And I don’t think I was the only one. I could memorize and subsequently have conversations that would last hours with friends on who was the most impressive rapper of the day and why or what latest sixteen was the coldest. But none of that translated to excellence in an English class. Despite the conversations on bars, I hated poetry units. I couldn’t care less for what Robert Frost actually meant. I didn’t see any connection to my life and the teacher, sure as hell, wasn’t making any attempt to bridge cultures in his classroom. Needless to say, by the time I was a junior, that 65 percent at the end of the term was not only expected but it was weirdly a relief. Ironically, although I had bad English, I guess as the work moved from spelling tests and grammar sheets to paragraph responses and eventually essays, I started to like the subject, despite the poor grades. 

I liked it so much that by the time I walked across the stage at my university’s commencement I was handed a bachelor of arts in English. A few years later, I was working as an apprentice teacher, trying to help 16-year-olds who looked like me unlearn everything they learned about English up to that point. 

People think the biggest challenge in education is the stigma placed on math and the fixed mindset that is developed by children at an early age. Kids simply think they aren’t good at math because they get wrong answers and bad grades. But if we look closely enough, the subject of English is the exact same but complicated through a more insidious tone. Students don’t overtly hate English like they do math; it isn’t expressed in the same explicit manner and demeanour. They are simply told that the climax they picked in 5th grade was wrong, and then they get 6/10 on a spelling test and then a 68 percent on an essay because they didn’t include an opening sentence and put their thesis statement at the end of their first paragraph. Teachers have fallen into teaching language arts the same way teachers teach math – in a pedantic, rule-oriented, and black or white manner. Instead, teachers should be urging their students to actually think outside the box, go against the grain, and use their own intuition when analyzing a text. I tell my students that, “In English class, there is no such thing as a “wrong” answer. As long as you are able to back up your opinions with support and sound reasoning.” And I leave it at that. Because that is what language is. Black English is different from Standard English, and the deeper you dig the more you understand that both are simultaneously dissimilar and correct; any sound linguist will tell you that. And for public school, a more liberal approach to how we understand and assess our students’ perceptions and opinions will ultimately leave our students with more confidence in the most fundamental subject that school offers – English class. If kids grow up thinking they have “bad English”, how are we going to get them to approach any other subject with confidence?

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While undergoing this Thesis project, I have indeed developed my understanding not only on education, but how knowledge itself is spread by discourse. Those countless journal articles I have read over the last few years equipped me with the tools needed to analyze an interview I have with a research participant and tie it into my work. Ironically, a recent language activity with my fifth graders revealed to me that elementary students are already doing this type of work unbeknownst to them. Without the training for how to analyze, I sat back listening to student responses to an activity on inferring and realized that elementary school is super-duper close to graduate school; and it is all in terms of how we naturally make meaning out of things. (I’m sorry; I couldn’t resist throwing in some super-duper easy-to-understand rhetoric. It’s been a while).

For this activity, we watched an animated short film titled, “Pigeon: Impossible”. The film is about a secret agent who faces a problem when a curious pigeon gets trapped in his government-issued nuclear briefcase. Important to the inference activity is that it has no dialogue. After we watched the film, we broke down the understanding of it. My students began to tell me the film would fall under the genre of a spy/espionage work due to the musical score that the creator chose to use, the wardrobe that the main character was attired in, and other visuals such as the font the creators chose to use at the beginning of the film. They elaborated on the pigeon’s personality and cited evidence referring to how they knew he was brave, greedy, and curious. They spoke about the agent’s emotions and how he was frustrated, determined and many other things. And they did all this with my simple question: “How do you know?”

I explained that when we infer, or comprehend, or analyze, or make understanding, we take “clues” from the text and combine them with our “schema” or background knowledge. Nothing complicated. That was my lesson on making inferences. Period over, recess time. I sat in my room alone slowly realizing that I’ve been doing the exact same thing through my qualitative study using phenomenological analysis. Only difference, I was doing it in grad school, them in elementary.

I guess I will make my inference on this experience now: children are born with tools required to make understanding out of things. This amazing gift that is bestowed upon us then gets built up through schooling. Unfortunately, it also gets dumbed down or disjointed by school at times (Pollack piece). The teacher’s second role, especially in the language arts, is to bring out this background knowledge of the world in a way that compliments a text, or in some cases, visa versa. Her primary role is to allow for that expression of opinion to be validated in the classroom. The only challenge then becomes using this background knowledge in an articulate way. That is exactly what my students did when they communicated to me their reasons for knowing certain details about a film with no words, which is the same thing I did when I coded and analyzed interviews and articles for my thesis. Basic stuff, we sometimes tend to forget how easy education can be.

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Our entire education is based on printed text and writing, yet more and more kids are leaving elementary school without the ability to craft a paragraph. I am startled when I walk into an eighth grade classroom and see students produce work without any basic standards of traditional grammar. And I mean, basic grammar. Things like periods at the ends of sentences, capitals at the beginning, topic sentences to start a paragraph, and transition words to continue an argument. We are sending our youth to high schools across the nation and our children cannot write. I am talking about basic writing skills. I was dumbfounded as to why. And then I recently went to a workshop on “the writing process” and it all started to make sense. The reason why these kids can’t write is because the curriculum doesn’t allow them to build on basic writing skills.

Take a look at any Language Arts curriculum. Once you start to read through it you will notice that the overall expectations or big ideas are essentially the same from first grade onto eighth. Students learn and re-learn the same over-arching concepts year in and year out with little attention paid to a scaffolding process that learners must acquire in order to develop as writers. This ideology is unlike any other curriculum. Take math curriculum for instance, students in the primary grades learn basic numeration. They are given the basic tools to learn how to count, and from there go on to learn how to add and subtract. After they have developed those skills they then learn how to multiply. Once they have “mastered” the basics (I used the term “mastered” very loosely, especially these days), they start to learn about more complex mathematical processes that are built on what they first learned. This does not happen with Language Arts in elementary school, as one thinks it should.

We are in such a rush to teach kids how to create different forms of writing like recounts and stories that we forget that we need to teach them the basics of writing. I teach fifth grade and it scares me that the majority of the students come into my classroom without the learned ability to write a proper sentence! And I do not fault their prior teachers. These students are a product of a flawed curriculum. I fault the structure of the curriculum. A curriculum that is based on the assumption that these kids will innately pick up skills as they mature and move on to the next grade level, without any building on what was previously learned. Well, news flash – they don’t.

We need to revisit our Language Arts curriculum and re-think the paradigm of teaching language. Those who create the curriculum that teachers teach need to take a deep breath and accompany those forms of writing with some small steps of how to write. Students in first grade should be learning how to write a proper sentence through the same methods that they learn how count and then move on to doing addition. After they have mastered the basic concepts of a sentence, they can then be taught paragraph writing. These steps would mirror those seen in the mathematics curriculum, where a student first learns counting, then addition and then ultimately multiplication. The Language Arts programs need to follow those similar logical steps and apply them to the curriculum. Kids come to my grade with the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide. So why can’t they write? We need to get back to basics with how we teach our Language Arts. Maybe then students will be able to leave elementary school with the ability to write a short essay. What good are great ideas that these kids may have, without the ability to write them?

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