When I was in the second grade, I was put in an advanced reading and writing group. I didn’t leave the “advanced” category until I left high school and entered the level playing field of college. I always wondered what they did in the other language arts classes that could possibly be so different than what we were doing in my A.L.A (Advanced Language Arts) classes. It seemed like we were taught the same thing, we just read different material and I had a heavier work load. To this day, I’m still not really sure that anything was fundamental difference.
I learned (along with everyone else) about nouns, verbs, accordion paragraphs, thesis statements, sentence clauses, five paragraph essays, MLA bibliographies, alliteration, personification…the list goes on and on. It’s funny how when you walk into class and the teacher has MLA citation written on the board for the first time, you have no clue what their talking about. But year after year of MLA being the standard when it comes to formatting a research paper, it becomes second nature. We read Lee, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hesse, Hurston, Angelou. The books were daunting at first, but as soon as the unit was over, it seemed like a small feat to have overcome.
None of the lessons I endured during primary and secondary school have hurt me during my time in college. I also can’t say that there are specific lessons that I truly draw on to help me. It was the stuff that was drilled into my head from early on that I find I rely on the most. Those things that at first I thought I would never use, and now they’re my basic instinct. My teachers made me practice them until they were second nature to me. I’m not saying that practice makes perfect, but it certainly makes reading and writing a little bit easier.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I thought the language you used to talk about your English classes prior to college was interesting. You talk about "overcoming" the small feat of reading classic novels and "the stuff that was drilled into my head." It sounds like reading and writing in school were things you were good at, but that you didn't necessarily enjoy. Yet you want to be an English teacher. How similar do you think your classmates' experiences were to yours? How similar or different do you want them to be for your former students?
It's interesting (probably because I took a different angle than you) that you believe the information was "drilled" into you and that none of it hurt your college experiences. I think it is hard to measure what high school hurt vs. what high school converted us to do without thinking about, simply because the information was drilled into our heads. Consider the process of "drilling" and how the material sticks and why - these are good topics that you could definitely write more about. Drilling helps us to memorize and use later without thinking about it, like you mentioned with MLA, but are there alternatives to drilling, especially for students who perhaps aren't focusing on english?
I can relate to how the novels were dautning and what we were taught in the early childhood English classes. I also felt similarly about the other classes, becuase I was also in advanced classes. I also felt similarly about the "drilling." Has your perception of how different classes can be changed now? How will you deal with these differences in classes if you decide to become a teacher?
Post a Comment