Damien pointed to an absolutely wonderful article today: Failing at Living: It’s a blackboard jungle out there: It’s bad enough when the students don’t want to learn, but when they can’t even spell dirty words correctly, can a teacher really expect them to grasp Stephen Sondheim? It’s a rather sad commentary on the state of many inner-city summer schools, and the challenges teachers face in trying to teach those students at the bottom end of the curve. However, at the same time, it is absolutely beautifully written, and gave me quite a few laughs while reading it.
…I glanced around at my remaining students (the ones I hadn’t thrown out of class) as they scribbled away on their final. After five weeks of hearing them tell me that reading “sucked,” I’d finally followed the dean’s sage advice: Let them watch movies. Since he did not say: Let them watch movies they like, I’d made them watch Stephen Sondheim’s thorny Broadway musical “Into the Woods.”
“You are really, really going to hate this,” I’d warned them. “Stephen Sondheim is all about words and they go really fast, and he doesn’t believe in happily ever after. But please hate it silently and take copious notes so that you can pass your final exam.”
Early on in my innocent phase, I would have asked for the context clues that helped us to know what copious meant. But such is the way of innocent phases. “Now, if for some reason you don’t hate this,” I said, “I beg you to keep the news to yourself. Your peers will never stop punishing you.”
There’s also a discussion of this article on MetaFilter that has some interesting points to it.