How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
Afterword
Being a teacher of English is one of the best jobs there is; it’s profoundly important whether you are in a secondary school department or it’s one of your many hats as a primary practitioner. One of the beauties of it is that, unlike other subjects, we don’t teach the same thing each year. Each time we read a novel, poem or play it becomes something new and different. Our subject changes because the context we are teaching in changes. The political situation in America changes the way students see power in texts. The contemporary social disparity between poor and rich makes us see Victorian novels as freshly relevant. Each teacher or student brings something new to the study of literature. No two English lessons are ever the same. No two English teachers are the same. No two students’ experiences of English are the same. Literature is too closely linked to the reader and their experiences.
Teachers are some of the best people in the world. They have wit, humour and insight; plus, they have the best put-downs ever. They are the thinkers. They are the dreamers. They are the empathisers who understand people and the world around them. They are quintessentially human.
In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock says the following in response to the injustice he has suffered:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.1
Shylock, like us, lived in a divided world. He saw connections where others didn’t. Shakespeare showed us that we have far more in common than we do differences, and how we are shaped by the people around us. I think this is a great point to end with. Shylock became embittered because of the experiences he lived through. It is vital that English teachers do not give in to such a temptation.
The teenage years are monumental in shaping a person. Our ideas and thoughts, I feel, take root here and linger. I am about to enter my fourth decade, but I can remember Hamlet vividly from my teenage lessons. We have a duty, alongside our students’ parents, to shape and change them for life: emotionally, intellectually and morally. We help students to think and feel. We help them to reflect on their actions. We hold a mirror to society and help them to see how they can make it better. We help them to think and feel before they act. What other subject does that?
Never underestimate your role, your duty and your power in the English classroom.
1 W. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Project Gutenberg ebook edition, 2000 [1596]). Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2243/pg2243-images.html.