Language Investigation #3

In primary schools I remember being asked to read a lot of the more "classic" adolescent literature. Night, Bridge to Terabithia, and The Giver are a few that stick out in my mind. They were shorter books that had some sort of moral we were to draw from it. There wasn't much of an expectation for us to read outside of class, but I did it anyway because I really loved reading. We were given plenty of time in class to read the books, and often times we read out loud as a group, discussing as we went. In regards to writing, most of what we did were worksheets and warm-up like exercises, such as Daily Written Language. We worked with verb tenses, finding the differences between adjectives and adverbs, and learning spelling (such as the difference between "there", "their", and "they're"). Any papers we had were very short and followed a very specific template that the teacher gave us. The papers always had to incoporate some sort of genre or part of speech that we were learning about. Was this useful? In some ways, I suppose. I've never messed up the different "to's" or "there's", that's for sure. However, I also didn't retain much of what we learned or read. It was all very surface level, very much rote memorization.
Once I hit secondary school, things changed immensely. I was thrown right into writing long essays (at least long for secondary school). There wasn't much instruction given. They threw us in with the lions and let us figure out how to survive on our own. I remember that essays were graded very harshly, as well. My writing did improve very quickly because I insisted on getting good grades, but I was forced to visit my teachers outside of class in order to learn what they expected from our writing so that I could get those grades. The templates were gone, the specific prompts were gone, and my creativity and imagination had certainly suffered due to the strict requirements I was given in primary school. The completely freaked when I received my first essay assignment that allowed for us to choose our own topic. Poetry was also a new genre that was introduced in secondary school. Rhyming was everything to my teachers, and looking back, I realize how ridiculous and forced that was. We never wrote argumentative or persuasive essays. They usually were research or summarizing papers. Boring. This is an important skill to have, I know, but I feel as though my teachers could have mixed it up a bit. Why did they teach just these methods? Maybe they were trying to keep things at a level that wasn't too challenging so that they didn't leave any of the students who were having difficulties behind. All the students suffered because of it, though. We still did the Daily Written Language, and a lot of it was simply repetition from primary school. In regards to reading, we still stuck with the classics. Contemporary literature was not of import. We read Shakespeare, Dante's Inferno, Of Mice and Men, and other such books. They were definitely more challenging and required a bit of reading outside of class, but they were still discussed in their entirety in class, so reading them wasn't really a requirement.
I know my teachers were trying to give us the best education they could, but English classes in both primary and secondary schools were kind of... well... lame. I don't feel as though anything new was really introduced. They needed for us to learn the basics, so they repeated the basics for years (probably so we could pass the tests). Grammar was a focus every year, as were parts of speech. They were always strict graders in regards to these aspects of English. Vocabulary was also important. We had to mix up our language if we wanted to get a good grade, whether or not the mixing up was really necessary. You couldn't use the word "I" in your writing. You couldn't say "said" more than twice in a dialogue. Bla bla bla. It was useful, sure, but it could have been so much more.
When I arrived in college, I was completely unprepared. I didn't take Composition until my sophomore year, and that was a huge mistake. When a teacher assigned a persuasive essay in one of my first classes, I was lost! I didn't want to raise my hand and tell her that I had no idea what that entailed because it seemed like everyone else was following her. I knew how to summarize. I knew how to explain. I knew how to describe. But how to argue in a paper? I needed help. I had to visit her outside of class and get her assistance. I struggled with that paper and many more to come until I finally got into College Comp. That class helped me so much. My high school teachers had tried to prepare us, but they failed in the worst of ways. If I hadn't gone to see nearly all of my professors outside of class my first semester, I probably would have flunked out. Fortunately, I was blessed with great professors that year who helped me to grow more as a writer in a matter of months that my secondary teachers had done in years.