Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid that English teachers here are killing Shakespeare. They hardly make their pupils read Shakespeare, but instead try to make it fun! Oh, so much fun. Yes, youngster, let's make fun. Shall I tell you about Shakespeare's dick jokes? Haha, I'm sure you're going to like that and pay attention.

And then all they remember is vague jokes they can't tell, because they don't have the vocabulary.

View on HN

It’s not just trying to make it fun - a lot of teachers just don’t know the material well enough to teach it. My daughter’s English teacher (in a highly regarded high school) taught them that “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” was archaic English for “Where are you?” because Juliet didn’t know where he was (like “Wherefore are my car keys?”, he said). If the teacher doesn’t understand one of the most famous and most important lines in one of Shakespeare’s most read and most taught plays, how will the students ever learn to understand it?

It's not making it fun. It's making them read at all. Go into a classroom of 8-10th grades and have your fucking mind blown. Both comments yours and the guy who says that they don't know the source material anymore are just so unbelievable pretentious and condescending it hurts.

I get where you are coming from (and take no offense). If I understand your intent correctly, you are right that I should be more generous to teachers. In the context of larger educational challenges (and a recovery from the pandemic), I did not mean to suggest that teachers’ intimate familiarity with Shakespeare should be a high priority in our schools, merely that in a perfect world (without other challenges), students would learn Shakespeare better (which I think would be a benefit) from teachers that know the material.

Sadly, our educational system has much deeper challenges than that, and I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. The conversation was about Shakespeare specifically and how his works are taught, not the broader state of education.

OTOH, English teachers once did know their Shakespeare. And Goethe, and Moliere. I had a colleague who could recite some Shakespeare, I even can remember some Heine (even though I hated it), and my former boss could recite the opening of the Odyssey, in Greek. All taught in secondary school. And in these same formative years, my daughter is taught dick jokes. It doesn't require much imagination to see what that does to education. It certainly downgrades the teachers.

Too much emphasis has been placed on knowledge being useful, without actually knowing what comprises useful knowledge, and fun in the classroom, in the unproven expectation to improve performance, while at the same time "broadening" the curriculum and lowering the standards, so more children can participate.

Teaching middle schoolers is just about the worst job in the world. But at least it pays poorly /s

On the contrary, it's one of the best jobs in the world. Kids that age are just old enough to comprehend complex ideas, without (yet) having spent enough time in the educational system to have all of their curiosity and creativity beaten out of them. The best trick is to pitch whatever you want them to do as somehow slightly subversive, and they'll follow you anywhere.

On the other hand, yeah: teaching has been made into one of the worst careers (at least for educated people) there is, which is why I'm not doing it anymore.

it's probably that some people don't think it's the worst job in the world that it continues to pay so little.

for me, it would be. YMMV.

That's fair. Teaching provides immense non-monetary rewards for people who have the temperament and ability to achieve them. (It also provides non-monetary rewards for people with toxic and authoritarian personality traits, but that's kind of a separate issue.) The educational system continues to run (to the extent that it continues to run) because it takes (economic) advantage of people's idealism.

Education isn't the only sector that does that. Medicine has become that, as well. OSS would be a tech-related example.

Some years ago I read a piece, only partly tongue in cheek, by an economist who posited that rates of pay are inversely correlated with the good any particular job does for humanity. I see that observation regularly confirmed.

Shakespeare's dick jokes were equally for the contemporary audience. Man knew his patrons, who didn't all know the finer points of their letters.

I know this won't be a popular opinion but maybe it's just kids not liking being forced to care about stories spoken in an archaic form of english that make them unintelligible and thus unenjoyable to read?

no kid in history has ever liked it. It's the teacher's job to make sure they learn something anyway.

As a former theatre student with a BA in Drana, I love performing Shakespeare, but hate reading it or watching someone else perform it.

The stories may be universal, but everything else about them is a product of the time they were written in. Yes, they’re important but don’t burden kids with having to learn the finer nuances that even escape most adults.

Not everybody has to like it. If you reach 10%, that's good enough. The rest can consume it as general knowledge. At least it'll elevate their knowledge of English a bit more than focusing on dick jokes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com