English lessons and how to make them not suck

[Korenith]

So the story goes that I'm having to interview somebody of secondary school age (11-18 for those not in the UK) about what their English lessons are like and whether they are any good or not. It's for of a teacher training course I'm about to start but I thought it'd be interesting to add some additional feedback from all over the place. So here's a good chance to rant about how much you hated English, or how much you liked it, and why. Go nuts.

If you could put what country, what kind of school (comprehensive, grammar, private etc.) and roughly when you were at school (or if you're still there) that'd be helpful as well for a bit of context.

 

[Thaluikhain]

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

 

[sageoftruth]

Depends partly on the class. If I was being taught English, I'd want a class full of mini-plays where I act out scenarios with other students in English.

 

[Jack Action]

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

That happened to me too! Which was particularly remarkable, considering it was a class dedicated to beating the proper use of tenses into ridiculously thick skulls through the overuse of disgustingly boring "fill in the blanks" exercises.

You wanna teach someone English, just dump'em in front of a screen loaded with old Cartoon Network shows and check back in a year or three.

 

[renegade7]

American public (public as in state school, I know that means something different in the UK) high school was my background. I was there from 2009-2012

First, reading aloud. I just absolutely hated this. I was always a quick, fluid reader, and the worst thing is when someone else is reading and is apparently, despite being 16 and speaking English as a first language for his or her entire life, barely literate. This continued up until my junior year of high school. Don't make them read aloud.

Second, group projects. Don't do it, just don't. The first problem with this is that your instinct as the teacher will be to try and mix high-performing students with low performers in the hope that the good students will help the bad ones. That never, ever happens. Best case scenario, the good student does everything, worst case, the bad students drag down the good ones. This may even be flat-out required of you because of some idea that it will prevent "tracking" (because heaven forbid schools try to help students with high potential make the most of their abilities). The second problem is that there is nothing about reading, writing, and analyzing literature that is somehow improved by arbitrarily making 3 teenagers pretend that the project was a group effort.

Third, attempts to bring popular literature into the class will always, always fail. We had to read the Hunger Games books. No one liked it. Not once did we see actual good popular literature like Harry Potter or Tolkien instead it was this endless parade of brainless lowest common denominator nonsense. And I get that it's because there are some people who think Harry Potter is offensive, but I want to say that it's just absolute bullshit that my school district banned Harry Potter due to "offending people" but had Mein Kampf on the required reading lists for nearly all of the Honors literature and history courses. If you're going to assign popular books for class reading, please make sure that they actually are popular.

Now to finish off the griping, some of the things that went well.

Critical analysis, logic, and rhetoric.

When you learn critical analysis, you learn to talk and think more intelligently about the media you're consuming rather than just passively absorb it. It's about putting things in a cultural context and looking at where they fit in with other, similar works. It was interesting because you got to go into a lot more depth with something you're interested in and present your take on it to the rest of the class. It's open-ended and gives you an opportunity to express your viewpoints and learn how to do so intelligently, and also how to engage productively with an analysis of a work you might find disagreeable. It also gives you a reasonably harmless and politically neutral way to introduce the class to styles of argument and formal reasoning.

 

[Batou667]

How to make English lessons not suck? In my opinion, be a "cool" teacher. That's guaranteed to win you the respect and admiration of teenagers.

For example, you could call the attendance register in rap, and demonstrate your youth-friendly credentials by referencing contemporary culture in your lessons, like Lady Gaga and cellphones. Perhaps break the ice and inject a smile into your lessons by occasionally using slang like "fo shizzle, my nizzle", or offering your students a fist-bump.

Good luck!

 

[JohnZ117]

How to make English lessons not suck? In my opinion, be a "cool" teacher. That's guaranteed to win you the respect and admiration of teenagers.

For example, you could call the attendance register in rap, and demonstrate your youth-friendly credentials by referencing contemporary culture in your lessons, like Lady Gaga and cellphones. Perhaps break the ice and inject a smile into your lessons by occasionally using slang like "fo shizzle, my nizzle", or offering your students a fist-bump.

Good luck!

You're trying to doom the o.p. and we all know it.
Ot, the truth is, in school many, or most, students are there because they are forced to be there, and they might [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U/] not belong on their current level, so it's quite likely to suck for them no matter what. Your best bet is to try to present the material in an atypical yet comprehensible manner, utilize projects and other activities that give the students more agency [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T39kYzzv_3Q/], and don't go crazy with homework and tests.

P.s., I am in Texas, fortunately graduated before they took the word "slavery" out of the textbooks.

 

[Mister K]

Would a comment from a non-English speaking country citizen be apreciated?

If no, then sorry.

If yes: Well, here is a thing. I live in Ukraine and when I was still a kid, the majority of people were old enough to live in and remember USSR. And, as you all probably know, unless you were a diplomat, knowing anything but Russian was completely unneccessary. As my generation grows in social position the percantage of English-speaking Ukrainians increases.
HOWEVER, those who taught us English in schools (hell, I've encoutered such people in Uni) are/were from older generation and older generation knows how to teach only by the book: they teach you rules, they teach you grammar and that is it.

What saved me was the fact that my family had a satelite dish and I had an access to Cartoon Network since I was about 3-4 years old. Through cartoons (and later computer/videogames) I got interested in English and I got a headstart. In my class, the only other guy who was as good with it as I was also watched cartoons in English. So, I think that kids should get a taste of English, get interested in it and then given proper education.

 

[Jack Action]

Would a comment from a non-English speaking country citizen be apreciated?

If no, then sorry.

If yes: Well, here is a thing. I live in Ukraine and when I was still a kid, the majority of people were old enough to live in and remember USSR. And, as you all probably know, unless you were a diplomat, knowing anything but Russian was completely unneccessary. As my generation grows in social position the percantage of English-speaking Ukrainians increases.
HOWEVER, those who taught us English in schools (hell, I've encoutered such people in Uni) are/were from older generation and older generation knows how to teach only by the book: they teach you rules, they teach you grammar and that is it.

What saved me was the fact that my family had a satelite dish and I had an access to Cartoon Network since I was about 3-4 years old. Through cartoons (and later computer/videogames) I got interested in English and I got a headstart. In my class, the only other guy who was as good with it as I was also watched cartoons in English. So, I think that kids should get a taste of English, get interested in it and then given proper education.

Bah, there's little to no point in, uh, "proper education" when it comes to English here in the East. A year or two of reading/posting on forums will help a hell of a lot more than 10 years of "proper" learning.

At best, if you stick to learning what you learn in school, you'll end up speaking in a mechanical, excessively proper manner (the exact opposite of your inevitable chronic inability to pronounce words correctly because your teacher couldn't either); which is going to make anyone who can actually speak English feel like their brains are flowing out of their skulls through their ears the second you try and talk to them.

 

[MysticSlayer]

American

High school English wasn't that bad. We were told to read a section, answer questions to indicate we paid attention, and occasionally told to analyze a character or theme. None of the teachers I had really tried to encourage a particular stance, and I don't recall analysis getting too crazy.

College, however, is where it went insane. It was essentially, "Is there significance to this thing the professor finds significant? You know the answer." There was also a section where the professor had us reading some relatively political stories, and she made it rather clear that she didn't agree with my position. She was a good teacher overall and still gave me a good grade for that assignment because I argued my position better than most, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that the entire course was designed to drive us into a particular way of thinking about certain imagery and ideas in stories. There was also the fact a lot of it seemed to be really forced.

 

[omega 616]

11 to 18 in secondary school? I left at 16 ...

On topic. English would be enjoyable if they drilled the boring crap into you and THEN moved on to more interesting stuff. Learning when and where to use punctuation being the crap and then move onto interesting stuff like the good writers.

I'd also appreciate it if education would stop swooning over bloody Shakespeare! It's been nearly 400 years! MOVE THE FUCK ON!

 

[KenAri]

UK here, speaking about my high school English lessons;

I disliked the lesson right up until GCSE level (ages 14-16). It was 100% reliant on my teacher. The subject matter isn't something that young people are interested in; I believe lessons only become interesting if the student is able to appreciate what the practical applications of the lesson itself will be.

Mathematics is another example; 'When will I ever use this?' and 'I'll always have a calculator on my phone' are famous sayings, and it's only once one learns to appreciate that maths isn't there to teach you specifically how to measure circles, but rather to open your mind to comprehending things of that level and nature. It's a brain-training lesson more than anything. Once you understand that learning mathematics will genuinely make you smarter across the board, it suddenly becomes a much more interesting subject.

With English, the practical applications quite often come down to showing off. Whether you're trying to charm a lady with finely-crafted words, or present yourself as an intellectual among others, a larger vocabulary and the ability to make sentence structures dance is vital. With this in mind, I think that the person you're trying to impress is the most important part of making students interested, and in my case I wanted to impress my teacher. It's one of the lessons where praise from the teacher is incredibly effective;
In a lesson like Science, there's usually only one 'right' answer, and praising a student for being right is great, but it doesn't encourage them to try harder. With language, there's a level above 'right' and 'wrong', and I think introducing that concept to students early is very important to making them want to keep improving.


Could write more if this is the sort of answer you're looking for, but I don't want to rant needlessly if it's not.

 

[Scarim Coral]

UK here and my English lessons were kinda different...

Due to my upbringing (British Born Chinese) English was more difficult for me so I was put in the "special need" English class.

During my Highschool, I go to the special need English instead of the other normal English classes and it kinda suck (while my mates were reading about the 101 Dalmatians, I read crappy stories about the "Con man"). Ok sure those lesson apply to those whose English were as bad as my but I had my own specialist due to my ethnic background to help my English futher.

Ok I getting out of topic, long story short, I eventually did get back into normal English and it was kinda alright for the most part I guess.

Like
Reading and doing English work on a novel which my was Maya Angelou biography "I know why the cage bird sing" and the novel "The Inspector Call" and these two other books I had forgotten the names to.


Dislike-
Anything Shakespare
Poems
Reading out load
Spellings tests

PS Oh this was during High School althought I was in special English lessons at Primary School aswell.

 

[FPLOON]

English: We make gibberish seem literate to the common masses...
English: Stealing words and making them our own since the "dawn of time"...
English: Catchphrases welcome even when unnecessary...
English: It's better to learn by example...
English: Nerg'HG'wnb'na'ornb'nerb!

Other than that, despite loving all my English classes both past and present, I never like when we had to come to the same conclusion/interpretation of a particular story, play, etc. especially when it had multiple conclusions/interpretations...

 

[09philj]

This response comes from England...

I only remember my GCSE English lessons well, so I'll talk about that. I enjoyed English Literature well enough, despite not liking essay subjects as a whole, but hated English Language. The simple reason is that we had a better teacher and better set texts for the former than the latter. The reason my Lit teacher was good is that he worked through the texts at a steady pace and took time out to tell us about the context of the texts in an interesting way. It helped the main text we studied was Of Mice and Men which is short, simple, and fairly interesting, as is the other text we did, An Inspector Calls. Had we been made to study, say, To Kill a Mockingbird I would likely have gone insane.

 

[Korenith]

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

Yeah I've heard a lot of people say the same thing. Treating English as a "right and wrong" subject is always a mistake. As long as you back up your opinion it should all be acceptable.

First, reading aloud. I just absolutely hated this. I was always a quick, fluid reader, and the worst thing is when someone else is reading and is apparently, despite being 16 and speaking English as a first language for his or her entire life, barely literate. This continued up until my junior year of high school. Don't make them read aloud.

Second, group projects. Don't do it, just don't. The first problem with this is that your instinct as the teacher will be to try and mix high-performing students with low performers in the hope that the good students will help the bad ones. That never, ever happens. Best case scenario, the good student does everything, worst case, the bad students drag down the good ones. This may even be flat-out required of you because of some idea that it will prevent "tracking" (because heaven forbid schools try to help students with high potential make the most of their abilities). The second problem is that there is nothing about reading, writing, and analyzing literature that is somehow improved by arbitrarily making 3 teenagers pretend that the project was a group effort.

The reading aloud bit is totally true. When the main character's lines have to be read by somebody with serious confidence issues it makes it harder for everybody, especially the poor sod having to read it.

Group projects do tend to cause issues but I think general group work, bouncing ideas off each other in small groups etc., is worth doing and stops it all being about what the teacher says.

I disliked the lesson right up until GCSE level (ages 14-16). It was 100% reliant on my teacher. The subject matter isn't something that young people are interested in; I believe lessons only become interesting if the student is able to appreciate what the practical applications of the lesson itself will be.

I like this point. So many times in Maths I heard people ask when the hell the knowledge they were supposed to be gaining would be of any use at all. A bit of real world relevance would help keep some people interested (hopefully).

And good to see the inevitable hatred of Shakespeare has turned up Thank you Omega616. Making Shakespeare interesting to school kids is probably the hardest task of any English teacher

 

[StormShaun]

I'm another Australian, who was educated in a private school until 2012.
The English class was horrendous. The whole funny thing about this story though, is that I was in the class with the lowest skills, and yet now, ironically, I'm studying writing at a university level. Sure, my major is "Creative Writing", but that is still writing.

The system just feels horrible to people like me, who rely more on the creative side on their brain. The English class was unbalanced, focusing more upon essays, papers, and the more logical formats of writing. This of course, did not interest me, so I didn't put much effort into it. Even when we did study how to create a story, they barely put any time into it. By the actual assignment/tests, I had the imagination of what to create, yet not the information on how to create it properly.

Not only that, there wasn't much effort into placing the basics of writing, spelling, and grammar into the students. So no wonder why we were in the same damn classes year after year. Also it's like how the first Australian poster said, you do it how the teacher does it, and boy, the teachers I received were terrible. Sure, it's partly understandable, since many of classmates were damn arrogant pricks who wouldn't shut up in the lessons.


Still, that is no damn excuse to not teach me probably, especially since this was schooling in the private sector.
This is why, when I'm going to become an author of great reputation, I'm going admit that school did nothing for my writing skills. In fact, I'll give all the credit to the Technical and further education/TAFE institutions. They were the ones to give me this skill. Of course though, I'll thank my university for allowing me to hone my skills, and the general experience of life.

To think that this country is cutting the budget to the TAFE institutions. It rather disgusts me.

 

[Creator002]

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

Yeah, that's basically what the last 2-3 years of high school English is like in Aus. Analysing books, articles, movies, and chewing gum wrappers beyond the point a philosopher would and writing essays on them. Absolute. Fucking. Bullshit.

Additional info: Regular public school, left in 2009, started 2004. We start high school here right after primary (elementary) school, so ages are from 12/13 to 18/19.

 

[Ronald Nand]

I went to an Australian Public school and I hated English class ever since Year 10. My reccomendations would involve changing the whole curriculum, but here goes.

Firstly I'd move Shakespeare, Austen, Bronte and anything older than 100 years to Advanced English class, let people who actually want to go deeper into literary analysis study these. There's nothing worse than being forced to read Shakespeare's plays where you need a wall of text on the side just to understand what people are saying! This just turns people off English class entirely, especially when you open with a play as stupid as Romeo and Juliet or one his Comedies, if we're going to suffer Elizabethan English let us actually study a good play (Macbeth, Othello). If we must study Study Shakespeare, don't have the class just read the play, let them go on a trip to see the play in action, or have some roleplay of important scenes of the play.

Secondly give students an actual choice about what they want to study, rather than the teacher choosing the text they like or are familiar with. Students aren't motivated to study and analyse something they would've never chosen. And the teacher choosing the text is a good sign that they want you to regurgitate what they think and declare the work a masterpeice rather than come up with your own ideas.

Thirdly have a fifty-fifty split with Visual and Written mediums, and have some modern and popular works. My English was nothing but old books and old poems, the one time I actually enjoyed English was when we were studying the Social Network. When students become adults they're going to see alot of Films and TV Shows, so why not teach them how to analyse them meaningfully? Instead of just teaching them books and poems, and lets face it, a majority of students will not go deeper into literature, especially poems, whilst a majority will at atleast consume visual media.

In short bring Mandatory English classes into the 20th Century, replace old texts and old mediums with new texts and mediums, and give students agency. Let the stuff in the current curriculum become Advanced English, something that will be taken by students because they want to, not because their forced to.