VI. How does the disparity between theory and practice mentioned in these texts come about and how could it be reduced? What are the present-day problems in education in your country?

The reality of teaching in
a comprehensive school in 1986

I remember distinctly several years back saying to my old German teacher that I was going to teacher training college. He asked me why, and when I said that hopefully they would teach me to teach, he merely laughed. Now, after four years of training and five of teaching, I can begin to see why he found my naivety so amusing.

At training college you are told always to be exceptionally patient and understanding, particularly with less able pupils, but what they don’t tell you is that when you give them this special attention and understanding they exhaust and demoralize you by giving you very little in return – no feedback, none of their unreceptive groups, the last thing you feel like doing is preparing the kind of well thought – out and structured lesson that they in particular need.

When I started teaching, I did so with great hopes of helping students make some genuine progress. The reality is that some pupils enter the school at 11 able to read and do elementary arithmetic and leave five years later able to do little more. How would ‘tuning into their mind’ help? They are only too well aware of their shortcomings, and their sense of failure, their pessimism, inevitably communicates to us, their teachers.

We are told never to stoop to sarcasm; ‘the lowest form of wit’ we were warned: yet how can you control 28 fifteen-year-olds without metaphorically slapping them back into place in front of their peers? All the other sanctions have been largely taken away from teachers, so how can you justify taking away our last weapon in this unequal struggle – our tongue?

Our lecturers at college emphasized the importance of being adaptable in one’s lessons, of improvising, but very often lessons fail not because the teacher has been insufficiently inventive but because the class, with its own deeply ingrained habits of mind, has been incapable of adjusting to the less structured environment of an improvised lesson.

One of the biggest problems of the present time is motivation. However unsatisfactory, the old-fashioned method of telling children that exam success and ‘good behavior’ would secure them a worthwhile job, was at least partly successful. That no longer convinces anybody, and yet, desperate to give any encouragement, I have found myself repeating the tired old argument to pupils and trying to believe it myself, only to be reminded by them cynically that nowadays it’s not what you know that will secure them a job.

And the teachers I work with? If I think back to the teachers who influenced and motivated me at my own school, the best were often individualistic or even eccentric characters who in the present school system would be passed over for promotion and perhaps even pressured into early retirement both by ‘difficult classes’ and the general movement toward a grey bureaucratic conformity.

(English Teacher
in an East Anglian Comprehensive, 1986)

The reality of teaching
in a comprehensive school in 1986

After four years of teaching English, two problems still perplex me: Firstly, where did the educational theorists who wrote all those fine books I read at training – college actually find the children who validated their theories? Certainly none of the children I have taught would have given any support to their ideas, which make the mistake of pre-supposing that children want to learn and that they see a value in learning. The truth is that most teenagers today have a totally utilitarian view of education, so that whereas poetry is seen as an utter waste of time, a functional form-filling exercise is greeted with enthusiasm and tackled with great care.

Secondly, the teaching strategies I studied at college not only pre-supposed a degree of motivation on the part of the pupil that does not in fact exist but also made unrealistic demands on the teacher. In fact to make these teaching methods work would require that the teacher had endless reserves of patience, superhuman energy and no social life whatsoever outside the school. I would have preferred to have been instructed at a mare realistic level, particularly in how to set targets which both educate the pupils in a way and about topics that they are predisposed to accept and allow the teacher to maintain his or her sanity.

English teacher
in an East Anglian Comprehensive, 1986

VII. What might be the response of H.C. Dent to the authors of all above mentioned texts?

VIII. Do profound reading of these two texts (follow the scheme of the first text if it is necessary) and choose the one to depict the teacher’s profession better. Work out the criteria of your comparative analysis.

The Foreigner

W. Saroyan

Hawk Harrap, whose father came from somewhere in Asia Minor and used to sell vegetables and fruit from a wagon drawn by a horse, was of my time in Fresno, so I remember the days when he was a kid in overalls hustling The Evening Herald or sneaking in to the fights at the Civic Auditorium or playing hookey from Emerson School to sell soda pop at the Country Fair and make a lot of money.

His father was Syrian but seldom spoke the language, as he had married a woman who was Scotch-Irish. Harrap was his name on all the school records, although his father's name was something that only sounded a little like Harrap. He was given the name Hawk by myself for being as swift as that bird or as swift as I imagined that bird was. By the time we were at Longfellow Junior High School together, the nickname was on the school records, too. Actually, his mother had named him Hugh after a dead brother.

The day I first met Hawk at Emerson School, in 1916, he took me to a boy named Roy Coulpa and insulted him by saying, "Roy, you're an Italian!" It did not seem to matter at all that Roy Coulpa was Italian. It was Hawk's tone of voice that was insulting. After making this painful and preposterous remark, Hawk shoved me into Roy with such force that we fell and began to wrestle. Roy was surprised and angry, and strong enough to make me exert myself. The school playground was Fresno dirt, so a lot of dust got kicked up as each of us broke free of all kinds of holds. The matched stopped when the recess bell rang, and Roy and I got up and had a look at one another. We looked around for Hawk, too. We were not permitted to move until we heard the second bell, at which time we fell in at the entrance of the school. When a third bell rang we marched to our classrooms. Hawk was standing among the two dozens spectators. When I caught his eye he winked, and I wondered what the hell he meant.

After school he and Roy and I walked to California Playground, and there the three of us wrestled for the fun of it.

The point is, it was impossible to dislike him.

Hawk lived on О Street, so he and I walked home together when Roy set out for his house across the S.P. tracks on G Street, beyond Rosenberg's Packing House.

"What are you, anyway?" Hawk said as we walked home. "Even the teacher can't pronounce your name."

"I'm American," I said.

"The hell you are," Hawk said. "Roy's Italian, I'm Syrian, and I guess you're Armenian."

"Sure," I said. "I'm Armenian all right, but I'm American, too. I speak better English than do Armenian."

"I can't talk Syrian at all," Hawk bragged, "but that's what I am. If anybody asks you what you are, for God's sake don't tell them you are American. Tell them you're Armenian."

"What's the difference?"

"What do you mean what's the difference? If you're Armenian and you say you're American everybody'll laugh at you. The teacher knows what you are. Everybody knows what you are."

"Aren't you American?"

"Don't make me laugh," Hawk said. "I'm a foreigner. My father sells vegetables from a wagon."

"Weren't you born in America?"

"I was born in Fresno. I was born in the house on О Street. What's that got to do with it?"

"Well, I'm American," I said. "And so are you."

"You must be looney," Hawk said. "But don't worry, you'll find out what you are soon enough."

One day months later, after lunch, Miss Clapping, our teacher, suddenly stopped teaching and said, "You Armenian boys who go home for lunch have got to stop eating things full of garlic. The smell is more than I can stand and I'm not going to put up with it any longer."

Hawk turned to see how I was taking the insult.

As a matter of fact lunch for me that day had been dried eggplant, okra and stringbeans made into a stew with chunks of shoulder of lamb, in which garlic was absolutely necessary.

The day wasn't so cold, however, that the windows of the room could not be opened or the radiator turned off. The classroom was air-tight and over-hot.

"Open the window," I said to Miss Clapping.

Hawk gave a hoot of amazement and Miss Clapping looked at me as if she had no intention not to finish my life immediately. The rest of the class stirred in their seats and waited for developments. I decided to kill Miss Clapping and be done with it, but when I got to thinking how I might do it, the scheme seemed impractical. Miss Clapping went to her desk and studied her class book.

"Yes," she said at last. "Here is your name. I'm sure you know how to pronounce it. The Lord knows I don't."

Another insult!

She closed the book and looked at me again.

"Now," she said, "what did you say when I said you Armenian boys will have to stop eating garlic?"

"I said open the window."

"Perhaps I don't understand," Miss Clapping said, her lips beginning to tremble a little.

She put down the book she was holding and picked up a twelve-inch ruler. She stepped away from her desk and stood at the foot of the row in which my desk was the last one.

"Now, tell me," she said, "just what do you mean?"

"I mean," I said, "it would be stuffy in this room no matter what anybody ate for lunch. This room needs fresh air. It's easier to open the window than to ask people to cook stuff without garlic."

Hawk hooted again, and without any further discussion Miss Clapping moved down the row to my desk.

"Put out your right hand," she said.

"What for?"

"For being impertinent."

It happened that I had recently learned the meaning of that word.

"I haven't been impertinent," I said.

"You're being impertinent now," the teacher said. "Put out your right hand or I shall send you to the Principal, who will give you a thrashing."

"No, he won't," I said.

"Oh, he won't, won't he?" the teacher said. "We'll see about that. You're not going to make a fool out of me in this class. Put out your right hand."

Miss Clapping waited a full minute for me to put out my hand. So many things happened to her face, to her eyes and mouth, that I almost felt sorry for her. I certainly felt disgusted with myself, although I knew she was being ridiculous.

Finally she returned to her desk and with a shaking hand scribbled a note which she folded and handed to a little girl named Elvira Koot who took the note and left the room. The class sat in silence, the teacher tried to occupy herself looking into her book, and I wished I lived in a more civilized part of the country. At last the little girl returned to the room and handed the teacher a note which the teacher read. I was sure the Principal had considered the situation and had urged her to open the window; I was ready to apologize for having made so much trouble; but when I saw the evil smile on the teacher's face I went back to planning to kill her, for I knew I was headed for hard times.

"Report to the Principal in his office at once," Miss Clapping said.

I got up and left the room. In the hall I decided to kill the Principal too. I had seen him from a distance, the usual tall man around public schools; and I had heard about him; but I hadn't believed what I had heard. The report was that he was quite a rooster among the old hens who taught at school and that he wouldn't think of giving you a chance to tell your side of a story. If one of the old hens said you deserved to be punished the rooster punished you. Instead of reporting to his office immediately, I left the school building and walked home.

My mother was in the kitchen cutting up half a dozen cabbages for sour cabbage soup.

"What are you doing here?" she said.

"I don't want to go to that school any more," I said.

I tried to explain as accurately as possible what had happened. My mother listened to my side of the story and cut up the cabbages and put them into a five-gallon crock and poured salt over them and put a piece of apple-box wood on top of the cabbage, and on top of the wood she put rocks the size of eggplants. She said nothing until I was finished, and then she said, "Go back to the school and mind the teacher. Hereafter when there is garlic in your lunch, eat a spring of parsley. Do not be so eager to defend the honor of Armenian cooking."

This attitude infuriated me.

I went to my room and put some things together – a pair of socks, a sling shot, three pebbles, a key I had found, a magnifying glass, and a copy of The New Testament I had won at Sunday School – and tied them into a bundle, to run away. I walked two blocks and then went back to the house and threw the bundle on the front porch and went back to the school and reported to the Principal.

He gave me a strapping with a heavy leather belt. After this greatest insult of all, I dried my eyes and went back to my class and sat at my desk.

After school Hawk said, "See what I mean? You're a foreigner and don't ever forget it. A smart foreigner keeps his feelings to himself and his mouth shut. You can't change teachers. You can't change Principals. You can't change people. You can laugh at them, that's all. Americans make me laugh. I wouldn't fool with them if I were you. I just laugh at them."

The Teacher
S. Anderson

Snow lay deep in the streets of Winesburg. It had begun to snow about ten o'clock in the morning and a wind sprang up and blew the snow in clouds along Main Street. The frozen mud roads that led into town were fairly smooth and in places ice covered the mud. "There will be good sleighing," said Will Henderson, standing by the bar in Ed Griffith's saloon. Out of the saloon he went and met Sylvester West the druggist stumbling along in the kind of heavy overshoes called arctics. "Snow will bring the people into town on Saturday," said the druggist. The two men stopped and discussed their affairs. Will Henderson, who had on a light overcoat and no overshoes, kicked the heel of his left foot with the toe of the right. "Snow will be good for the wheat," observed the druggist sagely.

Young George Willard, who had nothing to do, was glad because he did not like working that day. The weekly paper had been printed and taken to the post office Wednesday evening and the snow began to fall on Thursday. At eight o'clock, after the morning train had passed, he put a pair of skates in his pocket and went up to Waterworks Pond but did not go skating. Past the pond and along a path that followed Wine Creek he went until he came to a grove of beech trees. There he built a fire against the side of a log and sat down at the end of the log to think. When the snow began to fall and the wind to blow he hurried about getting fuel for the fire.

The young reporter was thinking of Kate Swift, who had once been his school teacher. On the evening before he had gone to her house to get a book she wanted him read and had been alone with her for an hour. For the fourth or fifth time the woman had talked to him with great earnestness and he could not make out what she meant by her talk. He began to believe she might be in love with him and the thought was both pleasing and annoying.

Up from the log he sprang and began to pile sticks on the fire. Looking about to be sure he was alone he talked aloud pretending he was in the presence of the woman. "Oh, you're just letting on, you know you are," he declared. "I am going to find out about you. You wait and see."

The young man got up and went back along the path toward town leaving the fire blazing in the wood. As he went through the streets the skates clanked in his pocket. In his own room in the New Willard House he built a fire in the stove and lay down on top of the bed. He began to have lustful thoughts and pulling down the shade of the window closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall. He took a pillow into his arms and embraced it thinking first of the school teacher, who by her words had stirred something within him, and later of Helen White, the slim daughter of the town banker, with whom he had been for a long time half in love.

By nine o'clock of that evening snow lay deep in the streets and the weather had become bitter cold. It was difficult to walk about. The stores were dark and the people had crawled away to their houses. The evening train from Cleveland was very late but nobody was interested in its arrival. By ten o'clock all but four of the eighteen hundred citizens of the town were in bed.

Hop Higgins, the night watchman, was partially awake. He was lame and carried a heavy stick. On dark nights he carried a lantern. Between nine and ten o'clock he went his rounds. Up and down Main Street he stumbled through the drifts trying the doors of the stores. Then he went into alleyways and tried the back doors. Finding all tight he hurried around the corner to the New Willard House and beat on the door. Through the rest of the night he intended to stay by the stove. "You go to bed. I'll keep the stove going," he said to the boy who slept on a cot in the hotel office.

With Hop Higgins safely stowed away in the chair behind the stove only three people were awake in Winesburg. George Willard was in the office of the Eagle pretending to be at work on the writing of a story but in reality continuing the mood of the morning by the fire in the wood. In the bell tower of the Presbyterian Church the Reverend Curtis Hartman was sitting in the darkness preparing himself for a revelation from God, and Kate Swift, the school teacher, was leaving her house for a walk in the storm.

It was past ten o'clock when Kate Swift set out and the walk was unpremeditated. It was as though the man and the boy, by thinking of her, had driven her forth into the wintry streets. Aunt Elizabeth Swift had gone to the country seat concerning some business in connection with mortgages in which she had money invested and would not be back until the next day. By a huge stove, called a base burner, in the living room of the house sat the daughter reading a book. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and, snatching a cloak from a rack by the front door, ran out of the house.

At the age of thirty Kate Swift was not known in Winesburg as a pretty woman. Her complexion was not good and her face was covered with blotches that indicated ill health. Alone in the night in the winter streets she was lovely. Her back was straight, her shoulders square, and her features were as the features of a tiny goddess on a pedestal in a garden in the dim light of a summer evening.

During the afternoon the school teacher had been to see Doctor Welling concerning her health. The doctor had scolded her and had declared she was in danger of loosing her hearing. It was foolish for Kate Swift to be abroad in the storm, foolish and perhaps dangerous.

The woman in the streets did not remember the words of the doctor and would not have turned back had she remembered. She was very cold but after walking for five minutes no longer minded the cold. First she went to the end of her own street and then across a pair of hay scales set in the ground before a feed barn and into Trunion Pike. Along Trunion Pike she went to Ned Winters' barn and turning east followed a street of low frame houses that led over Gospel Hill and into Sucker Road that ran down a shallow valley past Ike Smead's chicken farm to Waterworks Pond. As she went along, the bold, excited mood that had driven her out of doors passed and then returned again.

There was something biting and forbidding in the character of Kate Swift. Everyone felt it. In the schoolroom she was silent, cold, and stem, and yet in an odd way very close to her pupils. Once in a long while something seemed to have come over her and she was happy. All of the children in the schoolroom felt the effect of her happiness. For a time they did not work but sat back in their chairs and looked at her.

With hands clasped behind her back the school teacher walked up and down in the schoolroom and talked very rapidly. It did not seem to matter what subject came into her mind. Once she talked to the children of Charles Lamb and made up strange, intimate little stories concerning the life of the dead writer. The stories were told with the air of one who had lived in a house with Charles Lamb and knew all the secrets of his private life. The children were somewhat confused, thinking Charles Lamb must be someone who had once lived in Winesburg.

On another occasion the teacher talked to the children of Benvenuto Cellini. That time they laughed. What a bragging, blustering, brave, lovable fellow she made of the old artist! Concerning him also she invented anecdotes. There was one of a German music teacher who had a room above Cellini's lodgings in the city of Milan that made the boys guffaw. Sugars McNutts, a fat boy with red cheeks, laughed so hard that he became dizzy and fell off his seat and Kate Swift laughed with him. Then suddenly she became again cold and stern.

On the winter night when she walked through the deserted snow-covered streets, a crisis had come into the life of the school teacher. Although no one in Winesburg would have suspected it, her life had been very adventurous. It was still adventurous. Day by day as she worked in the schoolroom or walked in the streets, grief, hope, and desire fought within her. Behind a cold exterior the most extraordinary events transpired in her mind. The people of the town thought of her as a confirmed old maid and because she spoke sharply and went her own way thought her lacking in all the human feeling that did so much to make and mar their own lives. In reality she was the most eagerly passionate soul among them, and more than once, in the five years since she had come back from her travels to settle in Winesburg and become a school teacher, had been compelled to go out of the house and walked half through the night fighting out some battle raging within.

Once on a night when it rained she had stayed out six hours and when she came home had a quarrel with Aunt Elizabeth Swift. "I am glad you're not a man," said the mother sharply. "More than once I've waited for your father to come home, not knowing what new mess he had got into. I've had my share of uncertainty and you cannot blame me if I do not want to see the worst side of him reproduced in you."

***

Kate Swift's mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard. In something he had written as a school boy she thought she had recognized the spark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark. One day in the summer she had gone to the Eagle office and finding the boy unoccupied had taken him out Main Street to the Fair Ground, where the two sat on a grassy bank and talked. The school teacher tried to bring home to the mind of the boy some conception of the difficulties he would have to face as a writer. "You will have to know life," she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness. She took hold of George Willard's shoulders and turned him about so that she could look into his eyes. A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace. "If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words," she explained. "It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it's time to be living. I don't want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say."

On the evening before that stormy Thursday night when the Reverend Curtis Hartman sat in the bell tower of the church waiting to look at her body, young Willard had gone to visit the teacher and to borrow a book. It was then the thing happened that confused and puzzled the boy. He had the book under his arm and was preparing to depart. Again Kate Swift talked with great earnestness. Night was coming on and the light in the room grew dim. As he turned to go she spoke his name softly and with an impulsive movement took hold of his hand. Because the reporter was rapidly becoming a man something of his man's appeal, combined with the winsomeness of the boy, stirred the heart of the lonely woman. A passionate desire to have him understand the import of life, to learn to interpret it truly and honestly, swept over her. Leaning forward, her lips brushed his cheek. At the same moment he for the first time became aware of the marked beauty of her features. They were both embarrassed, and to relieve her feeling she became harsh and domineering. "What's the use? It will be ten years before you begin to understand what I mean when I talk to you," she cried passionately.

On the night of the storm and while the minister sat in the church waiting for her, Kate Swift went to the office of the Winesburg Eagle, intending to have another talk with the boy. After the long walk in the snow she was cold, lonely and tired. As she came through Main Street she saw the light from the printshop window shining on the snow and on an impulse opened the door and went in. For an hour she sat by the stove in the office talking of life. She talked with passionate earnestness. The impulse that had driven her out into the snow poured itself out into talk. She became inspired as she sometimes did in the presence of the children in school. A great eagerness to open the door of life to the boy, who had been her pupil and who she thought might possess a talent for the understanding of life, had possession of her. So strong was her passion that it became something physical. Again her hands took hold of his shoulders and she turned him about. In the dim light her eyes blazed. She arose and laughed, not sharply as was customary with her, but in a queer, hesitating way. "I must be going," she said. "In a moment, if I stay, I'll be wanting to kiss you."

In the newspaper office a confusion arose. Kate Swift turned and walked to the door. She was a teacher but she was also a woman. As she looked at George Willard, the passionate desire to be loved by a man, that had a thousand times before swept like a storm over her body, took possession of her. In the lamplight George Willard looked no longer a boy, but a man ready to play the part of a man.

The school teacher let George Willard take her into his arms. In the warm little office the air became suddenly heavy and the strength went out of her body. Leaning against a low counter by the door she waited. When he came and put a hand on her shoulder she turned and let her body fall heavily against him. For George Willard the confusion was immediately increased. For a moment he held the body of the woman tightly against his body and then it stiffened. Two sharp little fists began to beat on his face. When the school teacher had run away and left him alone, he walked up and down in the office swearing furiously.

It was into this confusion that the Reverend Curtis Hartman protruded himself. When he came in George Willard thought the town had gone mad. Shaking a bleeding fist in the air, the minister proclaimed the woman George had only a moment before held in his arms an instrument of God bearing a message of truth.

***

George blew out the lamp by the window and locking the door of the printshop went home. Through the hotel office, past Hop Higgins lost in his dream of the raising of ferrets, he went and up onto his own room. The fire in the stove had gone out and he undressed in the cold. When he got into bed the sheets were like blankets of dry snow.

George Willard rolled about in the bed on which he had lain in the afternoon hugging the pillow and thinking thoughts of Kate Swift. The words of the minister, who he thought had gone suddenly insane, rang in his ears. His eyes stared about the room. The resentment, natural to the baffled male, passed and he tried to understand what had happened. He could not make it out. Over and over he turned the matter in his mind. Hours passed and he began to think it must be time for another day to come. At four o'clock he pulled the covers up about his neck and tried to sleep. When he became drowsy and closed his eyes, he raised a hand and with it groped about in the darkness. "I have missed something, I have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me," he muttered sleepily. Then he slept and in all Winesburg he was the last soul on that winter night to go to sleep.

IX. Think over the technique of the text presentation:

acting out,

role play,

discussion “For and Against”,

public speech,

talk show