The ManicaPost
Morris Mtisi
OF course, the new curriculum does not succinctly evangelise teachers to treat the two as one learning area, for indeed the approaches differ, but it does vividly imply that the two are two pieces of iron that must and do sharpen each other.
If we continue to have teachers who continue to teach the way they taught the old colonial syllabi as intended by old colonial education masters, we are headed for a disastrous abortion of the new curriculum.
With poor, resistant, stubborn and confused teachers, this wonderful curriculum is doomed to failure; a pretty fiasco “Full of sound and fury signifying nothing! … Mad men and women chasing nothing!”
Every day we hear of aggressive STEM advocacy championed and driven by powerful academic experts who see STEM coming to fill in gaps in science education and provide answers to mainstream economic planning and development questions. We do not hear of the same noise and intellectual energy pushing for Languages and the Arts to take their position in national development. The curriculum has openly created the playground, but there are no players on stage.
What does the new curriculum hope to achieve in its effort to reform content, approach and purpose through Literature and Language?
Teachers who do not understand this question and obviously find it difficult to answer are not appropriate agents of change. The new curriculum is a blue-print of change complied to by the country’s paradigm shift from an old self-shooting education system to a liberating one: a new liberating one and relevant education system anchored on best possible practices intended to answer the problems and challenges of fitness for purpose.
I do not know who must re-educate the teachers, retrain perhaps is a better word to use, but whatever you call it, reorienting, in-servicing . . . whatever, one thing is certain. We need a new teacher to implement this change; a new teacher who understands the content and text of the new curriculum and its purpose.
The English teacher can no longer be the teacher who can only spell words correctly and can use “is” and “was” without confusing the tenses and breaching acknowledged rules of grammar.
The English teacher must fully comprehend the skills that learners must acquire at various stages of their learning and why. He or she must be able to teach English Language through Literature and Literature through Language to develop in learners the science of words and their placement.
This new teacher must, not ought to, be able to intelligently understand the choices of words writers make to build particular tones, moods and meanings; to assist the reader to understand meaning through choice of words, imagery, idioms and other forms of metaphorical or figurative expression.
Learners must end up skilled enough to say why a writer uses one word and not the other. For example, the word “blunder” may be more appropriate to create a wanted contextual meaning than “mistake” yet the two apparently mean the same. They don’t.
A mistake denotes lack of presence of conscious thought and attention, but “blunder” connotatively suggests stupidity or foolishness in making the mistake.
A good learner must be able to identify that distinction in analysis. A person eating a tasty, delicious and nice meal and one enjoying a scrumptious and mouth-watering dish are not eating the same meal.
Why? Analyse the words used. Some are weaker, more tired, than others. In critical analysis of language it must not only be possible to do, but easy.
Almost all the ‘A’ Level students who have sought help from me during the school holidays, of course against the will of their apprehensive teachers who are scared of “independent” teachers teaching “their” students, complain about one Literature Paper – the Practical Appreciation or Literary Appreciation paper.
Why is this so?
Of course, there are many answers to the question. First, the teachers take too long, sometimes never, to make students understand and know what poetry is for example; its characteristics, its variations of form and how to unlock meaning especially in “unseen” texts.
Most of these students have hardly mastered the basics of Practical Criticism in poetry, until term two-three or never at all. They don’t know initial rhyme, internal rhyme, end rhyme, off rhyme and perfect rhyme one month from final examinations.
They do not know the structure of the Shakespearean sonnet versus The Petrarchan. They have no idea what certain types of poems are called; for example the odes, apostrophes, narrative, descriptive and didactic poems, haikus, elegies, epics, ballads, limericks, etc. They don’t know the difference between Alliteration (Consonance) and Assonance.
They cannot make an intelligent judgment of a piece of text. They still use the ordinary words of language to express their points and not special literature language. They call the heroes and heroines in a story “main character” instead of “protagonist”.
They don’t know what flat and round characters are. They don’t know what a tragedy is; what a tragic flaw is; what a tragic hero is, etc. They don’t know who the antagonists are; who the foils are and why.
A lot of what I have mentioned above should be taught to ‘A’ Level students during the first two to three weeks of orientation to Advanced Level Literature. These first few weeks are vital. They sharpen the students’ appetite for Literature or kill it. They awaken the students or send them into a deep eternal literary sleep.
‘A’ Level students must know that prose explains things while poetry suggests. Poems are micro-compressed stories intended to trigger feelings, thoughts and ideas without explaining. They carefully use words, place words in unusual arrangements, particular sounds and bits, rhyme schemes, etc, to create desired tones and moods that make intentions and purposes of the writers obvious.
Don’t wait too long before your students know what to look for, what to identify, what to appreciate in each literature type (genre) and how to put mind to pen in their essays.
The STEM proponents are alive and aggressive; the linguists are fast asleep, watching sciences take over opportunity and space.
We need language experts with the same energy the STEM proponents have in interpreting the new curriculum and not people who shout “heaven!” from hell. We need experts who make correct noises about the new curriculum and not lip-sync from the same hymn book without one idea what the words mean. Where are the language experts? Why are they not taking position in the new curriculum “game”?
We cannot continue to shout “English Language!” on high staccato note and play low discordant note on the Literature. Is Literature, whether in Shona, Ndau, Venda, Ndebele or English, the highest illustration of language in its practical use?
Do not miss next week’s tips. The topic is LITERATURE-WHAT EVERY TEACHER AND LEARNER MUST KNOW.
