curriculum changes

I wrote this reflective paper for my ed class. Thought it was pretty important for my own philosophy of teaching I'm planning for this semester.


Tutoring for Double Discovery for a semester really got me to think about the purpose of an English education. Double Discovery is an after-school program that caters to low-income, first-generation college bound students. I worked with high schoolers twice a week on various subjects. I will focus my paper on the subject of English, because that is what I’m most interested in. Basically, working with these students posed several challenges I’m still grappling with today.
One instance I remember very clearly was when I helped a girl with reading and explaining The Odyssey. I could tell she was deathly bored of the text, and every other sentence, she would be lost on the mythical allusions. I tried to explain to her what it all meant—Dawn, Poseidon, Hermes…etc but it just made her dislike the text even more. I read out loud to her, thinking it’ll at least get her to follow along instead of just giving up. Later, she just flat-out asked me why she has to read such a boring irrelevant text. At that point, I didn’t know the correct and non-complicated way to answer her, so I said something like it’s valued in our culture as a great text and we should explore why that is.
Anyhow, there wasn’t a way I could make the Odyssey fun in that setting, so we just trudged along. She knew she should read it for homework, so that obligation saw her through. However, I’m left with the question of curriculum selection, how to get students to be enthusiastic, or how to explain to them why a text is important even if it seems as greatly removed from their lives as ancient Greek society and contemporary African-American youth culture.
Another day, I got to select which poems I wanted these two students to read, so we all read Maya Angelou. The poem had metaphors about slavery, rising up, courage…etc and they were really into it. They immediately understood the richness of metaphor and correctly analyzed tone and mood. Most importantly, they were into it! Then, I chose another poem, this time Shakespeare, and their enthusiasm completely flopped. It was an important one too---All the world’s a stage---but they couldn’t get passed the funny language and ancientness of Shakespeare. We stumbled on all the words and didn’t even get to explore the themes, which they might have been into, if it was written another way. So I’m left with the conclusion that students will more easily embrace relevant literature to their lives, or their culture, and that literature should be in a language they can understand (which is usually less florid, arcane, and more straight-forward, concise)
My conclusion may seem obvious/like common sense; people (not just students) tend to read what speaks to them, and that varies by culture, life-stage, environment…etc. However, this is a big problem for deciding what texts to teach, which has further implications on what the ultimate goal of high school education is. On the one hand, teaching students contemporary, teen, culture-specific texts can elicit enthusiasm and thus greater in-depth literary lessons, faster and perhaps better learning, On the other, however, it does not prepare them for the rigors of AP, SATs, college curriculums, which are dominated by canonical texts, old and white, or written in scholarly or many different types of literary language styles. Some may argue that the skills learned when teaching contemporary/teen/culturally-specific texts translates over to other texts, but I definitely think that’s not true in terms of literature. No amount of anything can translate to students knowing how to read Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, Woolf, Austen except reading more of Shakespeare, Dickens Joyce, Woolf, and Austen. However these are the authors that are really tough to get through, boring to most students when first introduced, and without enthusiasm, will be even a harder feat.
A guest speaker at Columbia did Teach for America and now teaches in a predominately African-American high school in the Lower East Side. His students rebelled against all Dead, White, Male literature; only when he tailored his whole year’s curriculum to African-American literature, the students began to be interested. I actually found this example extremely disheartening because teaching all anything furthers the gap between races/class, otherizing, as middle class white kids read their DWM, lower class African American kids are reading their civil rights, slavery, oppression-themed black literature (and what happened to Latino lit, or Asian-American, or global/world lit?). There definitely needs to be a curriculum reform in each camp (of course my examples are extreme, but these are real cases---I came from a school that read literally all DWMs). After reading some of students’ own relevant literatures, curriculum should move on to challenge students to read ‘other’ literatures, not as immediately relevant, but when dived into its depth, show universal human nature and truths nonetheless.
Schools with all DWM lit need to get some contemporary, teen, and multi-cultural texts in. This will help expand their lives to see how others live/have lived in the real world, a world usually outside of their sheltered bubbles, but a world crucial for exposure because exposure is the first path to tolerance and compassion. Schools that are catering most curriculum to ‘ethnic’ teen or contemporary literature need to know that although it’s effective for the short-term, a lack of exposure to the Western canon will limit students academically and culturally in the end. There are many complex reasons why the Canon is the way it is, but no one will deny that it is power and cultural capital. Social justice and activism in its most effective form requires a deep understanding of the status quo, of what is in power and why, and then use that knowledge to rally for change if need be. Ideally (but not for each specific case), a slight majority of texts (maybe 60-70%) should still be canonical (which doesn’t mean they’re not subversive) and the rest should address ethnic, global, teen, and contemporary literatures. As far as interest and how to explain to students why such a system of literature is important, this exact explanation as I’ve given here should be used; students need to be exposed to the battles for power, idea of cultural capital, social justice, and literature’s role in society. This kind of conversation will help them take part in the debate of curriculum by seeing its inner workings rather than be outside of it.