You know what's almost as bad as homossssssssssssssssssexuals?

[james_davis_nicoll]

English majors! Elitist English majors!

Contains OSC

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

No. There is in fact a reasonable critique to be made of the various (different) teaching methods out there for high school and college students. But Card doesn't make that critique.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Point well made.

Still, it is difficult for me to take seriously any "authority" who refers to the tiny fraction of reality and potential reality covered by mundane fiction as "mainstream".

(Except as a burden on literacy. As that, the people who demonstrate the view that SF stands for "sneering face" are to be taken very seriously.)

EDIT: Ironically, a typo needed correcting.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Every time I watch Americans discuss English classes, the more respect I have for the teachers at Waterloo Oxford DSS.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It's not all like that, though. Really. I've seen plenty of reasonable English classes where the kids were engaged and learning how to communicate in useful registers in the language of public discourse of their community and their country (not always the same thing). And I've seen plenty of classes in which the kids were having a reasonably fine time reading and understanding and independently critiquing a wide variety of influential, interesting, and insightful written works.

There are ral problems, though. Which are not improved by simplistic "reforms" driven by politics and graft.

[bedii.livejournal.com]

If they never subjected you to "Watch 'Dream of the Wild Horses' and write an essay about it" then you should respect them. (Someone has posted a digitized version of one of the 16mm prints on YouTube. Ugh.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I had some great English teachers. Even the one who subscribed to the Edward de Vere theory about Shakespeare succeeded admirably at getting the students excited about the material.