From the department of confronting what we value...
"High school English" is somewhere between a euphemism and a misnomer when what is really being taught (and subsequently written/written about) is "English Literature," i.e. narrative fiction.
When I came up through the IB gauntlet in the late 1990s (starting with "pre-IB" all the way bac…
From the department of confronting what we value...
"High school English" is somewhere between a euphemism and a misnomer when what is really being taught (and subsequently written/written about) is "English Literature," i.e. narrative fiction.
When I came up through the IB gauntlet in the late 1990s (starting with "pre-IB" all the way back in middle school), I had by far the heaviest workload in "English" class. I had great teachers who "got it" in all the right ways. But it was ALL built around narrative fiction. That's why I absolutly dreaded the "writing" assignments despite being (probably) the most able and willing "writer" in the class. By the time I graduated I had written a hundred short pieces of music on my own time, usually between 10pm and 1am, and I had emptied nearly a whole ream of printer paper writing about narrative fiction. I'll never forget staring at that stack of paper as I began to reorganize my stuff before college. I went numb for a moment. It was actually mildly traumatic. As this comment indicates, I'm still not over it. The day I learned that my stellar IB exam had bailed me out of all college "English" classes was one of the happiest days of my life.
From the time the novel first began to be accepted as a serious art form, Western literary people have refined and collected all manner of lovely rationalizations and platitudes in support of narrative fiction as the ideal lens through which to teach not only "writing" but just about everything else too. Literature is "a lie that tells the truth;" as if the search for documentary evidence is what drives fiction readers. Literature "fires the imagination;" as if musicians, scientists and craftspeople did not have or use their "imaginations." For bookworms literature is a "repository of memory;" whereas for anthropoligists and cognitive scientists memory just keeps becoming less trustworthy the better it is understood.
My high school experience prompted me, as an adult, to start paying closer attention to all of this. I don't understand how or why anyone still takes seriously the old views of narrative fiction's pedagogical role and value. I think we are just beginning to see some real "cultural lag" around this issue, prompted not by the question of "teaching writing" to adolescents but by the rough seas faced by (professional) journalism. The inherent tension between journalism's narrative and documentary capacity is suddenly harder to ignore. But when I talk to novel-readers the old platitudes come fast and loose as ever.
If all of that is too much, there is at least this: some of us are just cognitively, culturally, affinitively incompatible with narrative fiction, but not necessarily with "writing." Some of us are "musical" (others are "theatrical") rather than "literary" not merely in our superficial tastes but in our whole gestalt. And for us, "high school English" was going to suck no matter how "writing" was taught.
From the department of confronting what we value...
"High school English" is somewhere between a euphemism and a misnomer when what is really being taught (and subsequently written/written about) is "English Literature," i.e. narrative fiction.
When I came up through the IB gauntlet in the late 1990s (starting with "pre-IB" all the way back in middle school), I had by far the heaviest workload in "English" class. I had great teachers who "got it" in all the right ways. But it was ALL built around narrative fiction. That's why I absolutly dreaded the "writing" assignments despite being (probably) the most able and willing "writer" in the class. By the time I graduated I had written a hundred short pieces of music on my own time, usually between 10pm and 1am, and I had emptied nearly a whole ream of printer paper writing about narrative fiction. I'll never forget staring at that stack of paper as I began to reorganize my stuff before college. I went numb for a moment. It was actually mildly traumatic. As this comment indicates, I'm still not over it. The day I learned that my stellar IB exam had bailed me out of all college "English" classes was one of the happiest days of my life.
From the time the novel first began to be accepted as a serious art form, Western literary people have refined and collected all manner of lovely rationalizations and platitudes in support of narrative fiction as the ideal lens through which to teach not only "writing" but just about everything else too. Literature is "a lie that tells the truth;" as if the search for documentary evidence is what drives fiction readers. Literature "fires the imagination;" as if musicians, scientists and craftspeople did not have or use their "imaginations." For bookworms literature is a "repository of memory;" whereas for anthropoligists and cognitive scientists memory just keeps becoming less trustworthy the better it is understood.
My high school experience prompted me, as an adult, to start paying closer attention to all of this. I don't understand how or why anyone still takes seriously the old views of narrative fiction's pedagogical role and value. I think we are just beginning to see some real "cultural lag" around this issue, prompted not by the question of "teaching writing" to adolescents but by the rough seas faced by (professional) journalism. The inherent tension between journalism's narrative and documentary capacity is suddenly harder to ignore. But when I talk to novel-readers the old platitudes come fast and loose as ever.
If all of that is too much, there is at least this: some of us are just cognitively, culturally, affinitively incompatible with narrative fiction, but not necessarily with "writing." Some of us are "musical" (others are "theatrical") rather than "literary" not merely in our superficial tastes but in our whole gestalt. And for us, "high school English" was going to suck no matter how "writing" was taught.