“I don’t get it. You told me to read it. I read it last night. I don’t get it. You can’t give me a quiz on it, ‘cause I don’t understand what I read.”
“You’re taking the quiz anyway.”
“ But you can’t give me a quiz on it.”
“I can, and I will.”
“But I’ll get an ‘F’ on it!”
“Next time, maybe you’ll do better.”
“Next time you assign Shakespeare, I won’t even try reading it. I’ll just take the ‘F.’ Reading it’s a waste a’ time.”
“Is driving a waste of time?”
“Driving? What does that have to do with it?”
“Never mind; just answer the question. Is driving a waste of time and effort?”
“No. I drive a lot. I have to drive.”
“Can you drive a semi tractor-trailer rig?”
“Well, no, but what has that got to do with-?”
“Just cooperate with me a minute and answer the question.”
“No, I can’t drive a semi. I don’t have no license to drive no semi. I don’t have no CDL; that’s a commercial driver’s license. I don’t have none. I don’t need it.”
“You many never need a CDL, but you absolutely will need to read and comprehend at an advanced level. How are you going to do that?”
“When I need to, I will.”
“You need to now.”
“Why?”
“You have to start passing some of these quizzes.”
“You have to start passing some of these quizzes.”
“But I don’t understand what I’m reading. I told you that.”
“So someday, you might want to get your CDL. If you ever do, will you just slide behind the wheel and start the engine and have the examiner check out your skills?”
“Well, I’ll practice first.”
“You’ll have someone teach you how to start it.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll have someone teach you how to shift, how to make those wide, difficult turns, how to back it up to a loading dock.”
“Right.”
“Then you’ll take your test?”
“Right.”
“Without any practice?”
“Well, the guy teaching me will give me practice!”
“This first Act of the play is your practice. Are you going to do the practice or not?”
“I told you, I don’t understand it. There’s no use failing a quiz and wasting the time.”
“So, if there was no quiz, would you practice?”
“No. I mean, why should I?”
“Because you need the skill. Your CDL instructor will have you practice skills. He’ll give you small amounts to do at a time. He won’t send you from here to New York or Los Angeles for practice, but he might take you on a twenty-miler. He’ll tell you when you’re doing things wrong. You’ll fail. They’ll be small failures, like failures on little quizzes, not major tests. He’ll tell you that you’ve failed, and he’ll show you what you’ve done wrong. You’ll do better on similar situations later, as they come up. Then you’ll try something else and fail. Then you’ll get better at that too. But if you don’t practice and fail, you’ll never practice and succeed.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So I don’t want you to read the whole play. I want you to read a couple scenes from Act I. Then you’ll take a little quiz. And it will be a quiz that will count for something, but not for too much in terms of grade. And then I’ll show you how to negotiate the twists and turns. I’ll show you what questions to ask yourself when you run up against obstacles. I’ll show you when to back up and how to do that. You’ll learn how to get around better. Then we’ll try reading a few more scenes, and you’ll get just a little better. Your quiz scores will go up gradually, not all at once, but gradually, if you keep practicing, and I’ll show you how to get from here to there. So when are you going to start practicing?”
“Look. I’ll get better at reading on my own, better at the basics, I mean.”
“Just like you learn the rules of the road and apply them as you drive your little car around.”
“Yeah, right. And then I’ll read better and better, and then I’ll be able to understand. Someday. Maybe.”
“So, without ever actually sitting behind the wheel of that semi and without actually starting it and putting it into motion, and without practicing driving that rig, you’ll learn how to control a tractor and fifty or sixty feet of machinery behind you, all by driving your little car around? Someday? Maybe? Is that how it works?”
“One thing has nothing to do with the other! I don’t need a CDL! I have no interest in getting a CDL!”
“But you need to start reading at an advanced level.”
“Yeah, for your class, you said!”
“Not just for my class; for all sorts of standardized tests, for college entrance exams, for entrance into the military, for any sort of educational program you might try for the rest of your life, for the operation of modern computers, even for instructions on how to put together your child’s swing set someday.”
“Most of those things are easier to read than Shakespeare, and they’re more relevant to my life.”
“Some of those things are harder to read than Shakespeare, and none of them is more relevant. Shakespeare always has something to say about all of human experience, virtually every moment of it.”
“I don’t care.”
“Don’t care about all of human experience?”
“No. I don’t care about Shakespeare. It’s too hard. I won’t need to read that good to get along in the world. My dad and mom can’t, and they did OK.”
“That’s true. Many of our citizens can’t. In fact, most of our congressmen can’t, and some of them are even foolish enough to condemn the reading of classical literature. Sometimes they even admit that they don’t read themselves. They have lots of excuses. Some say they don’t have time.
“While denigrating the classics, they also insist that high school students pass standardized tests on math and reading. So you students are forced to learn calculus in high school and you’re required to show proficiency in your use of language. They make you take tests in which you read passages of college level text, Shakespeare passages among them, that significant numbers of those congressmen would have very serious trouble reading, and they further require you to answer complex questions that test your comprehension, questions that many of them would be embarrassed to tangle with.”
“They can’t do that. They can’t make me do what they’ll never do.”
“They do that.”
“Why?”
“Because the rest of the world is getting smarter than we are, and frankly, smarter than our congressmen for that matter. We’ve got to catch up if we’re going to remain a great nation.”
“So they put it all on us.”
“All on us.”
“Not you. Us. Us students!”
“Us teachers too, Young Student; us teachers too. Don’t be too hard on the congressmen, though. Most congressmen can’t operate a semi either.”
“But I’m not even sure I want to go to college. If I had a chance, I’d study truck driving, or welding, or auto mechanics, or maybe even computers. Then I’d learn the language I’d need to know, because I’d need to. So why do I have to read Shakespeare?”
“Well, if you lived in other countries of the world, you wouldn’t have to. They’d either give you a test, or give you a choice, and if you proved more suited to a program of technical education, or vocational education, or if you had special interests or talent, or both with regard to computers, or carpentry, or any other real skill, you wouldn’t be studying Shakespeare; you’d be studying –“
“I’d be studying things I’m really interested in! I’d have more freedom to choose in other countries than I do in this country, which is supposedly the freest country in the world. Ha!”
“Yes, but at the end of your high school years, you wouldn’t have the freedom to enter college.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t want to.”
“But we need you to be college educated here in this country. We need people like you to do technical and professional work, because that’s where the jobs are today in our country, and that means-”
“I don’t have much choice.”
“Sounds like you’re criticizing the system?”
“The education system.”
“The whole system. Society. You’re criticizing America’s de-emphasis of manufacturing and the rise of technology, its collective decision to lead in finance and in various other professions, not just traditional professions like lawyering and doctoring and educating, but also those connected with innovations in new energy sources, advances in technology and -”
“I don’t care about those things. I just want to have a simple job, own a little place, raise a family …”
“But your freedom to live that way is diminishing more and more all the time. Most jobs that support homes and families are no longer simple, and they’re changing constantly. You’ve got to have very strong technical skills at the very least in order to get a job. Then you must be capable of learning much more on your own in order to maintain your position and advance, meaning, you’ll need to educate yourself, to read and understand difficult material.
“Then I’d rather learn technical skills, and forget about college.”
“Now you’re criticizing the other system.”
“The educational system?”
“The educational system. We could follow the examples of other countries. We could conceivably make powerful tech ed programs available to some high school kids and powerful college prep programs available to others, but we’re not there yet and we’re not moving in that direction. We might eventually.”
“So in the meantime, you have to cram Shakespeare down my throat.”
“I do. You’ll have to contend with passages from Shakespeare and even with more complex literature. In the standardized tests, you’ll - ”
“You already said that. But you can’t like cramming it? You can’t like doing that all the time. You must feel a little, uh –?”
“Compelled, I suppose.”
“But maybe even worse?”
“Intimidated?”
“Yeah! Intimidated! That’s how I feel sometimes! Intimidated! That’s why I fight back!”
“Refusing to collaborate, eh?”
“Yeah! Refusing to collaborate in the, uh, the-”
“Conspiracy against your freedoms?”
“Yeah! Refusing to collaborate in the conspiracy against my freedoms! Yeah!”
“You see? You don’t even have the language skills to express how you feel. Don’t you wish you did?”
“Why should I? You figured out how I feel! You understand me!”
“Look, most people in power don’t mean to intimidate us. Some do, I’m sure. Some feel it’s the best way to govern and get things done. Some respect intimidation as the best way forward, but most are better people than that. If there’s a conspiracy at all, it’s unconscious for the most part. Only the really nasty ones think they’ve got it over on someone else. The point is, most people don’t spend too much time worrying about how others feel about the system, educational or otherwise, and to some extent, yes, it is a conspiracy. They set aside your feelings about it all because they perceive them as immature, maybe erroneous, and maybe even invalid. They see the freedom of getting a first class education as a true freedom, whether you have a liking for it or not.”
“But how do you feel?”
“Well, … I know I could do a much better job of teaching if I had highly motivated, excellent readers and writers in class. We could go farther. We could do more work. Then kids would develop true skills recognizing the subtleties in a piece of literature, and they could transfer those skills to everything they read and hear. I would feel confident about their chances at excelling on an ACT, SAT, or other standardized exam. I could be sure that they’d listen much more closely to campaign speeches and would discern, not only what is said, but also what is left out. They would be able to gather evidence and establish very good explanations for the candidates’ decisions to choose words so. They would be capable of assessing and dismissing the base, unfounded claims being tossed about. I would be much more secure in the knowledge that their votes would be informed by intelligent inferences regarding the strategies of unscrupulous, deceptive politics.”
“I bet you don’t like having kids like me around who don’t care about any of that stuff, do you?”
“You’re wrong. I enjoy kids like you. I enjoy conversations like this. And little though you may like it, I enjoy having the opportunity to teach you the universal truths contained in works by Shakespeare, even if you refuse to read. I enjoy it because the truths are so very applicable to our experiences, and once you see them, maybe you’ll even change your mind about reading the great authors who have arrived at them. Many, many of my students have thoroughly enjoyed Shakespeare’s work in my classes, and even if they decided not to read him, they benefited by watching and understanding his plays.”
“But I slow you down. You want to do more. You want me to read, and I’m not going to.”
“Yes, there is that element of frustration all right. I can’t make you want to get Shakespeare, any more than I can make you want to get a CDL. I’d always like to see you do more, but I understand the limitations, and now you do too. Unless we alter the educational system itself, we can’t compete with the vastly different systems of the world. You can’t raise test scores simply by forcing everyone to try harder. You need to find the most talented kids, group them out of the rest, and let them shoot ahead. Then your average scores will go up, and you’ll find more real talent to fill jobs. Kids who earn certification in carpentry or welding or auto mechanics might just have to go unemployed for a while.
“But I’m not entirely certain we’re doing the wrong thing, either. Our country’s educational systems may never catch up with those of Finland or Japan or China, or even Canada, for that matter, but teaching all our kids the great truths of the greatest philosophers and literary figures that ever lived is definitely not wrong, whether our students learn to read for themselves or not. And who knows? Maybe the system, the broader system, society itself, might eventually revert to the values of a former time, so that people who want to work in the trades, in construction or industry, will be able to find job opportunities that give them wages, benefits, and improved standards of living again. Do you understand?”
“Nope. I mean, I understand that part of it, yeah; but it still don’t make no sense to me. I still don’t see what’s in it for you.”
“Most of us never got in it for ourselves.”
“Oh. … Ya. Whatever …”
“Good way to keep greed out of it. Make teachers work pretty hard; make ‘em struggle just a little to keep up financially. Make ‘em think twice about being teachers. You also have a way to wash out the weak ones in the first few years. Lay on the work. Keep wages down. A teacher’s got to be pretty dedicated to stay in the profession for any time at all.”
“Yeah, or pretty stupid.”
“Maybe. Maybe. So, you want the last word in this little argument?”
“Ya, last word: Getting my CDL I understand. Reading Shakespeare? Getting Shakespeare, whatever? WHAT … EVER!”
No comments:
Post a Comment