Mentioning you’re a high-school English teacher in an academic crowd can be like confessing to a love of Red Lobster at a gourmet convention. It suggests you may not have read a novel since the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, and the only critical theory you’ve ever heard of is the close reading so disdained by postmodernism.
I’m exaggerating, of course, and probably a bit paranoid, but teaching high school after four years as a university lecturer, I’ve felt that frisson of disdain. Not long ago, I attended a seminar on teaching Macbeth to teenagers. That Saturday in Chicago started out promisingly with a group of more than 100 teachers from across Illinois, free bagels, and an impressive lineup of talks and demonstrations. We crowded into an auditorium for the opening address, in which a local scholar introduced some background on the play.
I was just beginning to take notes when the scholar said in an aside: “But don’t worry yourselves with New Historicism.” I put down my pen, betrayed as Banquo must have felt when his old war buddy Macbeth turned murderous. I “worried” my students with such literary theories, so why wouldn’t I want to pursue them myself?
To be fair, the comment probably was not intended as a slight, and much of the talk turned out to be useful. But it pointed up a long-held barrier between academics and high-school teachers. Teaching at the secondary level after working at Emory University and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, I have more insight into how to be a good teacher at both levels: I now know more about how college students have been prepared, and about how to help high-school students anticipate college.
So isn’t it time to get beyond this job-snobbery thing? The divide isn’t just one way, though. College professors often harbor the suspicion that their high-school counterparts aren’t intellectuals; high-school teachers secretly believe that college faculty members aren’t teachers — all they’re interested in is esoteric theory. In an ever-tightening academic job market for Ph.D.'s and M.F.A.'s (like me), however, the possibility of entering secondary education is looming larger in the minds of graduate students. We could all benefit from increased dialogue.
It’s not as if the two groups have no contact with each other. More than 50 percent of all secondary-school teachers in American schools have advanced degrees, according to the National Education Association. While many of those degrees may be in primary- or secondary-school education, I would bet that they increasingly include degrees in disciplines that college teachers study. As Ph.D. and M.F.A. programs continue to proliferate, a terminal degree is no longer enough to ensure a tenure-track position at a college.
At the private college-prep school where I teach, the majority of my departmental colleagues have master’s degrees, and some have pursued course work beyond that. It is not unusual to see academic journals lying open on desks in the faculty room. Some of us publish our work, as well.
Writing and teaching high school are not an unprecedented combination, especially when it comes to creative work. The award-winning author Frank McCourt famously did it at public high schools in New York. Kent Haruf, the author of Plainsong and a former colleague of mine at Southern Illinois, worked for years at high schools in Wisconsin and Colorado. The protagonist of his best-selling novel is a high-school teacher. Deborah Appleman, who taught high school for more than eight years before moving to academe, used the experiences as a basis for her influential nonfiction book Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents. She wrote the text as a kind of challenge to the divide between pedagogy and theory, she has said.
I’ve often found myself facing questions raised by my students that I can’t answer directly. “If the story of Beowulf isn’t always Christian, then where does Grendel’s evil come from?” “Why did Oedipus’ sons hang around Thebes after everything happened?” The first question I felt ready to answer after doing some research on Anglo-Saxon paganism and its myriad trolls and demons. But the latter question still haunts me, with its implications about inherited guilt and the continuance of daily life after public devastation.
Both the schools and colleges, however, erect obstacles in the way of dialogue. Secondary schools rarely place much of a premium on publication by their teachers in academic fields: Do that on your own time. And often, if you want to join an academic society or travel to do research, well, find the funds yourself. And by the way, don’t forget the five different preparations for your different classes, or those 100-some essays that you’re grading while monitoring the cafeteria. Fortunately, my high school is more supportive than most, but it is not the norm.
On the other side, while some graduate programs introduce their students to the alternate careers of grant writing and editing or similar positions, the option of teaching high school is largely left out — or relegated to the education department.
I came to high-school teaching from an equally harrying line of work — journalism. I had taken a job as an editor for the Chicago Tribune books section after my stints of teaching college, but after two years I realized that I missed the challenges and atmosphere of the classroom.
When I announced I was leaving the newspaper to become a high-school teacher, more than a few colleagues in academe and journalism raised their eyebrows. But one, a prominent book reviewer for radio, was silent a moment on the phone. Then he said, “That’s the front lines.”
He was right, perhaps more than he knew. The high school where I teach literally sits near the dividing line for two local gangs. One of my brightest students was murdered, and many of the others have had firsthand experience with violence.
The violence aside, we high-school teachers are a sort of literary shock troop. Reading acclaimed literature with students for the first time is bracing work, and a real responsibility. It requires patience, intricate planning, and flexibility. But the students’ unvarnished, raw reactions add urgency to the classroom. More than a few have been brought to tears by Of Mice and Men, some telling me that the story of two Anglo farmworkers reminds them of the plights of their Mexican-immigrant relatives. And while reading Langston Hughes’s poem “Theme for English B,” my freshman students once demanded that they be allowed to write their own poems about their hard-won educational journeys. You can see that kind of reaction at the college level, but often students there have already read or at least encountered major works before they get to your class.
So while teaching literature and writing to college undergraduates, I focused more on analysis, both from a cultural and craft-related point of view. In an upper-level course, for example, my students and I examined the work of Baldwin, Cather, and Hemingway. We did imitative exercises to understand the unique styles of those authors, and read contemporary writers who were influenced by them.
At the high-school level, it usually takes longer to get to that point. I’ll gently correct a student who pronounces Yeats as “Yeets,” or mention that “Southern Ireland” is usually just called Ireland. But planning activities and watching the results almost invariably yields unforeseen rewards. Several years ago, while conducting a talk show with students playing the main characters from Hamlet, a young man who was the Danish prince asked poignantly, “What I want to know is why didn’t I get to be king?”
The question may seem obvious. But I admit that I had become so accustomed to viewing the play from a psychoanalytic perspective that I rarely considered that basic query about power and status.
Another time, during a discussion of Beowulf, a student pointed out that the three trials the great warrior has with Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon were staged a bit like boxing matches on HBO. I began to ask my students to think about how the activity in the lair/ring presented a ritualized way to understand battle, conflict, and heroism, and about the nature of theater and performance.
The encounters with such ideas, spoken and written, are what sustain me as a teacher and writer. No matter how many times people assume that just because I teach high school I must be passionate about the themes of Man Versus Man and Man Versus Nature, or leap onto desks to quote Whitman, I know that the classroom will always offer good and honest questions. As the speaker in Yeats’s “Among Schoolchildren” begins, “I walk through the long schoolroom questioning.”
Carolyn Alessio is an English teacher at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, in Chicago.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 15, Page B5