Tuesday

31 October 2017

— light frost on the picnic table

Good Morning All,

One reason I decided to retire in June of 2013, (other than being sixty-seven, other than having taught at the school for thirty years, and other than the school then being run by an incompetent nincompoop of a headmistress and a not-so-crpyto-Nazi director), was that the International Baccalaureate had introduced an alternative to its just about perfect course in English Literature. 

Let me first say something about the traditional IB English Lit. course. It was a challenge for the students and teachers both, particularly at our school where my colleagues and I taught a syllabus of heavy hitters put together by the school’s first English teacher, Barbara Sapens, in the late 1970s. Here’s what my students and I covered during the two-year program:

Fiction: Crime and Punishment; Huck Finn; Great Expectations; The Scarlet Letter, The Stranger; Metamorphosis.

Plays: Oedipus Rex; King Lear; Hamlet; Doll House; Glass Menagerie; Death of a Salesman; Rhinoceros; Waiting for Godot.

Poets: Focus on:  Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge; Housman, Frost, Heaney, and representative poems from dozens of other poets.

Non-Fiction: Virginia Woolf, George Orwell.

From those texts and authors, the students had to write a take-home essay on World Literature (which was graded by external examiners), and deliver a fifteen-minute oral commentary on one of the poems we’d discussed in class (graded by me, but moderated by external examiners.) They also had to write 2 two-hour exam papers in May of 12th grade. Paper #1 was a commentary on a poem or prose passage that they had not (unless lucky) ever seen. Paper #2 was an essay on Drama, Fiction, or Non-Fiction. Both papers were graded by external examiners. 

We spent our time with close-readings of the texts as well as discussing the aspects of the genre they were in, because the exam questions coming from Geneva were always genre questions. For example, here were the two Fiction options one year: 

Prose: The Novel and Short Story  

Either

(a) The reconciliation of the drives of the intellect and those of the emotions has often concerned writers of fiction. In what ways have the two impulses been treated in works you have studied and with what effects?

or

(b) How far has confidence in the reliability of the narrative voice or voices had an impact on your appreciation of works of fictional prose? 

I had a wonderful time teaching that course! Lots of my favorite works to discuss with my students, plus getting to bring in as reference and comparison the works we’d done in grade 10, Catcher in the Rye, Old Man in the Sea, Of Mice and Men, Dubliners, Macbeth; Streetcar Named Desire, and others.

As for the kids themselves, a great many of them after graduating (some a quarter of a century after graduating), have dropped by the school, met me at a pub in town, or sent e-mails, telling me that once they got over the terror of so much to do in so short a time, they, too, enjoyed the course, and—better—the books had stayed with them, and—best—had helped them work through one dilemma or another.

Okay, now for the new alternative English course the IB began offering during my last three years: Happily, there is still some literature,  maybe even as much as a quarter of what is in the Literature course. The rest of the time is spent on reading and writing in such non-literary genre as business English and advertizing copy, plus familiarity with such new-age genre as the Graphic Novel, otherwise known as epic comic books. 

So, here you are a tenth grade student making your IB choices. Keep in mind, you also have five other courses: a math, a science, a foreign language, a humanity, and a free choice of something in the arts or a second subject in, say, science or the humanities. You will also be taking a twice-a-week class in Theory-of-Knowledge, which examines how we know—or think we know—things in those various areas. And you will be writing a 4,000 word Extended Essay on a topic of your choice in one of the subject areas. 

Do you opt for the traditional English Literature course or the Dumby English course?  

Which is to say, it was not difficult for me to see in 2010 that the writing was on the wall. I did manage to avoid having to teach the Dumbie English course, mostly by browbeating my tenth graders to hang in there with me. But it was only a matter of time. And, indeed, the English Literature course is now—though still theoretically available—gone from my old school.

Yikes, when I got up this morning, my plan had been to celebrate John Keats’s birthday by treating you all to my own poetry commentary on his brilliant To Autumn, which—the poem, not the commentary—I am attaching, just in case I can tempt you, especially if I can persuade you to read the first couple of lines aloud so that you actually sense your mouth feeling as full as the bountiful harvest the poem describes.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps: