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IF WE TAUGHT ENGLISH THE WAY WE TAUGHT MATH THERE WOULD BE 'ENGLISH
ANXIETY,' TOO
TECHNOCRAT - Imagine that your only contact with "English" as a subject
was through classes in school. Suppose that those classes, from
elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more
than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal
grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists -- you
never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond
the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and
precise definitions for an endless array of words. You would probably
hate the subject.
You might come to wonder what the point of learning English was. In
response perhaps the teachers and education system might decide that, to
help make English relevant to students, they need to introduce more
"Applied English". This means teaching English students with examples
from "real life" (for varying degrees of "real") where English skills
are important, like how to read a contract and locate the superfluous
comma. Maybe (in an effort by the teachers to be "trendy") you'll get
lessons on formal diary composition so you can better update your
MySpace page. All of that, of course, will be taught using a formulaic
cookbook approach based on templates, with no effort to consider
underlying principles or the larger picture. Locating the superfluous
comma will be a matter of systematically identifying subjects, objects,
and verbs and grouping them into clauses until the extra comma has been
caught. Your diary will be constructed from a formal template that
leaves a few blanks for you to fill in. Perhaps you might also get a few
tasks that are just the same old drills, just with a few mentions of
"real world" things to make them "Applied": "Here is an advertisement
for carpets. How many adjectives does it contain?".
In such a world it wouldn't be hard to imagine lots of people developing
"English anxiety", and most people having a general underlying dislike
for the subject. Many people would simply avoid reading books because of
the bad associations with English class in school. With so few people
taking a real interest in the subject, teachers who were truly
passionate about English would become few and far between. The result,
naturally, would be teachers who had little real interest in the subject
simply following the drilling procedures outlined in the textbooks they
were provided; the cycle would repeat again, with students even worse
off this time.
And yet this is very much how mathematics tends to be taught in our
schools today. . .
http://technocrat.net/d/2007/4/3/17225
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IF WE TAUGHT ENGLISH THE WAY WE TAUGHT MATH THERE WOULD BE 'ENGLISH
ANXIETY,' TOO
TECHNOCRAT - Imagine that your only contact with "English" as a subject
was through classes in school. Suppose that those classes, from
elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more
than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal
grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists -- you
never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond
the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and
precise definitions for an endless array of words. You would probably
hate the subject.
You might come to wonder what the point of learning English was. In
response perhaps the teachers and education system might decide that, to
help make English relevant to students, they need to introduce more
"Applied English". This means teaching English students with examples
from "real life" (for varying degrees of "real") where English skills
are important, like how to read a contract and locate the superfluous
comma. Maybe (in an effort by the teachers to be "trendy") you'll get
lessons on formal diary composition so you can better update your
MySpace page. All of that, of course, will be taught using a formulaic
cookbook approach based on templates, with no effort to consider
underlying principles or the larger picture. Locating the superfluous
comma will be a matter of systematically identifying subjects, objects,
and verbs and grouping them into clauses until the extra comma has been
caught. Your diary will be constructed from a formal template that
leaves a few blanks for you to fill in. Perhaps you might also get a few
tasks that are just the same old drills, just with a few mentions of
"real world" things to make them "Applied": "Here is an advertisement
for carpets. How many adjectives does it contain?".
In such a world it wouldn't be hard to imagine lots of people developing
"English anxiety", and most people having a general underlying dislike
for the subject. Many people would simply avoid reading books because of
the bad associations with English class in school. With so few people
taking a real interest in the subject, teachers who were truly
passionate about English would become few and far between. The result,
naturally, would be teachers who had little real interest in the subject
simply following the drilling procedures outlined in the textbooks they
were provided; the cycle would repeat again, with students even worse
off this time.
And yet this is very much how mathematics tends to be taught in our
schools today. . .
http://technocrat.net/d/2007/4/3/17225
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