Are we Telling Lies?
Tim is in the midst of an interesting series of posts about the lies that we tell our students. The "we" refers primarily to secondary language arts teachers. Here's lie number four:
Five lies we tell our students - #4: "This book is VERY important to read!"
In the first series under Lies ELA Teachers Tell, I will discuss the top five lies we tell our students. As with everything we do as teachers, we are well-meaning with these lies. But, in the long-term, these lies hurt our students. I will discuss the lie, what we really mean when we tell the lie, and how we can achieve the same objective.
Why do we tell this lie? How did we become so arrogant as to think we had the right to say which books were important to read and which aren't?
I'm not sure how this became such a common lie, and no doubt there will be some who disagree with me. You can see the comments to the post about why whole-class, teacher-selected books don't work for other's thoughts as well as mine. Let's for a minute forget the cultural capital argument of reading some books over others, however valid of an argument it might be.
What disturbs me most is that when we say this, we take a little power away from students AND hurt their critical thinking. Shouldn't they decide what's important and why? That can be empowering, as well as exercise the critical thinking muscle of evaluating. They would have to be able to justify their reasons for thinking a book is important and we can share how other people define "important". Students can further evaluate others' criteria for "importance". How many perfectly good lessons surrounding this are thrown away when we decide what's important?
Too often, though, we take that power away.
Next time: Lie #3 We Tell Our Students ... "A paragraph contains 3-5 sentences."
For what it's worth, I've never told any student that a paragraph contains three to five sentences. Heck, frequent readers of this blog know that some of my paragraphs contain one sentence. Some of those, one word. I deliberately play with the length of sentences and paragraphs for intentional effect. I'll even use a sentence fragment if it helps convey meaning. Our students should, too. (And the adults that teach them should understand that doing so isn't automatically wrong.)
I'm interested to see what Tim has to say about paragraphs. He's blogging some pretty interesting stuff right now -- if you're not paying attention, maybe he's worth a look.
I've never been entirely comfortable with the 3-5 thing or, quite frankly, any of the "formulas for writing." Every one of them makes the writing predictable, forced, and, well, formulaic.
Posted by: Amerloc | January 13, 2006 at 08:34 AM
Thanks for the heads up on Tim's blog. It looks good.
I think we lie to students sometimes because we want to symplify the subject, to make things easier for them at the time. The problem is that eventually they find out that it isn't quite that simple and then they have to unlearn what we have taught them. I see this a lot in teaching the lower levels of ESL. I am not always sure what I think the best solution is.
But, like you, I haven't told students that a paragraph ahs 3-5 sentences. Some lies seem more heinous than others!
Posted by: Nancy McKeand | January 14, 2006 at 09:12 PM
I believe that if more teachers played sports they wouldn't oversimplify about paragraphs having 3-5 sentences. In sports, coachs have players go through simple and repetitive drills. They then have practices in which those drills are combined. And finally they have real games. What would be the parallel pattern of teaching in writing?
Posted by: Charles Nelson | January 15, 2006 at 06:19 AM