Lessons from High School English
I’m tutoring my brother in English for his run up to the HSC, am I qualified? I like to think so since I went through the hell of HSC English in the first place and managed to come out relatively unscathed with relatively okay marks in the process. Add to that I also spent 5 years in uni majoring in cultural and film studies. So I’d like to think that even though I might not have the experience in teaching high school English I can definitely impart some skills in relation to analysing cultural texts in relation to contextual and genre studies. Pretty much the skills you need to get through HSC English anyway.
So currently we’re in our 8th week and at the 4th week juncture I helped him prepare for a speech assessment task which I thought we both did a pretty good job on considering it was only the 4th week.
I come back home today to a pissy and moody 15 year old. Oh no, something went wrong. So he got his mark back for that assessment today, 8 out of 15. What went wrong? Is this a sleight on my teaching ability? Perhaps my skills aren’t as crash hot as I’d thought they’d be. You might all be thinking…shit, LJ; perhaps you should actually pay for a qualified tutor?
I guess to fully answer this question I have to go back to the actual chain of events leading up to the assessment.
The question for the assessment basically asked the student to present their own interpretation of Macbeth as a film and pitch it to a director. To those who know me, you know I could probably personally do this assessment standing on my head. But how would you break your own process down and teach it to another?
My brother and I first work on breaking down cinematic techniques then building them up with textual proofs and contextual links to create his own interpretation. And we get to a point where I’m happy with the progress and figure out that he will be able to answer the question to competent standard.
The first day he was meant to do the speech, the teacher didn’t manage to get to him. Instead my brother came home worried after listening to some of the other kid’s speeches. All the other kids didn’t change the setting or time frame for their interpretation and he did. Was this a restriction the teacher implicitly applied to the assessment I ask him? Yes was the reply, it was verbally stated. I was like, fucking hell what teacher gives you further restrictions which weren’t on the original assignment sheet. Personally if it’s not stated on the assessment sheet it doesn’t count, that’s what the lawyer in me says.
Anyhoo, I gave my brother 2 possible choices:
- Stick with the original plan. The interpretation which we worked on together which we both knew was solid
- Change his interpretation to be more in line with the rest of his class.
Of course being 15, kids are impressionable; you never want to stand out or do something different or do something which is not EXACTLY what the teacher has prescribed. He chose no. 2 and decided to change his entire interpretation and I didn’t get a chance to look at his new speech before he presented it in class.
I studied the pencilled comments the teacher scrawled on the back of the assessment sheet he got back today. Each remarked on an area which I covered explicitly in our lessons. e.g.
- Explore your interpretation through defined cinematic techniques
- Provide lots of backup from the text of the original work,
- be persuasive, you’re there to convince the director to use your interpretation.
So in between the 1st and 2nd versions of his speech he managed to lose all of this, or rather did not pay enough attention to develop each aspect to the level they were in the 1st version.
I think my downfall as the tutor was that I trusted my brother’s analysis of the speeches of his peers. I definitely know that at that age I couldn’t tell the difference between what the teacher thought was an AWESOME speech or a mediocre speech. My brother may not have been able to adjust adequately to conform; rather his conformity was superficial as the rest of his arguments fell apart simply because he didn’t have the conviction to believe in his own work.
So the first question you ask after the initial shock of disappointment is: What if my brother used the 1st iteration of his speech? But even then what if he got 6 or 7 for that THAT speech? (Although I doubt that would happen). Irregardless of the mark I’ve always said that for this assessment we both know that he did the work and knows the stuff and that in the end it was execution on the day.
So what’s the lesson today?
- Always go with your initial instinct, go with plan A. No one ever wins something starting with Plan B.
- Trust your ability to answer the question to the best of your ability.
- Don’t conform for the sake of conforming.
- Have absolute conviction and belief in what you’re doing, because even if you fail at least you can be sure that if was your best and you did what you needed to do.
Otherwise disappointment will await as you realise your output was shite because you were too busy trying to be the same as everyone else rather than working with your own understanding and analysis of the material.
