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I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

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Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#81

Post by fluoridation »

thfuran wrote: post #41
lordnacho wrote: post #33

As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. S…

It’s certainly true that an adult would tend to have more additional knowledge and be better able to understand a lot of writing, but if you avoid exposing kids to anything they don’t have total understanding of the context of, you won’t really be able to teach them anything. Discussing books can help provide some of that context they’re missing. It’s probably fine to teach arithmetic before algebraic number theory t…

I'm honestly of the opinion that teaching children arithmetic (as in, having them perform arithmetic algorithms) is not just a complete waste of time, but actually detrimental as it sours them to the idea of anything labeled "mathematics".

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#82

Post by dmurray »

lordnacho wrote: post #33

As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. S…

But fiction is the best way to learn about those past times.

You could read in a history book - in the few sentences your locality's curriculum can spare for Victorian England - that there was a lot of urban poverty in London after the industrial revolution. Or in a geography book, that that area is prone to smog if you build coal-burning factories in it.

But are you really going to get it in the same way as someone who reads and imagines young Oliver Twist asking for "more", or about the smoke and the mud and the fog crawling down over rooftops in Bleak House?

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#83

Post by NoboruWataya »

NobodyNada wrote: post #56
pavel_lishin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning. The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it ou…

I had the same experience reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in high school -- I could follow the story, but it was a slog to get through and I didn't understand what was supposed to be so great about it. Then I saw an actual performance of the play recently, and it all clicked. It was just as understandable as any contemporary film, and easily one of the most fun and entertaining stories I've seen.

I gave up trying to read plays shortly after school. There's no point to me, they are supposed to be performed. I still think it's worth studying some of the more famous ones in school, but any study should absolutely involve actually going to see the play at some point.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#84

Post by DEADMEAT »

Bratmon wrote: post #49

In my understanding of literature, I went through the same arc as the poster, but then I made it to the next realization- "thickness" is just your willingness to give authors credit for things they didn't write, and it can be done just as well for works that are considered "schlock" as it can for the canon of works that are considered "great". You can read "Moby Dick" as a story about a fish, and you can read "50 sha…

Your point of view seems to imply that the author's skill and intent don't matter, which I can't agree with. The reason that a reader's effort gets more out of a great work is because the author put it there, not because it exists as a function of the work in itself.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#86

Post by chaps »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #80
chaps wrote: post #11

There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it. In high school we had to read and annotate this 900p Greek mythology book during our summer break. Our grade reflected how well we annotated it. I didn't do any of it (thanks Ultima Online). The very first in-class assignment we had that year took about an hour and had about a 25% bigger impact on our grade than annotating did.…

What kind of abusive high school gives a 900-page summer assignment?

One that wants to teach Greek mythology but can't because no child left behind forced teachers to teach the standardized tests over all else.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#87

Post by schoen »

PsylentKnight wrote: post #73
LPisGood wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, maybe I was convincing myself that I understood in high school when I’ve in fact it not, but I found that reading it aloud and trying to say the words, as if you were the character (acting, if you will), made it much more understandable.

I mean, even the most famous line in all of Shakespeare, "wherefore art thou Romeo" is frequently misunderstood because many people reasonably assume "wherefore" means something like "where". Yes, you can figure it out from context, but the context is in the same archaic language. Very possible to untangle all that while you're reading it and perhaps it's a good mental exercise. But it can be really tough to keep up…

That speech is expressing an awesome idea: Juliet is saying that she loves Romeo-the-person, but she is terrified of her bad luck in that he happens to have a certain surname ("Montague") which will automatically cause her family to hate him. Which, indeed, they do. It's basically something like "why did I fall in love with such an inconvenient person?", together with "why does my family care so much about this thing that I'm not sure needs to matter?".

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#88

Post by joshstrange »

I also feel like I was let down by my English teachers. Even in high school I would complain that they would suck all the enjoyment out of a reading a book. Every book felt like a chore and I was an avid reader, a get-in-trouble-because-I-stayed-up-too-late-reading kid. I was the "reading at an N+1/N+2/N+3 grade" student, but I hated English/reading classes with a passion.

I've gone back to re-read some of the books I read in school and disliked and I find myself wondering constantly "why didn't the teacher point that out?" or "why didn't they give me the context to understand that?". I feel cheated in a way. And I had good teachers (I think), I'm not sure if I just wasn't in the right mind-space to understand or appreciate it or what.

Oh sure, they'd talk about symbolism and all of that but it always felt a little like BS to me as a kid. Like they were deriving meaning from thin air. I unfortunately cannot remember specific examples or I'd love to go back and re-read the book in question to see if I could understand/see it now. It felt like they never "grounded" the book in the context I needed to "get" the joke or understand the reference/metaphor/etc. I'm sure there were countless clever passages that went right over my head and instead of it being explained I was just supposed to understand that this was a metaphor for XYZ (something I'd not experienced yet, was well before my time, etc). It felt more like I just needed to memorize what they said and parrot it back since I wasn't getting that from what I had read.

I have (and continue to) re-read books from school and find myself amazed to find myself enjoying books that I remembered disliking or merely tolerating. Did I need more life experience? Was I just too focused on "more important" things? I don't know. I look back on most of my education and wish I could re-do it with my current eyes/mindset, I feel like I'd get way more out of it.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#89

Post by hylaride »

PsylentKnight wrote: post #48
pavel_lishin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning. The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it ou…

I have heard that Shakespeare is much easier and more enjoyable for non-English speakers, because they get modern translations and we do not Linguist John McWhorter says that Shakespeare is often an "the Emperor has no clothes" situation. No one wants to admit to themselves or others that they don't understand it, and the people who think they understand it are often misunderstanding a lot of it

It's a tragedy that most English classes don't have field trips. Going to an actual Shakespeare play would probably change many people's minds than having to direct it in book form.

What clicked for me was after being forced to read The Merchant of Venice in grade 9, I suddenly saw all the cultural references ("I want my pound of flesh" or "All that glisters is not gold") in movies, music, etc. I remember watching Strange Brew and somebody mentioned that it's basically Hamlet and you can't unsee it once you realize which movie character is matched to which Shakespeare character.

Over the years I've been to several adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream and it was a ton of fun every single time.

Re: I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

#90

Post by stackghost »

lordnacho wrote: post #33

As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time. You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to. But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it. S…

There is no vampire in all of literature able to suck blood from victims as well as high school English classes are able to suck all the joy from reading.

Here's a seminal work of literature. Instead of taking your time and reading it, write an essay about something you don't give a shit about that's tangentially related to the book.

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