Let English Teachers Teach: the audacity of non-experts

Sadly, sometimes, micro-managers will try to control, even minimize, what figurative devices and literary tropes students learn. This urge to undermine faculty and micro-manage instruction leads to comprehension gaps. Imagine that I’m deep into a discussion about a text, and my students have no knowledge of the writer’s tone. No matter how hard I work the text, no matter the many times students test and write to learn, the subtle meanings, the inferences that lead to an understanding of what lurks between the lines, or even an understanding of author’s message, will become unattainable for my class. Tone is essential to understanding, yet I have been ordered to withhold instruction for this skill and others. I don’t see how an understanding of tone, a thorough and chronic teaching of this, could lead to anything negative.

This type of disturbing micro-management reveals a lack of trust in the classroom educator. Why would any senior educator ask teachers to delay badly needed concepts or insist on a lock step pedagogical approach when each teacher and each class will present with widely different gaps and interests?

It seems like sabotage.

I wonder why school districts move regular teachers without subject area degrees into executive positions when they really need expertise and experience in combination. No matter how many years you’ve been teaching a subject, if you think that withholding skills that aid comprehension supports any retainment of information, or an understanding beyond the surface, then you are completely wrong. Tone, irony, diction, metaphor, parallelism, and so forth, are all skills that require more than one or two mini-lessons to conquer. These literary devices, tropes, and motifs, require constant and chronic re-visits.

Secondary schools face two extreme challenges: the talent drain and a lack of content area specialists. Content area specialists typically earn a terminal degree in their subjects, not in education or some other off market degree that isn’t specific. A master of education is nice to have, but it isn’t the same as a subject area degree. You can teach a subject at the secondary level for decades and still not know much about what you convey to students if you refuse to invest in your own advanced education in a thorough and dedicated way.

What if you tried to teach Swift without first teaching irony and satire? Your students would think that people in 1725 were actually dining on fresh babies to avert the famine. This example, while it may seem a bit odd, is not that original and encapsulates this problem. Without a full and rigorous understanding of an author’s technique, students are left in the dark and become bored with challenging materials. You might wonder why I care, but this is my last act; I am older and becoming impatient with public school antics. Reforming education isn’t about the classroom as much as it is about the leadership.

When leaders resort to toxic and non-productive mandates, no matter the subject, students suffer and fall behind.