same terms in, say, Algebra I? (Anyone would be hard-pressed to try to convince me that these two terms are used equivocally in the two different settings.)

These are conversations don’t have a persuasive tone, and so it’s easy to exchange ideas and obtain new questions from the teachers. Something to munch on.

On another note, Ben recently asked me to find someone with whom I disagree and write about that topic. I have found that I hold a vastly different mass of opinions from most of the teachers, some of the Interns, and usually Ben. Most of my disagreement doesn’t come out in conversation; I’m not too timid to share (my tutors at St. John’s have told me about how “strongly” my opinions are sometimes presented to them), but I’m very willing to defer to others’ experience, at least temporarily. Who could I choose? Should it be Ben? Should it be Matt? Should it be the Freakanomics guys? Should it be a hypothetical argument, or something I really hold dear? I have tried to write this part of the post three times now, and have failed to find anything satisfactory to tell you. I will report back tomorrow.