Friday, March 01, 2019

English and the Fine Art of Crap Extraction

I'm doing one of my least favorite things this year--preparing students to take a standardized test. They don't graduate unless they pass it, so I don't feel like I have a choice. One problem is that half the class has actually passed the test, so those students aren't particularly motivated to study for it. I don't blame them. The NY State English Regents Exam, more than anything, is an exercise in tedium. It's exactly what I would not teach if I wanted to inspire a love of reading or writing.

Of course, I can't be bothered with such lofty concerns. The important thing is that they learn how to pick out appropriate support, spit it out credited, and explain it. I recently heard a supervisor say the only kind of writing done in college is argumentative essay. If that's the case (It wasn't when I went.), then I have little idea why we're even bothering with college. The current iteration of the English Regents exam is all about the crap we refer to as "close reading," or dredging through whatever to find particular points.

I speak to English teachers who tell me they're discouraged from teaching entire novels. Why not just teach excerpts so they learn how to extract crap from it? After all, what's more important--teaching a love of reading, or learning how to extract crap from fiction the same way you extract it from non-fiction? The more I look at the English Regents exam, the more I realize that crap extraction is the apex of Western Civilization, and we must therefore focus on it and it exclusively.

I'm old fashioned and unsophisticated in the art of crap extraction. I remember the first book I ever read. I think it was called The Little Black Puppy. I was fascinated when I cracked the code of sounds represented by letters. In elementary school, we were explicitly taught English usage, parts of speech, and punctuation. These are things we're not really supposed to focus on in high school, but I see a whole lot of students who can use help with it.

I'm thinking of two students right now who, in my unworthy opinion, cannot write at all. Their sentence structures are odd, likely direct translations from their first language that do not work in English. Both are in my advanced class, yet would benefit more from my beginning class. However, both have tested out of ESL via the NYSESLAT, which measures I have no idea what. Because the NYSESLAT is aligned with the English Regents exam, and the fine art of crap extraction, they've passed that too. One got 82, and the other got 86.

The insane concept of "college and career readiness" is somehow tied to the English Regents score. I assume that one or both of these students has reached that lofty plateau. I can tell you, though, with 100% certainty, that neither of these students is prepared to take English 101 in college. If they go to city schools, they'll take writing tests and be bounced into remedial courses. They'll pay thousands of dollars to learn what I could've easily taught them in high school.

Instead, they're sitting in my crap extraction course, which they need not at all. But common core has made the need for crap extraction a national emergency. Therefore our kids are done with fiction, finished with Shakespeare, rid of the need to interpret language, and set on a path of trudging through tedious crap and determining which of the crap is most important.

Multiple sources assure me it isn't only ELLs we're sending into the world unable to write coherently in English. Because NY State is enormously ambitious, we're failing native English speakers as well. I'm told that students with excellent overall grades cannot spit out a decent personal statement for college. This failure is even more shocking than the one we've presided over for ELLs.

We can serve our children better.. The overarching philosophy of Common Core, as stated by its illustrious founder David Coleman, is no one gives a crap what you think or feel. That's one of the most pathetic and cynical philosophies I can imagine.  It's anathema to anyone who's chosen to teach for a living.

How pathetic that we have so many so-called leaders who drink whatever Kool-Aid served them. While I'm actively involved in teaching kids how to pass one single test, and showing them skills that will likely be good for little or nothing more than that in the long run, at least I'm aware of it. Unlike a whole lot of people, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
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