What does english class do?

[Anonymous No.12002147]

I took 12 years of public education in the US. We all had to take english or "literature" class to read books in and most people hated it. They hated it because:
1. It took us months to read one book. Even up through grade 11.
2. They made us read books analytically to dissect every part (theme, symbolism, tone, etc). This would help us show that we understood the book on a test.
3. We would read a book most of us didn't like and would never have read independently outside of the class.
Why are classes set up this way? I love books; my room is full of them. I hated english class. My life has not improved in the last decade because I now can properly identify and explain the theme of the book that the author intended. I learned how to enjoy books by reading books that I liked at my own pace and understanding, not with this class.
On another note—especially in fiction—literature is an art form and art is meant to be interpreted differently. Why should we care in the first place what the author intended?

[Anonymous No.12002154]

American English classes do nothing. American schools are trash and our english programs are terrible. Theres a reason Americans have incredibly poor reading comprehension and misuse words all the time.

[Anonymous No.12002313]

The education system in America has a hammer and every problem is a nail. They think the solution to students' poor reading comprehension is to drill them with shitty exercises and slow down reading even more so they "understand it". In reality they just bore them to tears and make them hate reading altogether.
The education system is also measurably female-biased and doesn't pick books that young boys would be interested in.

>t. angry schooling made it take until my 20s for me to discover reading

[Anonymous No.12002606]

>>12002147
>Why should we care in the first place what the author intended?
Not even that. Ray Bradbury said that the point of Fahrenheit 451 wasn't about censorship but everyone still treats it as such. But yeah I'm with you on everything else. Writing essays was the worst because you were basically asked to cite only one book as your source and it came across as heavily derived. I think I made in A in a short essay when I completely bullshitted the one in 1984, how Nazi Germany and Communist Russia fell because their society lacked "love" or something.

[Anonymous No.12002706]

>be me
>graduate law school
>finally a lawyer so I have some power and can start to fix things
>I fucking hated english classes, lets fix that
>go to english teacher
>ask why classes suck
>"it's not me, it's the head of the department that gives me the material I have to teach"
>go to head of school's department
>"it's not me, its the head of the district that gives me the material I have to teach"
>go find the god damn head of the district's English department
>"It's not me, it's the state regulatory agency that tells me what to give to the schools"
>go to state regulatory agency
>"it's not me, it's the state legislature that constructs how we function and operate"
>go to the fucking capital
>find a fucking congressman
>"Oh it's not me, you want to talk to someone on the education committee"
>wait two weeks until the committee has session
>"oh it's not us, we just propose bills that are given to us by special interest groups"
>track down special interest group headquarters
>"oh it's not us, we just do what our donors tell us to do"
>get job in federal agency
>break into system to find list of anonymous donors
>track biggest donor down
>lives in huge mansion
>white suit and cowboy hat
>ask him why highschool curriculum is such shit
>ask him why he perpetuates the suffering of millions of children and teachers across america
>he chuckles
>he wets his lips
>"What in the hell are people still readin' books for?"

[Anonymous No.12002729]

I thought rhetoric was interesting and gave me new ways to think about writing. We would analyze the lyrics of my teacher's favorite emo songs too.

[Anonymous No.12002821]

>>12002729
Drops of Jupiter?

[Anonymous No.12003231]

>>12002147
Why didn't you mention all of the grammar and vocabulary lessons your English classes taught you? They clearly did or you would not have succeeded in making me read your textual wall of a post.
Besides the technicalities of speaking and understanding our language, these classes often feature reading material which is selected to instigate discussion on a related matter. I'll admit that this last function is corrupted by the halfway point to graduation by the massive emphasis on political or humanities based books and stories that teachers usually choose, but the spirit of the idea is still there

[Anonymous No.12003239]

>>12002147
Our 11th year was unironically Holocaust Education Class. We also read Lord of the Flies out loud in class. The teacher was young, foreign, and beta, and for some reason, despite her being very well-meaning, I didn't like her. So I took it upon myself, whenever it was my turn to read, to simply read without stopping. I sat close to the front of the room and she never even suggested switching up the order, so the result was that no one else would get to read. Helped with my reputation since I was not well-like, but felt kind of bad about it years later.

[Anonymous No.12003248]

English classes are meant to teach critical thought holy shit op no wonder you are so stupid Lmao

[Anonymous No.12003433]

>>12002147

God this post just reeks of America

[Anonymous No.12003582]

>>12003231
I honestly learned more about grammar in my foreign language classes. I don't know about anyone else, but we didn't do crap in english on grammer. I remember reading my classmates' essays without periods in high school.

[Anonymous No.12003778]

I always liked my English classes in Canada.
We read a Shakespeare every year, as well as the usual high-school stuff like Animal Farm, Poe, Of Mice and Men, etc.
The only Canadian content we read was Duddy Kravitz though, and maybe the option to read Alice Munro & Atwood in 12th grade. I wish there was more.

We read Streetcar Named Desire out loud and I had to be the one to do the STELLA line. The teacher made me repeat it a couple times because i was too shy to actually yell it. It was embarrassing but fun.
Maybe I got lucky and just always had good English teachers. I used to fantasize about them a lot

[Anonymous No.12003787]

>>12002706
I like this short story

[Anonymous No.12003965]

>people on /lit/ actually went to public school
i bet they didn’t even teach you latin

[Anonymous No.12004573]

My parents English classes were based. They had to read and recite Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon.

[Anonymous No.12004582]

>>12002147
Try attending a non-shit school. Only public school dregs have this complaint.

[Anonymous No.12004628]

This. My high school German classes taught a hell of a lot about sentence structures and grammar. I didn't even know what conjugations were until I took the class.

[Anonymous No.12005163]

>>12004582
>just stop being poor

[Anonymous No.12005270]

American education (at all levels) is terrible and only prepares you for standardised testing and subservience to the state. It only trains you to be a good little indoctrinated worker bee.

[Anonymous No.12005406]

Public school English class is bad for a couple reasons
1. It teaches that books are like a problem or a riddle with a clear solution. You learn to identify basic characteristics--themes, characters, plots--and then "solve" the book by rearranging these SparkNotes elements to support some cause-and-effect argument.

You never learn to appreciate Shakespeare for his beautiful metaphors and thrilling plots or To Kill A Mockingbird for its sentimental depiction of childhood. You never learn to enjoy reading! You learn to skim texts, coldly analyze their exterior surface, and bullshit

2. There is entirely way too much emphasis on literature's social value and its relevance to "the human condition." The craftsmanship of a story, its aesthetic value, is completely secondary to its social concerns. It's much easier to explain what this novel says about prejudice than to explain why this particular scene is so tense, why this plot twist is psychologically resonant, why this passage is uniquely beautiful, or why this character is so compelling

Which brings me to point 3

3. Many of the books are simply not very good. When they're not worn out middlebrow classics endlessly recycled by disinterested English teachers who no longer enjoy them, they're affirmative action diversity picks explicitly chosen for political purposes. It's hard to get kids interested in reading when you're just feeding them the same resentment and oppression porn they've been getting since Number the Stars in 5th grade. There's no sense of a literary education, a cultural tradition of written stories and higher registers of speech. It's just politics!

[Anonymous No.12005499]

Public US education sucks. Everybody knows this. This is not something new.

So the dumb-asses in the US Department of Education look at the test scores they get from around the country, and compare it to other countries.
"Hey," they say, "we really suck. How do we fix it?"
"I know, we can look at what works for other countries, and try that."
"Shut the fuck up, Danny! We're doing what AMERICANS do!"
"...Which is?"
"WORK HARDER."
Cue fewer and shorter recesses (recess has been proven to help learning), more 20%-or-more-of-your-grade tests (also doesn't help), more goal orientated learning (which quickly leads to pigeonholing), and basing funding on a reward system (which is the exact opposite of what schools need). But of course, everyone is SHOCKED when it doesn't work, and in fact, makes it worse.
"Shit, what do we do now?"
"Why don't we..."
"Shut up, Danny! We change the math!"
"Ch... change the...?"
"New math! New stuff! Make it easier to learn!"
"Fuck it, I quit."
"Good riddance. And hey, you know what they say: third time's the charm."

[Anonymous No.12005803]

I think this thread has identified some solid criticisms of the American public education system.

Now, what do we need to do differently? We have all these armchair experts in education, but none of you have proposed any realistic changes that can be made. Yes, some anons posted that English classes don't teach students to appreciated the beauty of Shakespeare, but how do you expose them to that beauty when all they care about is Fortnite and smoking Juuls?

I'm a high school English teacher at a middle-income public school. Give me some solutions, oh wise experts of 4chan who have everything about education figured out.

[Anonymous No.12005945]

>>12005803

Nuke America and start over. It's been shit since 1776.

[Anonymous No.12005986]

>>12005803
>Yes, some anons posted that English classes don't teach students to appreciated the beauty of Shakespeare, but how do you expose them to that beauty when all they care about is Fortnite and smoking Juuls?
Force them to memorize Shakespeare. Totally and completely browbeat them. You can't really appreciate a poem until you know it by heart, so grade them on memorization and repeatedly ask them to regurgitate particular sonnet or poem throughout the year. Make questions on a test something like, "What is line 8 of Sonnet 43? What is the fifth word of line 3 in Sonnet 27?"

Force them to write their own sonnets to understand the elements of a sonnet (extreme attention to form and rhythm) and better illustrate the gap between their own ability and that of Shakespeare.

Make every effort to emphasize that they have absolutely no critical skill whatsoever and until they develop one, they are to be reliant upon you and other keepers of the Western tradition. Eliminate student input as much as humanly possible.

Introduce them to similar poems and sonnets with alternate rhythms. Have them practice scansion.

Assign them famous critiques of Shakespeare. Assign them appreciatory essays on Shakespeare. Why does Johnson admire the man and Wittgenstein find him incoherent? Ask the students why their opinions on Shakespeare are not assigned reading.

Do NOT, under any circumstances, make Shakespeare relevant to their modern "lived experience." Do NOT reference hip hop, politics, or popular culture, even for rhetorical purposes.

Make it as objectively clear as possible that Shakespeare is the single most perfect writer in the history of the modern English language. He is a Genius with a capital-G and perhaps the greatest human who ever lived.

If you do all this, you will have provided your students with the tools to begin appreciating Shakespeare. Whether they do appreciate Shakespeare is ultimately up to them, but they will have the tools.

[Anonymous No.12006049]

>>12005986
This is some uniquely brilliant bait

[Anonymous No.12006101]

>>12002706

[Anonymous No.12006111]

>>12003239
you sound like your popular older brother kicked your ass on the reg. hope life got better for you, cringelord

[Anonymous No.12006118]

>>12006111
you sound like a cuck to be quite honest with me homie

[Anonymous No.12006123]

>>12005986
link to the wittgenstein critique of shakes?

[Anonymous No.12006124]

>>12002313
I feel this. I didn't enjoy reading until i hit my junior year of HS which is when i started IB, but then i hated it again because i had to overanalyze the SHIT out of everything. Just started reading again at 24 because i took a Russian sci fi class and its a LOT better taught. It gets to the meat and potatoes of what things mean rather than pissing about with stupid bullshit that the author didn't care about.

[Anonymous No.12006213]

>>12005803
Oh look, it's a thread full of complaining about problems but no suggested solutions
It's almost like these problems exist for a reason and aren't just the product of >lolamerica

To answer your question, anon: the fuck if I know

[Anonymous No.12006405]

>>12006213
There were many, many solutions suggested in this post
>>12005986

The major problem I think is that public schoolteachers are essentially state-funded babysitters, not tutors. It doesn't help that the teachers are not really interested in the material they're paid to teach and prefer to shoot the shit with their students for nine months a year plus holidays.

But this problem is really only a derivation of the fact that the introduction of women and girls into the student body has greatly diminished men's ability to learn. Easy, feelgood self-directed learning overseen by a wishy-washy cat lady is no way to teach boys. Boys learn through corporal punishment, dunce caps, constant oversight, and rote memorization. Boys are more impulsive and immature than girls, they experience passions and temptations more intensely, and thus they need to be more tightly controlled by an authority.

Present a teenage boy with option A of jerking off and playing video games, and option B of studying for his algebra exam, then he will pick jerking off every time.

This whole NEET phenomenon is due to the fact that we are placing hardcore addictive substances like televisual entertainment and pornography into the hands of people who are uniquely susceptible to addiction. The Chinese (quite rightly) refer to the internet as "electronic heroin" and are starting boot camps to kick their denizens of the habit. At least they can acknowledge there's a problem. Men are collapsing in the Western world and it's considered misogynistic to make any acknowledgement of their failure beyond denigrating them for not keeping up with their female peers.

[Anonymous No.12006515]

>>12006405
Are you some kind of social psychologist? Or did you just read some Jordanian Bradley Peterson and corroborate his precisions against your own public-school generalities? Either way, bad post my boy.
t. speak for yourself kid, i studied algebra while jerking off

[Anonymous No.12006576]

>>12006515
I am not really a Peterson fanboy, though I admit he and I have some overlapping concerns. I suppose I am something of a social psychologist, but just an amateur--I am but a humble internet poster with a few hot opinions

I congratulate you on your multitasking, but I don't think this ability is one that is widely shared or cultivated among young men, whose test scores, income, and level of educational attainment are all either plateauing and or markedly declining.

[Anonymous No.12006587]

>>12005986
I didn't realize Harold Bloom visited /lit/.

Dr. Bloom, your office was always too cold. That's why I never visited. C/O '01.

[Anonymous No.12006668]

>>12003965
I went to a public school and they taught me Latin there. Get fucked pleb. (though I regret not going to the school that taught Greek as well...)

[Anonymous No.12006707]

>>12006111
I don't have any brothers. Life got better, sort of, but I just want to go back to being 16 again.

[Anonymous No.12007010]

>>12005803
The simplest solution is to just take the kids who don't want to be there out of the class. Let's face it, at least half of them won't learn anything no matter how much you force them to because they don't care or don't want to be there. They ruin it for the rest who actually want to learn.
I suggest we fit a new model to solve this. Kids can stay the same through middle school, then once they hit grade 9 they can learn something that they enjoy and make a living on. For instance, a carpenter doesn't need to know shakespeare, but he does need to know how to read and write technical writing. You could put him and some of the other kids like that in one class that teaches them technical writing; that's their English class.
They could also take the Shakespeare class if they wanted, but it would be an elective.

[Anonymous No.12007020]

>>12006668
are you British? Because that anon probably means American public schools which is where the proles go. Not like in the UK

[Anonymous No.12007197]

>>12003778
Shakespeare every year in English class while I was at school in Nova Scotia.
I could never understand why it was always Shakespeare. From Grade 7 to Grade 12. One each year.
Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice and at one point a teacher decided we should watch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead the MOVIE. All the girls were fangirling about the handsome actors Gary Oldman and Tim Roth while we laughed at the Players and their antics.

[Anonymous No.12007205]

>>12007197
>handsome actors
>Tim Roth

[Anonymous No.12007222]

>>12002706
Underrated post

[Anonymous No.12007226]

>>12007020
This. I was lucky to have gone to a decent catholic high school. There I took Latin for three years and had English teachers who were actually good at teaching the subject. I’m happy to say I read the Oedipus trilogy along with a good amount of Shakespeare.

King Lear is his best work. Don’t even try to deny it.

[Anonymous No.12007241]

>>12007205
Okay perhaps not Tim Roth but still...
Not a single Canadian novel in sight during my high school years.

[Anonymous No.12007250]

>>12007226
MacBeth is supreme... but then again I never had to study or watch King Lear during my education so it can be still toppled from it's lofty perch.

[Anonymous No.12007267]

>>12007250
King Lear has a better arc, more dynamic characters, two plot lines interwoven, and overall has a lot more meat on it. I don’t recommend too many books to people, but that was one of the few books I really got into in high school.

To my senior year of high school English teacher, you’re amazing. Easily top three favorite teachers so far.

[Anonymous No.12007291]

>>12005163
Exactly, get a job or something

[Anonymous No.12007324]

>>12003231
>Why didn't you mention all of the grammar and vocabulary lessons your English classes taught you?

For my school, we stopped learning grammar and vocabulary after grade 8. From grade 9's-12, we would read 3 books (Shakespeare, a classic novel, and another play) and we would write an essay on them, mostly about the themes, tones, and symbols of the book.

[Anonymous No.12007356]

>>12007324
I feel terrible for you. What a way to kill the love of reading.

[Anonymous No.12007371]

English teacher here. American. Public school. Inner City.
I think that the problem is that the curriculum is too broad, and people's expectations of an "English" class are unreasonable. We're expected to teach rhetoric, grammar, usage, mechanics, vocabulary, composition, editing, revising, publishing, theory, criticism, and analysis. To help students best understand much of this, we also have to teach a Cliff's Notes brand of psychology, economics, and philosophy.
Because our classes are required for all four years in high school, our instructional time is often interrupted to accommodate silly administrative initiatives.
And on top of this, we have to meet students where they are with regard to interest. Which means that often we have to incorporate a level of film and television analysis in order to engage the kids.
If this sounds schizophrenic, that is because it is. The language arts curriculum is designed to make the teacher and the student seem inadequate (inadequacy, after all, validates the testing culture by giving people low test scores to get angry at, thereby selling more textbooks that aim to get kids to pass the test and little more).
That said, I love my job. I love my kids, and I enjoy sharing my love of language and literature. My job would be so much easier if we could compartmentalize the curriculum, but every now and then, I get to create some pretty cool lessons that synthesize a few of the core initiatives.
tl;dr: The public school system is a mess, but it's that way because people get outraged at the wrong targets. Also, we have silly expectations.

[Anonymous No.12007419]

I can't help but wonder if we should just kick out students who don't want to learn academically and make them go to a different specialized streams that will pique their interest or have them work somewhere while taking the occasional class.
My father sucked at regular school so he went to a specialty school that taught him a trade and some random crap about handy math and writing skills that fit with it because he didn't care at all for literature, arts, and higher levels of math.
He still doesn't care for literature now but he's done quite well for himself and ended up owing his own business.

[Anonymous No.12007524]

I hated school because we sat all day and told constantly to be quiet to 'learn'
Sitting all day is tiresome. Sitting all day, being quiet and listening to the stuff teachers' would spew at me was exhausting.
It is amazing I stayed awake during any of my classes. If I dropped off to sleep, it didn't matter because we were basically made into passive learners. We contributed very little to class unless directly called upon, so what does it matter if we just drop out of sight and mind?
I don't how it is now but being made to sit and scribble notes down as fast as possible while you go through five classes a day is terrible.
Very few teachers seem to realize how extraordinarily hard it is to just sit there and just listen to a lecture. It wasn't too bad when a teacher allowed us to actually take a stretch break every 30 minutes and talk about something else for five minutes before continuing on but very few ever did so.

[Anonymous No.12007546]

>>12005986
This