Base on our classroom learning and teaching over the past half century, we're guessing teachers and students have never had less fun and engagement in real learning than they do now. Leile Christenbury, who recently spent a term as a high school teacher again after a long career in teacher education, found her students "largely preferred not to commit to any sort of sustained intellectual engagement" and saw the classroom as "a barren way station, a locale to pass the time, turn the pages, and get the credit."
Reading this part of the article really began to make me think back to my experience in English through High school and really made me take a look back at what I had experienced and in many cases my experiences rang true to the quote that was taken from "Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom." Thinking back my teachers never really pushed us to engage with the material, or atleast not near the same level of engagement that is described in the "Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom." Instead my High School English experience consisted of reading the assigned books for the curriculumn, answering questions that were assigned to each specific chapter, and handing in the answers to be marked. We never really engaged in any of are novels for the year as a class but simply answered the questions for each chapter and moved on to the next. I also remember another experience from my grade twelve English class when we were reading and interpreting a poem. The teacher read us the poem and then proceeded to interpret most of the poem for us instead of letting us work out the poem ourselves. By doing this instead of engaging us in the learning of the poem she really disengaged us. I say this because of instead of having to look through the poem and find our own meanings she told us what it meant and really left no area of the poem free to interpret for ourselves. Therefore as a class for this certain poem we really had only the one interpretation which was that of the teacher and it seemed to be discrediting how other students might have interpreted it. Through this style of teaching we were only exposed to the Teachers interpretation and therefore lost any of the other views that might have came up if this same situation was presented but instead of the Teacher interpreting the discussion could have been opened up for the whole class to try and interpret. Both of these experiences that have I have had as a student support Leile's idea that the classroom as a barren way station, turn the pages, and get the credit my question to the people commenting on this article is how are we as young aspiring English teacher going to change this in are classrooms?
I have to agree with you completely about how in my high school english classes I was not really encouraged to engage in the literature. I HATE doing questions right from the text that do not show in anyway that we understood anything about the text. The point you make about the way your teacher went about teaching you poems I think is quite typical of many people's experiences. I really think as teachers we cannot truly expect our students to be active and engaged learners if we don't allow them to interpret and create their own perspectives.I think we are really doing them a diservice by simply telling them what and how to think about the texts they are reading
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