Authenticity and the Point of Teaching English

Peter Smagorinsky in his book, Teaching English by Design, takes great issue with the current state of English education in the US. He points directly to two culprits that seem to cause a great divide in what/how students should be taught in order to allow for the most personal growth and learning. These culprits are a lack of creativity and originality from teachers and administrators (meaning these educators seem to assume a “one-size-fits-all” type of approach when it comes to teaching students), and a lack of authenticity that often comes along with our system of education. To link one to the other, these two causes both stem from a misconception that all students learn and perform the same in an educational setting. Smagorinsky gives the reader a simple example (p.3) of one teacher asking another to borrow a test that one of them already used. Smagorinsky and I take great issue with this type of unauthentic practice. Being an authentic teacher to me means creating your own materials, tests, homework, assignments, and lessons, catered to the needs of your particular class (that is not to say everything a teacher does and uses has to be free of all influence, but rather that these materials need to be created with the particular class in mind, or adapted to fit). When a teacher takes a lesson or test directly from someone else, I view this as an insult to the students and to the profession of teaching because it shows such a lack of effort in even creating a test (viewed as the “most important part of a unit” by many educators, policy makers, and schools) catered to the authentic material that the teacher should have been planning way ahead of time (i.e. before starting that particular unit, book, etc.). How, given the unauthentic nature of the test, can the teacher expect his students to not exchange answers on homework in the hallway, or look on another student’s test for an answer? This teacher has set the bar very low for themselves as an educator and for their students as a role model of creating authentic material (that is, doing your own work!).

                Teachers, policy makers, and schools often take the “easy way out” when it comes to evaluating our students, simply it seems because it requires the least amount of effort on their part. Providing all students with a generalized test is saying that all students learn the same way and the information we want our students to take away from a given lesson is uniform all around. That is to say, that education as a whole is about each student leaving the classroom with the same knowledge and receiving 100% scores on all the exams and papers we can throw at them. According to Smagorinsky, “Assessments can be deadly for students, too, when the same evaluation is viewed as a universal fit for all students, no matter what shape they are in relative to the test” (p.5). What he is saying is that assessment on any given topic, as well a breadth of knowledge in a student on any given topic, should be looked at with more analysis than a generalized test that requires simple fact regurgitation (aka Transmission, p.7). If a student struggles in succeeding at standardized tests, yet connects deeply to the material and understands its meaning and significance, then usually their skills go unrecognized, or at the very least, unrewarded (in terms of grades as well as by many teachers and schools), even though that particular student may have a much stronger hold on the material than a student who excels at standardized tests and memorization. To me, that is an injustice that discourages personal growth and connection to learning, and similarly, causes many students to grow jaded towards the idea of schooling, education, and the learning process.

                Have you ever heard a statement like, “I hated the Scarlet Letter in high school, but when I re-read it years later, I enjoyed and understood it much more”? Since entering English education, I have heard these types of statements from my friends, parents, colleagues, and even teachers. Hearing people whom I respect say things like this communicates one thing to me: the way the material was presented to you didn’t allow for any personal connection or deeper understanding to be met. Thus, the teacher most likely asked the students a bunch of recall questions based on detail, plot, and action, rather than assisting their students in understanding the meanings, emotions, and beauty of a piece of literature like The Scarlet Letter or Hamlet. Teachers get bogged down in details and elements that are easy to test, rather than allowing for their students to engage with the material, to ask questions, to truly dive into the material. Students nowadays are terrified to be wrong for the most part because their whole lives in the world of education have told them that being wrong is inherently bad (i.e. the bold, red correcting pen) rather than part of a journey towards greater meaning (i.e. learning).

                As I develop as a young English educator at the high school level, I continue to see the pitfalls of how education and learning have had all the exploration and fun taken out of them, to be replaced by Scantron sheets and a standard grading scale. This type of education is binding, suffocating, limiting our students from appreciating and connecting with the great authors and texts. Giving students choices and creating a judgment-free learning environment as a teacher offers a world of possibilities to students that standardization, transmission, and final-draft speech/writing (p.10) can never offer. I know that it is my job to continue to evolve as a free-thinking teacher so that I may offer my students chances to explore and construct information and meaning for themselves rather than assigning official meanings for them. It is also my duty to fairly assess student learning and growth, far beyond five-paragraph essays and multiple-choice tests, by creating authentic and specialized ways of evaluation that meet the needs of my students.

                I leave this blog/rant with this question: Can the point of teaching Romeo and Juliet to our students be summarized and evaluated by a simple Scantron, or is there something much bigger we want them to take away from reading Shakespeare? I know my answer.