English lessons and how to make them not suck

[someonehairy-ish]

Welp, there's nothing less fun than listening to barely literate classmates slowly drone through one agonisingly slow sentence after another for weeks on end. Most of my English lessons were spent drawing, because I'd already read the current book three times over and gotten bored.
I did actually enjoy English a good proportion of the time though. I was always good at writing short stories and I enjoyed class discussions and debates. I think if the subject were modernised a bit, more students would enjoy it. Shakespeare is great, but not when you're 14.

 

[kurupt87]

Australian here, English to us is "Say how this poem proves whatever the teacher wants you to say is correct".

UK Boys Grammar school here, and this pretty much sums it up. English was a procession of middle to late aged women forcing their interpretations of literature onto a class of 30 teenage boys. All you had to do was agree and you skate to an A. Boring as fuck but there you go.

 

[SuperSuperSuperGuy]

I'm Canadian. At my current school, where I'm studying computer engineering, I've only needed one "English" course, beyond an exam to determine whether my English skills were up to par, or at least close enough to be acceptable. It was a course on communication, and I hated it because it was so... basic. The lectures were just fine, don't get me wrong, since we discussed the elements of communication, argumentation, and so forth, but our workshops were so rudimentary that I learned more about communication by browsing the web during the workshop periods. We went over basic sentence structure and common grammatical mistakes for a large portion of our periods. The only time it actually got to be interesting was when we had to write an opinion piece on an article that we were given. Even the final project was awful because I felt held back by the people I had to work with. The report-writing tips were good, and I appreciated them, but they weren't anything particularly new to me. Essentially, I hated that course because it felt stifling. I didn't get to do anything; I was constantly being held back by my peers and the curriculum we had to learn.

Contrast that to my experiences with English in high school. Unlike most people my age, I loved Shakespeare. I thought it was clever and surprisingly easy to understand, given the reputation it has. I enjoyed poetry, when it wasn't being pedantic slop. I loved studying and considering ideas, philosophies and schools of thought, especially when I could put my own spin on things and have fun with them. I loved being creative and different with these things; the most fun I've ever had in school were my grade 11 media studies course, where I did my final project and presentation on Madoka Magica, of all things, and my grade 12 English and philosophy courses, which had a teacher (same one for both) that not only accepted but encouraged any strange and unusual ideas that I had. Like with my Madoka Magica media project, I did my independent study for grade 12 English on the first Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya novel. He loved my presentation; he thought it was really interesting that I did something that he's never heard of before.

So basically, my best experiences in English courses are ones where I wasn't restricted. I have a lot of fun working with dumb ideas that normally would be questionable; I mean, what English teacher do YOU know of that would let you do a presentation about a Japanese light novel for a project? To be honest, I look back very fondly on that project, because I did well on it and I loved doing it in the first place. In order to make students, or at the very least people like me, enjoy your class, you need to let them do things that they love. Let them look at their favourite novels, TV shows, comics, movies, even anime and manga or, god forbid, video games, with a critical eye and help them gain a new appreciation for them. The problem with most English classes is that they attempt to restrict their students. While some students might appreciate strict guidelines for what they can or cannot do, as stating outright to "do anything" sometimes gives a crippling amount of freedom, never be afraid to entertain an unusual or unique idea that a student has. Never judge them on what's "right" or "wrong"; just what's well reasoned and not. That's what allowed me to enjoy my high school English courses, and even years later I look back on them fondly. Even if they mattered little to my primary field of study, they were fun, and that's more than a lot of people can say about their English courses.

EDIT: This is mostly irrelevant to the subject of English, but a couple people thus far have discussed math classes in this thread. As an engineer-in-training, it bothers me that people question the usefulness of math classes and the material covered therein. First and foremost, I do a lot of math, and it is so important, even if most people are probably not going to use much trigonometry in their lives. Second, the "we have calculators on our phones" thing is bull. A calculator helps crunch the numbers, but it's almost always more efficient to avoid using a calculator until you need to get a final value, as counter-intuitive as that might be. Calculators are not time-efficient unless you need a decimal value. And third, and most important, a calculator will not solve a problem for you. If you don't know how to do the math, the calculator can't teach you how. The whole point of math classes is to teach problem solving, and that will never stop being relevant to everyday life. I suppose math classes could benefit from making that clearer, much like how English classes can benefit from an emphasis on teaching students real critical thinking.

 

[Pseudonym]

I'm in the odd position of having english as a secondary language. I live in the Netherlands. Secondary schools here are a bit different from a lot of countries in that there are multiple levels of them, some of them for smarter students and some of them for slower ones. I followed secundary education on the level called VWO which means, rougly, 'preperatory scientific education'. Students who attend such schools are expected to follow university education and their education is geared towards such a future. (that is not to say that they are all particularly motivated or even that smart) English classes here in the Netherlands weren't an awful way to spend my time as I found most of it very easy and I like reading literature. One problem with my english classes was that I and many others my age are used to having our TV and games in English, possibly with Dutch subs. Localization is ussually just not profitable for a language spoken by 20 million people, most of whom speak decent English. My teacher, being from an older generation did not have that advantage making her English sub-par and often worse than the English of some of the students.

Maybe it is more useful to complain about my Dutch classes. While I found the grammar classes I had to be very informative and well structured, mostly because the teacher responsible for that had a thourough understanding and appreciation of the subject and presented it systematically and at a high level, the other parts of those classes were less pleasing. For one: argumentation. I have at least a basic understanding of logic being a student of mathematics and philosophy and I dare say confidently that all of my argumentation classes in Dutch class were useless. Assembling a list of fallacies to regocnise is just not informative, especially if the classroom texts can't tell the difference between an ad hom and an insult. Regocnising and properly explaining the problem with a certain argument is a difficult art. One that requires both factual knowledge and a somewhat systematic understanding of how arguments work. A list of fallacies won't cut it. Secondly: text interpretation. Again with the lists. Why do Dutch language scholars have such a hard on for lists? If you believe you have found a list of five possible functions a paragraph can have you are massively and unhelpfully oversimplifying. Lastly, I will never forgive my Dutch teacher for making me read 'twice a woman' by Harry Mulisch. That was just a complete load of pretentious, egomaniacal nonsense.

If you want my advice on how to teach (and I have no experience teaching, so I wouldn't know why you'd want to) I have some opinions. First of all, you should know why your field is interesting, more so than your students or the plebs in this comment section like myself. You studied English in more depth than most of us have. You certainly have a better idea of why it is interesting and important than teenagers who are forced to attend school by the law and their parents. So while I agree with others here that you should try to explain why the English language and literature is interesting or important I would be careful not to cater too much to those who aren't interested. I'll be blunt about this. What a significant portion of students typically want, are easier classes, which they cunningly try to describe as more interesting. This will only have the effect that those who are interested lose their interest because class becomes too easy and trivial and those who aren't interested, still aren't. It doesn't improve the students knowledge of the subject one bit. Secondly, be aware that a significant portion of your students won't read the texts they are supposed to. At my school, reading all of the books you were supposed to and being able to identify some basic themes could easily get you an 8/10 or higher on your verbal literature exam. This is not a matter of being good at interpreting literature, it is a matter of even bothering to read the literature at all.

With the lazyness of students I see around me in mind I recommend focussing on making the classes interesting for those who bother to do their homework. Help those who want to be helped.

Edit: I'd like to add something to this.

EDIT: This is mostly irrelevant to the subject of English, but a couple people thus far have discussed math classes in this thread. As an engineer-in-training, it bothers me that people question the usefulness of math classes and the material covered therein. First and foremost, I do a lot of math, and it is so important, even if most people are probably not going to use much trigonometry in their lives. Second, the "we have calculators on our phones" thing is bull. A calculator helps crunch the numbers, but it's almost always more efficient to avoid using a calculator until you need to get a final value, as counter-intuitive as that might be. Calculators are not time-efficient unless you need a decimal value. And third, and most important, a calculator will not solve a problem for you. If you don't know how to do the math, the calculator can't teach you how. The whole point of math classes is to teach problem solving, and that will never stop being relevant to everyday life. I suppose math classes could benefit from making that clearer, much like how English classes can benefit from an emphasis on teaching students real critical thinking.

I think people also underestimate how pretty much all higher education will have mathematics classes of some sort. Be they classes in logic for the philosophers and the programmers, classes in geometry for the engineers, classes in differential equasions for the economists and the physicists or classes in statistics for the psychologists and sociologists. While you certainly can avoid mathematics as much as possible in some studies there is barely a field of study where an understanding of mathematics isn't helpful.

 

[necromanzer52]

Here's a perspective from Ireland. The english teacher I had for my leaving cert was very big on the idea that we should be writing every day and so would constantly be giving us essays to do. It invariably took more time than every other piece of homework being thrown at me and over time I grew to despise these essays. Many nights, I spent hours staring at a blank piece of paper, racking my brain, trying to come up with something to say. You can't force yourself to be creative. You can't make yourself have an opinion on something. Especially when under time constraints. For the actual exam you were expected to conceive of and write an entire short story (about 5-6 A4 pages) in about an hour and half. Pen on paper that is, so no going back and changing things if come up with a better idea for it halfway through.

In short, this teacher systematically destroyed any interest I had in creative writing. It gradually returned to me once I got into college and was doing a heavy maths/science based course and now I make forays into various forms of poetry and prose. I just feel I'd be much better if this teacher had taught us more about techniques we could use to write a story or helped us to develop our ideas.

There was a nice range in the actual things we studied however. Bit of Shakespeare of course, but also some more modern books and poetry from various times in the last few centuries. We did this great movie called Il Postino as well.

 

[freaper]

How to improve your English as a non-native speaker? Reject your social life, watch movies and tv or play videogames, preferably from a young age.

 

[Lufia Erim]

I hate teachers in general. Snooty, snobish and generally unpleasant. This was when i was in school. And the teachers my age i met once i graduated college. I hate the lot of them.