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by Richard P. Sinay (Author)
In a short story by Shirley Jackson called "The Lottery," she makes a fundamental comment about human society. She implies that people continue to perpetuate traditions regardless of the tradition. The townspeople have a lottery every year, and the "winner" of the lottery is stoned to death. After the stoning, the people go about their business like nothing happened. I suggest that English departments have established traditions that have continued for decades without a constitutional change because they have such entrenched traditions that no one sees the importance and the necessity to change them. I am writing this memoir to open the conversation about those traditions that have seriously affected our children's literacy. We will look at some of those traditions at the high school and college campuses where I taught for quite a few years.
I wrote Confessions of an English Teacher: A Memoir of My Teaching Years to share the problems I discovered as a high school and college English teacher in California schools. They are indeed my confessions, even though confessions imply I did something wrong. I did nothing wrong except that I could not do anything about what was wrong. There needs to be a correction to the long-standing tradition of teaching English. These corrections are all valid criticisms of two institutions that have disregarded change too much. I taught at six high schools in Orange County, California, from 1973 to 2008. I also taught at seven community colleges from 1978 to 2018, including one in another state. During my career, I learned that watching colleagues teach English was a perpetuation of problems I saw as far back as my high school days in the 1960s. While those who teach English have improved their approach, much remains to be done.
I will share my experiences teaching English throughout my career. Although some of these stories might sound negative, they do not reflect my feelings about teaching. I loved teaching, and I was good at it. I was a well-respected teacher by my students and colleagues, more so at the college level than the high school level. I enjoyed doing what I was required to teach but saw some things that could be improved. After all my education, I discovered that how English was being taught needed to be clarified for me. There needed to be more consistency in the teaching of English. Much of the English instruction has remained the same for fifty or more years, so I questioned why the system perpetuated itself without significant change. The book's structure takes the reader through the sequence of schools I taught. Each school's English department operates differently, and I highlight differences in each school's chapter. The schools are the settings for those incidents that illustrated my concern about teaching English and other educational matters. There will be scenes where English teachers earn their criticism as teachers. There will be scenes where English teachers embarrass themselves with their lack of knowledge. There will be scenes showing English teachers teaching literature poorly. There will be scenes the public might not want to know about. There will be illustrations of how incorrectly teachers handle the evaluations of writing. There will be scenes where I question the hiring practices of both high school and college. There will be scenes where I question grammar teaching at both the high school and college levels.
