Because of a series of circumstances (including but not limited to a) my over-eagerness to study in the United Kingdom and b) my desperate need to acquire money despite having nothing to spend it on) I have been spending my pre University days giving tuition to a host of colourful characters. The great thing about tuition is that you get to meet a lot of people you wouldn’t ordinarily have met – the downside is that you’ll have to teach things that you wouldn’t ordinarily have taught. Raised on a diet of thick academic history books and friends who have actually read Hemingway, teaching kids whose standards of English are shockingly low came as a bit of a rude awakening.
One of my students is this little old Indian lady who took it upon herself to go to ITE and learn English. I think this is a very courageous decision and it’s certainly great to hear about someone who, though old, wants to continue learning. Unfortunately, the recent change in the English syllabus has done nothing to help her. Instead of the good old proper comprehension, you now have ridiculous things like ‘name three things that help the advertisement to achieve its purpose – font size, layout, colour of text etc.’ It’s probably done in the name of cultivating a sense of literature (because it’s quite obvious that the comprehension paper is now skewed towards literature) in the young, but I don’t believe that this is the right way to go about doing so.
Literature is great. It’s a really useful subject because it broadens your mind to a lot of different things and allows you to examine situations from different perspectives. After literature (and Knowledge and Inquiry) I never looked at anything the same way again; I’m always digging from hidden meanings and even in a normal book or movie I’m going ‘my god what symbolism’ or other things that make my parents give me strange looks involving raised eyebrows. But the fact of the matter is that English and Literature are vastly different subjects and each of them should be kept to their own arena. This is what is done in JC, with GP and Literature two completely different subjects. Literature requires a standard of English beyond what is regular and this is why only certain types of students choose to venture onto that dangerous path.
By blurring the line, the O level syllabus has made it even harder for students to improve. The simple fact of the matter is that a lot of students don’t have the requisite standard of English to pass a normal comprehension paper, let alone something Literature based. Going back to the little old lady, she doesn’t understand words like ‘weave’ and ‘images’. She asked me to explain to her what ‘bits of sticks’ meant. How is someone like that going to be able to understand concepts like irony and tone and symbolism? And it’s not just her – another student is seventeen years old and can’t string together a grammatically-correct sentence. Still more children are struggling with the very fundamentals. By skipping these fundamentals completely and going on to a higher-level topic, we are coming dangerously close to leaving even more children in the lurch. The students I taught at SRJC were woefully underprepared for the rigour of the GP syllabus; making the English paper at O Levels even tougher (and demanding different things that GP does, to boot) does not solve the problem.
Another thing I don’t like about the syllabus is that there is no right answer, yet they persist on giving ‘right’ answers nevertheless. For a secondary school paper it’s important that there are proper answers. Secondary school I feel is where English is really drilled into you; the rules of grammar, of vocabulary, of writing a proper essay that will then make the transition into GP easier. The syllabus now is, for the lack of a better word, fluffy. The ‘name three things’ question is ridiculous – any number of things could help the advertisement achieve its purpose, and it all depends on you as a person which features stick out the most. And all of the questions are like that. Just go take a look at any given Section A paper nowadays. You’ll probably not get all of the questions right regardless of your prowess in English, which is stupid. A paper meant to test the standard of English is wrong when someone who has an excellent command of the language is able to fail.
Finally, you can’t expect teachers to set papers like this when they evidently have no training in the area. All the papers I’ve gone through with my students have mistakes in them, be it with grammar or with reasoning or with the actual answers. How can you expect students to improve in English when their teachers are making mistakes? Already my students have picked up some bad habits like problems with subject verb agreement and tense – habits that were found in the papers they were doing. It’s easy to demand a higher standard and much harder to implement it, I know; but all the same steps have to be taken to ensure that we don’t pass down the wrong values and ideas to students.
I would personally much rather reinstate the old syllabus. At least that was a good drilling of English, covering actual comprehension; allowing students to understand the basic level before choosing to move on to something more complex. Despite the common perception that literature and English are similar (hence the term English Literature) it couldn’t be further from the truth. Pursuing this mix won’t help students to appreciate Literature more; it’ll simply lead to more students failing English and hating both subjects. Students who want to take literature will take it without having to be force-fed. If you want to increase the appreciation for literature, then do it properly – by fostering interest in the subject as a subject and not cross-breeding it with English. That’s something best left for mad scientists holed up in top secret labs to pursue.
the grumpy bulldog 