/lit/ - Literature

>>15748055
why would it not be?

>>15748055
All school teachers, at least in the United States, never left their school days behind.

>>15748055
I'm actually about to have a fucking fit lads

Being an English teacher isn't all about teaching refined lit.

>>15748055
yet another obvious troll lapped up by the mental invalids at reddit

>>15748055
>(love how they look on my shelves tho lol)
I can't believe that people like this actually teach English. You can tell just by how they talk about literature that they're more concerned with vanity and easy entertainment than they are anything else. Guess it makes sense; immature person has remarkably shitty taste and can't go further than YA.

>>15748130
One person I trained with bragged about how she never read a book on her literature degree, and just used SparkNotes for everything. Education won't improve until we have less women in it.

>>15748141
>less women.
>unaware of the less/fewer distinction
Men sure are paragons of literary virtue, it must somehow be the fault of women/jews/blacks that you're retarded.

>>15748155
>to a smaller extent; not so much.
Ah yes, the semantic retard that thinks he's clever by parroting old phrases.

And, ironically, if I were poorly educated at the hands of women, then yes, it would have been their fault that I was educated to a lesser standard. Funny how that works, isn't it?

>>15748167
Except not everyone seems to suffer from this system as badly. In fact the percentage high-IQ successes doesn't seem to have decreased much at all. Makes you wonder whether your retardation is truly the fault of another.

>>15748055
I can't imagine finding Shakespeare difficult or dull, nor can I imagine why someone who finds him difficult or dull would go on to TEACH ENGLISH.

>>15748194
>In fact the percentage high-IQ successes doesn't seem to have decreased much at all.
I'll take private education for 500 Alex.

You must be a woman. Nobody would be this incessantly stupid about defending a woman cheating a literature degree to become an English teacher unless they were a woman too, and saw this as an attack on their person. (It is, women are spoiled and lazy.)

>>15748205
>There are no women on the internet, except for when someone disagrees with me.
For what it's worth, I am a man and I'm not defending your random coworker. I don't give a fuck about her to be honest. I have more than one masters degree and have seen a pretty equal share of men and women "cheat" their way to degrees in the way you describe. I take issue with the fact people with similar ideas to yours tend to fail to take responsibility for their lot in life.

>>15748220
>I have more than one masters degree and have seen a pretty equal share of men and women "cheat" their way to degrees in the way you describe
Haha yeah sure thing kiddo, and I hold a PhD in plowing your mother.

Women have done immense damage to the education sector as a whole. It's flooded with useless bureaucracy, nebulous thinking, and is propped up by a heavily female, and also incredibly weak, academic field.

Yes, it's okay, the same way being autistic or retarded "it's okay".

>>15748232
You can choose not to believe me, I don't really care. I just don't recognize your assessment of the current academic field. I work in a specialized mental health facility and most of my direct coworkers have a masters degree or beyond. Most are also women. I don't run into any of the problems you describe there. I certainly accept that my anecdote is not better than your evidence. However, since you've provided no evidence, my anecdote will have to suffice. I hope you find nuance in your thinking one day.

didn't we just have this thread

These are the type of women who become jealous of high performing male students, and torture me in my sleep at night. These women are directly responsible for decades of mental abuse and trauma inflicted unto schoolchildren. She will cause millions of dollars of financial damage across many, many unwitting pupil's lives and would be held directly responsible for it in a world that cared about all people rather than just women.

>>15748270
So, you're comparing your experiences of working with women, with master's degrees, in a mental health facility, to the ones that work in education? Mmhmm, yeah I think you're just the kind of retard that prances around and calls everyone dumb for the sake of flaunting something - in this case, having multiple master's degrees, of which I'm skeptical. Go and read some pedagogical studies some day, you'll realise it's little more than armchair philosophy for dunces.

>>15748055
America everyone!

>>15748304
I'm comparing them because these are highly educated people. We all went through the system you insist can only churn out intellectually damaged people. I am surrounded by the end-result of this system and do not see what I would expect, given your hypothesis.

>Go and read some pedagogical studies some day.
I have and never said they were brilliant. Pedagogy as a science is in its infancy. I fail to see how that proves that is a regression from "yell at children and cane them if they behave in way that don't fit the mold".

>>15748055
This is an obvious troll.
It is literally impossible to go through an English degree and not even going through Shakespeare.
If this is somehow real I can only hope someone fires that retard before he can give too many kids such a formative deficit.

>>15748368
>Pedagogy as a science is in its infancy.
Holy shit you're retarded lmao

>>15748378
I can't tell whether you think pedagogy is already a science, or can never be one. I can imagine either, but you've given me very little to work with.

>>15748371
>he

>>15748400
Honestly now that I look at it a second time this screams liberal woman.

>>15748397
It isn't remotely close to being a science. It is still entirely supported by armchair philosophy. Pedagogy is taught in such nebulous terms that it's worthless as an academic subject; the tacit knowledge vastly outweighs the 'academic' knowledge. Interestingly, every study done on degree subject against IQ has found education to be one of the lowest, and it fucking shows.

Oh dear. Go and work in the education sector at some point. It's full of worthless women, half of whom don't even seem to like kids.

Remember, these communist wastrels are teaching YOUR children.

>>15748435
>It isn't remotely close to being a science
>implying you're even capable of giving a definition of the term science
lol

>>15748454
It literally provides no data, nothing falsifiable, and what 'data' they do attempt to provide is often skewed or requires so many factors to come to a conclusion that it's utterly worthless.

Teaching, and pedagogy, are vocational. It's about doing. It's about learning while you do. The academic side is fucking worthless. You seem to have a lot of stock in this, are you one of the pseuds that mastered in education or something?

>>15748435
>It isn't remotely close to being a science. It is still entirely supported by armchair philosophy.
This is what I meant with infancy. I don't know how many infants you've interacted with, but they're not even close to adults in my experience. I see the failings of pedagogy as a fledgling field of investigation and agree with you that we shouldn't be implementing large scale educational systems based on it's preliminary findings. As far as I know, this is still the case. Schools are not much different than they were some half a century ago. I'd say critical thought is no worse now than it has ever been among the masses.

>Go and work in the education sector at some point.
No thank you, it's filled with kids.

>>15748460
I only just came into the conversation with my lol comment my man, and all I take issue with is the way my inner monologue read out science in the most nasally-autistic way imaginable, as it always does whenever science is mentioned in the manner in which you mention it.
>It literally provides no data
But it kind of does.
>nothing falsifiable
Neither does paleontology, is that not a science? Fuck off with the popperian idiocy, you've fucked your mind already at the outset if you believe every science must conform to the aims and methodology of physics. Embrace wissenschaft, reject science.
>and what 'data' they do attempt to provide is often skewed
So there is data.
>or requires so many factors to come to a conclusion that it's utterly worthless.
Welcome to the difficult sciences my man, hope you enjoy your stay.
>Teaching, and pedagogy, are vocational. It's about doing. It's about learning while you do.
Now this I mostly agree with.

>>15748483
>, you've fucked your mind already at the outset if you believe every science must conform to the aims and methodology of physics.
It does though. The only reason 'science' even has any prestige is the success of fields like physics.

You are in fact entirely correct that paleontology is not science and is largely a joke. You can make some reasonable speculations based off the evidence in the field, but that's it.

>>15748220
Education is getting less and less effective and creating more and more illiterate retards, and more and more women are making a career in education. Put two and two together, fucking faggot

>>15748483
>>15748470
Data is inverted commas. I thought this board was for people that could read? It's non-data, and for some reason, academia is fucking obsessed with this worthless non-data. What's that? We gave out more detentions this year than previously? It must mean *something*, right? And that *something* must be directly related to school, right?

That's the thing, nothing they do can holistically capture the experience of a student, and translate it into anything comparable, that means anything worthwhile.

It's not about wanting the cane back, because frankly, anyone who's ever existed might have an inkling that people don't like being physically hurt. But as an academic field, pedagogy is fucking useless, and has about the same credibility as gender studies.

It's not about whether 'kids are smarter', but about the quality of the teachers, and if the job is a pit of misery mired by bureaucracy, then it will drive people away. And yes, every school I've been in, has had some old fucking cunt with something to prove, that will reform everything, implement dozens of new forms, and generate a shit load of extra work for everyone involved. Every, single, time.

Yeah, why challenge yourself and learn what all the buzz is about.

This whole thing about "it's just not my thing" is so stupid. Your brain is so full of cobwebs from not actually using it

>>15748513
>Education is getting less and less effective
[citation needed]

>Illiteracy is increasing
[citation needed]

>>15748490
>It does though. The only reason 'science' even has any prestige is the success of fields like physics.
Prestige is the gayest of all metrics, and I have no idea why you would ever put that cock in your mouth. I've no idea what success is supposed to mean.
>You are in fact entirely correct that paleontology is not science and is largely a joke.
Nope, clearly wrong, and a very, very dumb hill to die on.
>You can make some reasonable speculations based off the evidence in the field, but that's it.
What is speculation even supposed to mean? Prediction? Must be since you denied the value of classifcatory sciences.

>>15748519
>frankly, anyone who's ever existed might have an inkling that people don't like being physically hurt.
And yet many people who have ever existed have fought tooth and nail to keep the caning in schools? So when you agree with the data and its implications, it's just common sense and didn't need the data to begin with, even though the data was used to implement that very change to begin with.

>>15748538
In the UK it was law that banned use of corporal punishment, nothing to do with pedagogy.

>>15748562
>And the law was passed down by God himself, nothing data-driven had any relation to it.

>>15748565
>nothing data-driven
It wasn't though. It was entirely humanitarian. Because you know, people with any sense of having existed, could tell you being hit sucks.

>>15748513
>>15748397
>>15748460
>>15748397

I think that guy seems like an asshole and is obviously at least acting up his woman hating thing on this board, but I agree in the sense that the science of learning is worthless, and that pedagogy is not a science.

There were great teachers long before there was science, in fact, the archetypes for teachers to whom we aspire today. These people taught by having relationships with their students, through what was nothing less or more than full human relation and interaction.

The fact is that the science of teaching looks to accomplish learning in the mode of industry, even at the most tender Montessori schools there are too many children for any of them to become great thinkers because of a teacher's intervention. Though, those schools are a huge improvement on the factories we call public schools.

Maybe science can one day improve on human empathy, humor, and wit, in creating relationships which lead to personal and intellectual growth. That day is a long way off. If you can learn something in any of our public schools you probably could have learned it alone with a book.

>>15748055
Imagine not being taught to translate the Illiad into refined English verse as a 12 y/o like in the 1800s.

>>15748537
the only thing separating science from speculation is experimental verification. The only thing.

/lit/ inhabitants are well-read but not exactly successful. So maybe it's true that you shouldn't read classics.

>>15748055
>(love how the look on my shelves tho lol)

>>15748460

The idea that this has any scientific merit whatsoever is purely neo-Marxism.

>>15748578
>These people taught by having relationships with their students
I think this is a meme. When I went to school I didn't need a friend, I needed and authority figure who would get to the point. My parents generation didn't bond with their teachers and they had larger class sizes than I did. They also performed better than we did because they had much higher standards.

>>15748055
jesus fucking christ those poor kids

>>15748055
>/u/thesefuckfaces
>6648 rebbit points
>posted on /lit/ as well
>50 replies already
I'm the only non-retard person on the internet

>>15748055
>I like the way they look on my shelf though

>>15748055
>It's okay to read YA books
Yes.
>and to be an English teacher who can't get through Shakespeare
No.

>>15748055
>Reading is a hobby, that means it's supposed to be fun!
You think I read for fun?

>>15749057
kek
this is what American universities produce to educate the next generation

>>15749067
I don't see what I said that was objectionable. English teachers should be able to read through Shakespeare of all things.

Shakespeare is a part of even high school English classes though. Why would I want to be taught by someone (or have kids be taught by someone) that doesn't like even the bare minimum of an English education (or somehow hasn't even read them themselves)? English teachers are also supposed to encourage children to read, not tell them that it's fine to read kid's books well into adulthood. If this is really true then I read more "adult books" in middle school than this teacher has read, which is disturbing.

>>15749087
I was agreeing with you anon. I should've been more specific. It's sad and laughable that someone with a university education in the liberal arts can't read Shakespeare.

>>15748055
So plebbit is the polar opposite of /lit/, where everyone reads nothing but Hegel and Deleuze and ever reading once for fun is the sign of irredeemable tardiness?

do native English speakers struggle with Shakespeare?

>>15749139
Are you retarded? No one is saying reading for fun is bad. You can read more advanced literature and still enjoy it. The problem stems from the fact that an English teacher, who is an adult, is purporting that there's nothing wrong with an adult reading YA.

>>15749152
I don't think reading YA as an adult is necessarily a problem, but being a college-educated adult, specifically one who should be able to teach English classes, that can't read Shakespeare is an indescribably huge issue.

>>15749139
>Deleuze
No one reads that hack, pleb

>>15749139
Although the sentiment seems snooty and elitist I think it is pretty correct. People who haven't at least studied the gist of the canon and read some works from it have no idea where their ideas and beliefs come from, they are freely manipulated by whatever ideology merchant befalls them and then they teach your children in public school. Understanding the intellectual history of the society you persist in should be a bare minimum standard of education but obviously there is no incentive for shakers and movers to encourage such a thing.

>>15749150
The further back you go the harder it is for a modern English speaker to read older English texts, like Shakespeare, at the same pace they'd read a book from today. It's pretty common for kids in high school to complain that they can't understand Shakespeare. But there's no reason for an English teacher to have those same problems and they (along with whatever notes are in the version they're reading) are supposed to help the kids get a grip with the English that Shakespeare uses. Otherwise you end up with people that read pic related.

>>15748586
>Linnaeus wasn't doing science
Wew.

>>15748422
i can just picture the ugly scarf and pyramid shaped body

>>15749057
inclusivity is fine until it becomes exclusionary to the original components

>>15749063
>reading as a hobby should be fun
yea ok
>im an english teacher
well then its not a fucking hobby is it

>>15749192
Try to define science in a way other than the convention of independent verification of experiments. You won't be able to do it. That is literally the entire content of the method. This method is enormously powerful and has achieved incredible things, so other people try to call what they do science, to associate their speculation with its power.

>The statement that YA and children's books aren't real books implies that their target audiences aren't real people. So I agree 100%.

>>15749243
Did he say something like this during the cultural revolution or what?

>>15749226
>formal science isn't science
>classificatory science isn't science
>most of theoretical physics isn't science
>optimizing the effectivity of dildo manufacture is science
Wew, wew, wew and wew lad.

I’m an English teacher. There’s a place for reading YA lit and finding stuff to help bridge the gap for kids into some of the classics. To not be able to make it through Shakespeare though... how do you do your job? We literally teach kids how to persist and read through texts that might be challenging for them and give them strategies to help. That’s a big part of the job, if you shy away from anything remotely ‘complex’ then... you’re not doing your job. You can’t teach something you don’t know how to do yourself.

>>15749276
You can sperg all you like but the fact will always remain that the only reason anybody gives a shit about science is the practical applications of the results reached through experiments.

>I used to read almost only YA books well into adulthood. It changed when I met someone I really liked who showed me the pleasure of adult books, and then when they disappeared from my life, I could no longer bear the lack of despair in YA books.

>>15749184
>It's pretty common for kids in high school to complain that they can't understand Shakespeare.
Those kids are retarded. My parents raised me on the King James Bible and I had no problem understanding Shakespeare.

>>15749184
>It's pretty common for kids in high school to complain that they can't understand Shakespeare.
I taught undergrad composition (ENGL101/102) and one of my colleagues had his students read a Flannery O'Connor story. Several of the students referred to her writing as "Old English" and said they couldn't read something so ancient. I don't know if he was exaggerating, because I taught "Good Country People" one semester and my students (non-English majors) actually really enjoyed it. It's hard to generalize about college students (esp. non-English majors), but many believe that things before 1990 are simply unreadable. But if you pressure them to do it, they'll realize that they can understand & enjoy the texts.

>>15749420
As an addendum, I also was a T.A. for an Brit Lit survey spanning from Beowulf to 1660, and the prof had them read Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" and "The Wife of Bath's Prologue & Tale" in the original Middle English (but was edited with modern spelling and was heavily glossed). While I'm sure about half the class just did sparknotes, I knew that at least a third of the class put the time in to reading both texts in the Middle English. There's no excuse for someone with an English degree to complain about Shakespeare, not to mention Virginia Woolf.

I even had a student who wanted an English degree to WRITE contemporary YA fiction stories, and she actively came to my office hours to ask questions about the Beowulf and Chaucer readings because she really couldn't understand them. So that gives me some hope; at least there are some YA readers/writers who are attempting to understand the roots of the linguistic tradition they're working in.

>>15749463
I just read Gulliver's Travels recently, which was 1720s, and outside of words here and there that aren't used anymore (which had footnotes) it was easily readable, though sometimes the structure of sentences could be annoying. I'd be interested to know what the person complaining about 90s books is complaining about though. There shouldn't be any difference in language between something written in 1997 and something written in 2017. It's probably more just a stigma from someone that has never bothered reading anything older than what was being released when they were in school (which is an issue in most media really).

>>15749463
Yeah I read Beowulf and some of the Canterbury Tales in high school too but I don't remember if we read them in middle English or an updated version. There's bound to be some students that are legitimately interested in reading challenging stuff but if the teacher doesn't have any passion for that it's unlikely that students that may have interest even find their interest to begin with. I wonder how much control over what is taught is up to the teacher though. It would still suck to have a teacher that hates Shakespeare but if teaching Shakespeare is still required it's somewhat less of an issue.

>>15749540
>but I don't remember if we read them in middle English or an updated version
I can guarantee you read translations of both. I was surprised the prof had them read Chaucer in ME, because I know for a fact that most graduate students in English can't read ME (which is a recent development; reading Chaucer in ME used to be assumed in graduate studies). Beowulf is in OE which is essentially an entirely different language than what we speak, since it's before the Norman invasion.

>>15748120
yepp look @ his username

>>15749593
Yeah I figured. We might have had a version that had both and so you could see how different they were. I liked the English classes I took a lot though. The one book we read that I absolutely hated from them though was Robinson Crusoe. Education as a whole these days seems to be lacking though. There's a bunch of issues with new math curriculums too. Even at my school though which was 10 years ago our high school graduation test only required a 40% to pass. Even if the person in OP's image isn't actually a teacher it's still believable, which is sad.

>>15749628
40% could be a good bar, it really depends on how difficult the questions are and how forgiving the grading is.

>>15749607
>yepp
>look @

Post your feet then go to hell, roastie.

>>15748055
>YES!

i agree with her, virginia woolfe and shakespeare is tough to go through but maybe its because im ESL

>>15750371
don't worry anon. the majority of native English speakers can't understand literary language.

>>15750371
That's perfectly fine if you're a casual reader (though Shakespeare is part of almost every English curriculum everywhere in the US) but a teacher of English should enjoy reading and should be able to read more in depth books. You shouldn't be an English teacher if all you want to read is YA fiction.

>>15748055
>reddit screencap
[] goes in all fields. fill in the blank

>>15750520
>>15750388
i like vonnegut, jules verne, wilde, ian banks etc
is this YA? i am casual reader and not academic

>>15748055
>you should never feel ashamed...

Shame is natural and if you feel it you probably deserve it. Why suppress yout emotions?

>>15750371
Shakespeare really isn't that difficult, there are plenty of annotated editions, and his plays offer instant gratification in terms of wit and banter even if you can only get through a bit at a time. You should absolutely try to read his stuff.

>>15749243
Mao and Stalin were rather fond of several classics so even they wouldn't have anything in common with this.

>>15748055
I teach high school English. I can tell you that you never want to be in a position where you simply don't know the answer to a student's question about the work you're studying (this is more liable to happen during the Shakespeare unit). So to dumb the content down and resort to teaching YA "books" is a sad cope, in my opinion. There are ways to incorporate YA/light books into your lesson plans/teaching approach as a nice break from tougher content or as selectable material for independent book reports, but they should absolutely not be relied upon to teach the older students. And any teacher that uses that sort of material for AP lessons ought to be reassigned.

Read YA during your off time if you really want to -- I'm not going to force you to grow up. But for the sake of being a respectable professional, at least be well-versed in difficult material. Best-case scenario: have publication credits. Administrators and students alike love that shit.

The OP of the reddit post is Dutch. Read their comments.

>Shakespeare wrote simplisticaly for the common man as his primary audience
>a bunch of demi-literate farmers and leather-tanners were more intelligent than modern university trained academics
Please end western civilization, it's past its expiry date.

>>15751187
>people who lived back when Shakespeare was writing his stuff and spoke the English of the time understand his works more than people 400+ years later
Part of it is just how different English nowadays is and part of it is gen z being retards but your argument really isn't that good and fails to take into account the cultural and language difference. Not to mention I wonder how much of those barely literate farmers "understood" anything and just liked the fighting and humor.

>>15751375
Nigger it just sounds like regular english with a funny (mental)-accent to me. maybe you're just a retard.

>>15748055
>I'm a doctor but I don't read papers nor anything related to medicine lol