Reply to What's the best way to advocate for improved English curriculum in MS and HS?

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Reply to "What's the best way to advocate for improved English curriculum in MS and HS?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I agree English is the weak point.

I think there’s one easy fix which is to assign more books and better book.  Basically everything my kids read was written after 1950 and most of t was written after 2000.  They don’t read Shakespeare, dickens, Britney, Steinbeck, Hawthorne, Wharton, Austen etc.

The second one, which is probably impossible to solve, is more feedback on their writing.  They just aren’t staffed for that.  They would need to give all the English teachers at least one or two more additional planning periods to give them time to really read and edit and provide substantive feedback on writing.  Or give them TAs or something.  (Although it’s not even clear to me that the new graduates are capable of that.) [/quote]

Both of my kids have read Shakespeare and Steinbeck.[/quote]
MS students should be reading texts like these, and not excerpts.

I liked reading Steinbeck and Shakespeare in public MS.[/quote]

Mine touched on Shakespeare in MS. But I'm glad they won't get Steinbeck til later. I know their mental maturity level will be a better match then even though they could handle the reading now.
[/quote]

I'm the one that first mentioned Steinbeck and I agree that MS is too early, but 10th grade is not.  And it would pair well with APUSH which a lot of the 10th graders are doing.  So would Hawthorne, and something like The Crucible and The Invisible Man.   I think my kid that did IB read some of those in 11th grade.  I just feel like 8th-10th grade are totally wasted with the books they read.

But I totally agree with the teacher who posted before that the current system does not allow for any meaningful feedback on writing.  They could use computer programs to at least give them grammer and punctuation feedback, but actual writing structure and syntax ... you need a human with hours to dedicate to that task.  I wonder if they just hired writing instructors (like some colleges do), how many they would need to give each kid a decent edited essay once per year, or once per semester.  It's also amazing when I look back on my own public school education in a state that people here deride as generally pretty crappy .... but we got feedback on our essays.  I don't know how they did it -- we also had big class sizes, but maybe the teachers had less in-service BS, less paperwork, and more grading periods.  Is there anyone on here who was teaching in the 1980s that can weigh in?  [/quote]

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