Teach for Australia: an education revolution
Written by Steven Schwartz on September 4th, 2008
In today’s Australian newspaper Noel Pearson and I discuss a plan for an exciting new direction for education in Australia.
The Teach for Australia project, a collaboration between Noel’s Cape York Institute, Macquarie University and the Boston Consulting Group, aims to revive the idea of public service among young people by encouraging the brightest Australian graduates to spend two years teaching disadvantaged students in urban and remote areas.
Teach for Australia is a home-grown version of the British Teach First and US Teach for America programs, which have changed the lives of low-income students and their teachers.
In a recent speech Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called on talented young graduates to try teaching. Teach for Australia would be one way of enabling them to do that.
As Noel and I point out, last year 25,000 US university graduates applied for a place in the Teach for America program. Applicants were from some of the most prestigious universities in the country, including Yale and Harvard. The British program attracted similar applicants.
Teach for America was the brainchild of Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, who wanted to do something to close the achievement gap that blighted the opportunities of children from low-income families.
Kopp’s scheme relies for its success on elite students being idealistic enough to postpone their careers and give back to the community. But idealism is not the only reason graduates participate - the skills they acquire and their positive social attitude is attractive to employers in and outside education.
Britain’s Teach First has tapped into the same combination of idealistic and practical motives. Not only are graduates rushing to teach, the principals of low-performing schools are delighted to receive them because the scheme works: test results of school students taught by Teach First recruits are good and getting better.
Although many recruits leave their schools at the end of the two years, more than half of Teach First teachers have stayed beyond their two-year commitment. In the US, two-thirds of Teach for America teachers have remained involved in education as teachers, principals, policymakers or school board members.
Teach for America and Teach First, non-profit organisations, are examples of how to reform the delivery of public education. They do not devalue the teaching profession, but work to support it.
Noel and I believe that if thousands of top American and British university graduates can be convinced to apply for teaching jobs, so can the brightest Australians.
It would be a real education revolution.
I think that this teaching initiative deserves credit and reflects well on Macquarie University. The cognitive, linguistic, and psychological skills that need to be taught start with adaptation and orientation.
Students are orienting to language poorly because close reading is a lost art, and because there are so many distractions, including American composition handbooks, AP manuals, the SAT, TOEFL, and the most malformed method in English teaching, American school rhetoric.
There is an article in the current Harper’s on how Kaplan is entwining itself around high school curricula in New York, but the lesson of that article is not being assimilated. Did we collate the Harper’s article with the ETS Europe disaster in UK marking? No, we did not. In Australia, some people mistakenly think that New York schools could be a model for reform. You are dreaming, people. Read the Harper’s article carefully, or ask someone to explain it to you. I would be willing to do so.
In Vancouver, Canada, there are obvious problems with English teaching that could be addressed in a matter of months, without elaborate “studies” that lead nowhere. First, there is no understanding of long-cycle and short-cycle learning. The teaching of Shakespeare is superficial in the extreme (it is not unknown for high schools in the region to teach “translated” Shakespeare). The work is assembly-line: once a play has been “taught,” the students do not see it again.
The best long-cycle Shakespeare play is “Macbeth,” since it is by far the most powerful play for teaching the sound systems of English, so that it is useful for all levels: sound, vocabulary, grammar, and semantics.
Every student should study “Macbeth” minutely from grades 7-12, at least once a year, for the six years (the Oxford school’s version would be fine for the first three years). Macquarie University should have its Linguistics professors design a complete and clear description (to be posted on the Internet for free use) of the sound patterns of “Macbeth,” and of the sound systems of English as taught through this play. There should be extensive Internet video discussions of “Macbeth” by Macquarie English professors.
Macquarie Linguistics and English professors should also design a limited Internet database of poetry, composed of about 60 lyrics from 1600 to 1900, and including “Paradise Lost” Book IX for performance. The idea would be to describe the sound systems of English meticulously so that students would eventually develop an accurate picture of what would be learned in first year university phonetics and phonology courses, as enriched by poetry and “Macbeth,” and then be able to give a coherent account of the sound systems.
The most striking limitation of Linguistics is that even though phonetics and phonology are extremely practical subjects, professors have not been able to grasp the power of poetry in teaching them. Therefore, spoken international English languishes in TOEFL land, so that students from China and Saudi Arabia are disadvantaged.
Macquarie English and Linguistics should form partnerships with Columbia University in New York and Birmingham in the UK so as to work the time zones with the goal of producing the prototype Internet “Macbeth” and poetry tools by this December.
John Donne’s “The Flea” should be included in the poetry database, along with eight sonnets by Shakespeare. “The Flea” provides some interesting challenges in cohesion. What is “this” at the end of the first line, and “that which”? What about “this” of “this cannot be said”? Explain the “this” of “this, alas!” Be sure that you make the meanings explicit in words (no pointing). Make sure that you can explain in coherent sentences. Make sure that you understand the transformed language sometimes needed to flesh out a “this:” (”this enjoying, this being pampered, this swelling with the mingling of bloods”). Pregnancy implied. If not more. Chained cohesion can be particularly subtle to describe: a spectacular example of collapse in attempting to do so is in Harold Bloom’s misreading of Emily Dickinson’s “The Tint I cannot take–is best–” in his “The Western Canon.” The manners of the squirrels?
The most serious complaint that students have coming out of high school in Vancouver is that they do not understand poetry. They are remarkably befuddled by cohesion. The first step is to study cohesion carefully and repeatedly in the best introduction, chapter nine of the COBUILD English Grammar, after having mastered the COBUILD Intermediate. The essential idea is to integrate chapter nine on cohesion with the COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary by looking up the reference nouns listed in the boxes in the grammar so as to practise sentence making.
If you try to teach cohesion in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” to the modern student, there is likely to be panic, because the school teaching “methods” for cohesion and coherence are so weak.
The professors putting together the long-cycle “Macbeth” and poetry Internet sites should look for every opportunity to integrate levels of the language. The rule now in the schools is to have no method for any level, so obviously there can be little integration of levels. In “The Flea,” in “Cruel and sudden, hast thou since/ Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?”, we have two lines foregrounding by one precise chiasmus the striking perception of the fingernail purpled “in blood of innocence,” the “l” of “Cruel” and the “n”s of “sudden” and “since” reversed in “nail.” Yet overlapping this chiastic “nail” we observe the paraphonic and continuing “l” to “n” of “Purpled thy nail” and “blood of innocence,” reinforcing the “nail” sound synthesis.
One of the most valuable poems for the study of chiasmus is “The Sick Rose,” in which the final word “destroy” cryptically enciphers “Rose” in “es” and “ro,” a graphic chiasmus. There could not be a better poem for the study of paraphonics than “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Students do not hear the sound patterns, so they cannot discuss their significance. Therefore, they systematically lose opportunities for perception and composition. If we were to analyze the Abrams entry on “symbol” in his glossary of literary terms, we would note the poverty of references to the sound patterns in “The Sick Rose,” as if they hardly existed. Students should examine this entry and write their own on symbolic chiasmus. They should always work on production, never on the barbaric multiple choice of American test manuals.
The Flea by John Donne
MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas! is more than we would do.
O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck’d from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
‘Tis true; then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.
[Discuss “sacrilege” in “The Flea.”]
This seems like yet the next rendition appealing to altruism and people’s good nature to fill a well known problem, of which every other attempt using this solution has failed (people have been told what a wonderfully rewarding career teaching is for years). If you want good teachers, you need to pay them reasonably compared to other professions, and new graduates need to believe that they will get paid reasonably across a career. You may as well also be realistic from the start (i.e., there’s lots of administrivia, you will get unfairly abused and scapegoated by parents, the public, the government, etc.). If you don’t do that, all the problems we have now, like the best and brightest _leaving_ the profession, will continue.
The more specific problem with this proposal is that what you want to do is send new, inexperienced graduates into some of the hardest places to teach in Australia. Aside from being rather unethical and likely to cause an even higher attrition rate than now, perhaps you haven’t realized this, but very few people leave universities being the best teacher they can be — it takes most people some years to reach their full potential. Given this, if you really want the best teachers in the hardest to teach areas, then you need to find experienced ones currently teaching and think of ways to get them.
Hmm, not sure that sending our graduates out to “Teach for Australia” will do much to advance the teaching of poetry (or appreciation for the sound patterns of English, for that matter). Maybe the VC’s topic could be examined more closely by some of our teacher educators and teaching graduates?
To take up your point about language, though, Clayton, I agree that providing school students with an opportunity to develop such an appreciation would be A Good Thing. And I’d like to see students at University level (including PG level) with a greater understanding of how words, sentences and paragraphs work, how they carry ideas and communicate them in a coherent and logical way, and how to make their words not only functional but… well, beautiful, I suppose. I am thinking of Don Watson’s book, Death Sentence, about the appalling state of public language, when I say that. It’s a bit of a rant, but still a great read.
I’m not a linguist - far from it - but I love language and words. In the English curriculum my daughter is experiencing in her final year of high school, I see a great deal about meaning and understanding of texts. I really like the way they relate and critique texts, consider them from a number of perspectives and take into account the contexts in which they were written and were/are received by their audiences (past and contemporary). But I wish there was a little more in the course that inspires a love of the words themselves and the music they can make.
When I studied English at school, we didn’t do enough of the meaning-making stuff, and so missed out on a great deal of the contextual richness of the texts we studied. But we DID gain a great appreciation of the linguistic richness of the English language, from Chaucer to Donne and Shakespeare, and from 19th to 20th century novels. I still reckon that for sheer musicality you can’t beat the poetry of Hopkins (or at least, he’d be up there with the best) - although I know English teachers who can’t BEAR Hopkins - they find him too sweet and contrived and sentimental. I guess there is still a place for personal taste!!! (Or maybe I am also too sweet, contrived and sentimental… er… maybe not so SWEET…)
Another thing the kids don’t do enough of these days (while I’m being middle-aged about all this) is wordPLAY. They just don’t have enough FUN with words. Fortunately, in my family, wordplay has been a bit of a tradition (along with Scrabble, cryptic crosswords and other word games - is it genetic?) So the youngest generation (aged from 2-17 years) is developing a fine appreciation for words, their sounds AND their meanings, through conversation, games, jokes, puns and metaphor. It’s only in recent years I’ve realised how important this is, and how lucky my brothers and I were to grow up in such a household. (So it’s probably not a “kids today…” sort of whinge - it was probably relatively unusual when I was a kid too - but I wonder if high-pressure modern life leaves even LESS room for this sort of thing?)
Anyway, one thing that greatly concerns me is not so much the spoken English of our students but their written English - I don’t just mean vocabulary and grammar, but the general coherence of their writing (yes, I realise I’ve just switched from middle-aged whinge/anecdote to HE student capability, but it’s a blog, not an essay!).
I have tried to recall WHEN it was that we were taught about constructing an argument in an essay, or structuring a report, or methodically reviewing a text - I’m sure it was in school. But we (in higher ed) are increasingly finding that it’s necessary to go back to these basics with our students - and not only with undergrads but postgrads as well.
How should we best do this? Should these things be part of the introductory or foundation units we will introduce in 2010, should they be taught by linguists or should all of us, in each of our disciplines, learn to teach these skills to our students in context-appropriate ways? (This relates quite a bit to your last post, too, Steven.)
Until we can ensure that our own students have a good grasp of the language and can both practise this and articulate what it is to speak and write well, it might be a bit much to expect even our best graduates to grow this capability amongst our most disadvantaged school students. This is especially the case when a major factor in educational disadvantage may well be a lack of facility with the English language. This doesn’t just apply to those from non-English speaking backgrounds. Some of our most disadvantaged school students are from English-speaking backgrounds but have not had the opportunity to develop their language skills or appreciation.
Teaching Macbeth probably won’t help these students, or at least not straight away. Talking to them, reading to them and playing with them might, though, especially if it can be done in the earliest years of learning. If we send out graduates to do this sort of work for a couple of years (after appropriate preparation) it could well have a huge positive impact on those kids.
Maybe our early childhood education academics would like to comment?
I think this initiative is well thought & should get lot of credit & momentum to make it happen here.
Cathy Rytmeister, Your point about constructing an argument is fundamental. What I would suggest is that Australia fully accept the corpus revolution in Linguistics by employing the COBUILD grammars and advanced learner’s dictionary as official for high school and university. The Longman Language Activator and Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary are both excellent for reference. For spoken pronunciations, http://www.m-w.com is of high quality.
You asked for comment from academics, who tend to play it close to the vest. That is, if you invest time in e-mailing those associated with “English Today,” a natural journal to cover the amazing parasitism of the English language internationally, you may not get a response because academics do not feel that they have any duty to reply to valid comment.
We are burning through hundreds of billions of dollars every year on useless English programs and tests since the fake English business is larger than Wal-Mart’s in revenues, yet academics are willing to put up with these frauds, even though the scams damage the cause of their own universities in that students will not be ready for advanced study, and their own universities will eventually get a bad reputation for exploiting foreign students. That academics do not care is quite a comment on human nature.
It seems to me, Cathy, that you are placing “ESL” students, the disadvantaged, and even those struggling with English generally, in possibly something of a separate category, as if they needed special programming. The idea is to have common English programs as much as possible. This is one of the advantages of the corpus revolution. There is no necessity for separate language streams because the COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar is the only great introductory teaching grammar for both “ESL” and “regular” students.
The ability to construct an argument depends on cognitive skills, including a subtle appreciation of vocabulary, but the fundamental limitation of the schools is that they do not integrate grammar and literature. If we were to practise counterfactual and deductive reasoning, we would find that the best method is to study conditions and modal past perfects in the COBUILD system and then find clusters of the structures in literature. For example, “Great Expectations” is full of counterfactuals, but teachers do not tend to choose a novel because of its grammar.
There are heavy opportunity costs associated with the mind numbing American manuals such as those for the SAT. The writing prompts are exceptionally weak, as if the object were to make the student helpless in constructing an argument. Any education professor willing to support the use of a test without a powerful curriculum being tested directly needs to get into another field immediately. If Australia had a national English test based on one COBUILD grammar and dictionary, along with the Internet poetry database I described here in my last post, “Macbeth,” “Great Expectations,” and five or six other novels chosen for grammar patterns that the students would have to be able to recognize and explain, then your country would be far in advance of the USA (with its absurd NCLB), and the UK (witness the ETS Europe marking fiasco). An honors section of the test could include “No Country For Old Men” (excellent for teaching cohesion) and “The Turn of the Screw” (still very poorly interpreted).
In the UK and the USA, the impression is that education is a bureaucratic process, so that in theory if you followed all the paint-by-number steps of American school rhetoric you could construct an argument, as if a human being were an ape just put through a Kaplan prep course.
Before cognition we have to have orientation to adaptation. What would do more good than anything else would be to think triangulation systematically: the grammar, the dictionary, and the novel working together. Teachers cannot inculcate the first step, the encoding into the fingertips of the desire to turn the pages and integrate the material. You see this bias in the way journalists avoid contact with texts. If you ask them to compare a TOEFL manual with a COBUILD grammar, they do not even touch them, let alone pick out pages for comparison so as to ask penetrating questions. So we do not have a single higher education reporter in the world who can tell us why English is the language most afflicted with parasites.
Could you give me four or five examples of arguments that you would like students to be able to construct, Cathy? Then perhaps we could look at more strategies to build the necessary skills.
Clayton,
It would indeed be good to have an integrated teaching program for all students regardless of background, but the fact is we don’t have that much control over a number of important factors. And so yes, you’re right, I do think that students who fall into those various categories (whether at school or university) do indeed need special programming to build their language capabilities.
Re. the arguments I want students to be able to construct: hard to be specific, but a common problem is lack of ability or perhaps, rather, lack of application of ability to move from the general to the specific and back again, in a clear and coherent way.
Another common difficulty students have is in application of theory to real-life problems without reification of the theory (which we want them to critique, or at least recognise the limitations of, and assumptions embedded in, the theory).
Language usage is also an issue, or rather a set of issues - sometimes grammar is a problem, sometimes vocabulary, but most often students just have difficulty expressing their thoughts clearly and precisely. We see a lot of pretty sloppy use of language in the assignments we mark! Still, that’s probably been the case for centuries…
You are certainly an enthusiastic advocate for your language teaching strategy. Is this because you are involved in its development, or its sale or promotion? Or are you researching this area? What evidence do you have that your system works more effectively than the many others on offer? I suppose I have a bit of a problem with some of your own rather unequivocal language around what the “best” texts are and those you say are “useless”. Perhaps we would expect a little more tentativeness than that, unless you had evidence that was convincing enough to justify your apparent absolute confidence in your assertions. Then again, there might be cultural factors in different interpretations of our blog postings.
And we’ve certainly moved off the topic of Steven’s original posting here! But that’s the way of the blogosphere I suppose…
Cheers
Cathy
memoria, intelligentia, providentia. Perhaps the three most interesting words to mediate on in attempting to assess why students are having such difficulty in assembling evidence and presenting it in the context of their theories.
Frances A. Yates’s “The Art of Memory” is suggestive as an introduction to a subject that is paramount in books on cognitive science in biology sections in major bookstores.
Memory has become partially invisible in modern education, but that it remains dominant not only in cognitive science but also in books in biology sections parasitic on Proust might indicate that we could work on student incoherence indirectly.
A student who wanted to be competitive enough to lead her undergraduate classes should study Yates minutely and learn how to create memory pages. A strong memory creates latent templates that help to organize ideas.
However, it is the hyper-text work off memory pages that is powerful. Students have such low tolerance for ambiguity that it causes them to slip into it often. If they become sensitive to ambiguity, their linguistic skills will not desert them at key points in their arguments. When I have students visualize 60 verb elements of the past, I ask them to picture the ambiguities of “had to know,” as a past-context modal: “Sam had to know about our secret codes to do his work,” or, with a different deductive meaning, “Jack had to know about the penetration into our office because we have him on video looking right at the broken window, the entry point.”
With active, passive, and continuous, we then have six sentences for “had to know,” meaning purpose or deduction. Students seem disorganized since they are taught to be so relentlessly language-insensitive. American school rhetoric does nothing to improve their ability to build an argument in that it assumes the language skills students have failed to develop.
If we assume the language, as our ingrained habit, then we will swallow down all the assumptions in a theory, and reify everything. The linguistic issues are far upstream of what rhetoricians imagine. General language plasticity is far more important than “the ability to construct an argument.”
If we had a grammar of literature, it would help with clusters of subordination, important in presenting and qualifying arguments. Hawthorne and Melville–especially in “The Scarlet Letter” and “Moby-Dick”–are full of clusters of result and manner clauses that have never been adequately described or mined for effect in argumentation in school.
Weak prompts do not help students in handling evidence. If we were to ask them to argue, based on careful choice of quotes, to state that Shakespeare did or did not “compose” “The Book of Daniel” in the King James Bible–the text for comparison would be “Macbeth”–then we could encourage close attention to evidence.
If we were to discover that there has never been a sound interpretation of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” we might realize that much that we think we know is a mirage. If only we could have the students tinker with the thesis statement or something, maybe they would be able to put together a better argument, we think.
But the human mind easily deceives itself. If we examined “Sailing to Byzantium” without assumptions, we might note an insistent patterning on “m” and “g,” Maud Gonne. As in: “Of hammered gold and gold enamelling.” Yet since we have no term “symbolic chiasmus,” we can’t quite assimilate the perception into our routine reading of the poem.
Critics continue to write as if Yeats’s lyric meant what it says on its face, when its irony is a stage deeper than even their eyes can see. It’s like a puzzle of Prudence. The avoidance of meaning is a trained reflex.