Winterborn wrote: ↑Wed Feb 23, 2022 9:06 am
An author I follow posted his letter to the school board after some concerns were raised about the English class his son is in. The letter is fairly lengthy but does give some good examples of what is going on in that particular school.
My son is in (redacted) Honors English class at Morgan High School (Utah). Recently her teaching methods have caused some controversy. As a professional writer I would like to address her curriculum—which appears to be far more about leftist indoctrination than English skills—and as a parent, the principal’s lackluster response to our voiced concerns.
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After I was approached by these parents, I asked my son about this class. To give you an idea how bad it is, (my son) told me that “it sucks”, he had learned absolutely nothing, but he was getting an A because he’s good at “telling the teacher whatever she wants to hear.” My son wasn’t learning any English skills at all, but rather how to play a political game.
I was appalled to hear that they would be spending the entire trimester on a single book, The Great Gatsby. Three months? I have nothing against The Great Gatsby, but to put this in perspective, it is only 47,000 words. My copy is 210 pages. The audio book is only 4 hours long. By novel standards it is extremely short. My smallest novel is more than double that, and my average is triple. Basically I’ve written longer books in less time than this class is being forced to analyze what’s basically a turgid novella.
It doesn’t matter how good a book is though, because tortuously analyzing any book for three months would make it awful.
You might be wondering, how in the world does an honors English class stretch out a tiny book for that long? Easy. You just talk about a bunch of contemporary political issues—which aren’t actually in the book—day after day, all from a biased leftist perspective.
You might think I am exaggerating for political effect. I’m not. My son was happy to show me some of his homework, and the assignments are simply absurd. Here’s an example.
https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/02 ... Lreo0PIeGs
Keep us updated on what happens (if anything) .
I loved this part
The assignment was another of these deconstructionist nonsense things, where the student was expected to force a work into a proper leftist bucket based upon their feelings. They used a short Hemingway story, and (the student) looked at it through feminist lenses to explain why he felt the protagonist was a terrible person.
Professionally speaking, his sentence structure was clunky, and he couldn’t decide if he was going for colloquial voice or not, but it certainly wasn’t a zero. By the directions on the homework assignment, (the student) not only did it correctly, he also used one of the other encouraged lenses as well, by pointing out she was a vapid consumer with a pointless life, he accidentally used a Marxist deconstruction of the bourgeoise class. That’s nonsense, I know, but this whole thing is nonsense. The fact is this particular kid got zinged for not parroting the correct nonsense.
Meanwhile, my son just made up some crap about how the rain represented sadness and got an A. That’s great that he’s learning how to placate leftists, but I’d kind of like him to learn English in an English class.
This is a continuation of a trend where our "educators" aren't really educating. They're teaching to the test or they're badly distilling complex, historical issues into digestible tidbits which present themselves as fact i.e. The USA fought the Civil War to free slaves (they didn't). They don't encourage critical thinking at all and from all appearances, they don't tolerate constructive criticism.
They do a good job with the College World Series. 
