The fact that we are developing a nontraditional English Language Arts curriculum does not excuse us from teaching influential periods of literary history such as English Romanticism or vital forms of literary representation such as poetry.
(Although, to be honest, I could justify not teaching English Romanticism.)
What irks me is that I had to make the argument at all, BTW.
by greg—Dec 13, 02:20 PM
You are one stinky, canon-loving, conforming, hairy, stubborn, traditionalist sonofabitch.
And your Hermit Monster ate my comment to your John Edwards post.
by kl—Dec 13, 02:46 PM
Hairy as a monkey’s ass.
Hit the back arrow on Firefox ‘til you see it again. Copy it, then resubmit it anew.
by greg—Dec 13, 02:49 PM
well, what are they trying to plug in where romanticism and/or poetry should go?
and, we all know that we grow out of poetry once teachers stop asking us to write haikus…
by Balthasar Gracián—Dec 13, 02:59 PM
It’s more about poetry than Romanticism. All they do is replace it with more prose—mostly rhetorical studies. They’ve been told by teachers that poetry never gets taught anyway. But rather than figure out how to show teachers how to teach poetry, they’ve abandoned it altogether—except as a sideshow. I think the decision to abandon it is partly temperamental—the person in charge of such things has little confidence with it—and partly organizational in that my workplace is somewhat poetry agnostic.
by greg—Dec 13, 03:18 PM
that’s like how poetry gets treated in my department… no one teaches it (except two of us). or, if it does get taught, it is only as see how excruciating high-brow culture can be. buncha lazy bastards…
by Balthasar Gracián—Dec 13, 03:46 PM
Not even in surveys?
by greg—Dec 14, 08:46 AM
they assign a few poems and a short story… and discuss the short story.
or, one colleague, assigns poetry, discusses only the thematic content (and if the one class I observed is any indication, grossly misreads the text), and this after prefacing the discussion of the poems in the most deprecatory manner. more than one student after taking this professor has had the audacity to tell me that “they aren’t interested in literature… that poetry is high-brow trash that shouldn’t be taught… that much better is culture… but that literary analysis is crap.” which is pretty much a regurgitation of what this colleague has taught them.
by Balthasar Gracián—Dec 14, 09:59 AM
honestly, there are times when I think that conservative/politician dislike of academia is fully vindicated in some of the people I know how little work they put into instruction
by Balthasar Gracián—Dec 14, 10:00 AM
What perplexes me is why, given the fact that we’ve taken on this duty of recommending best practices in education, our specialists have taken teachers’ admissions that they don’t teach poetry as a justification for not teaching the teaching of poetry. Wouldn’t it be a more appropriate response to identify the teaching of poetry as a deficiency in secondary education that needs to be researched and rectified? Might not there be a market for such a resource?
Or, is it just that this has always been the case?
by greg—Dec 14, 12:44 PM