andave's place

Although I don’t normally do this, I’d like to dedicate this entry to Virgil, because he asked for it. Thanks, Uncle Virg!

This year has been a little surreal because I’ve been realizing that it’s the last year that my life will be the same—it’s my year of lasts. Last year I’ll go to my church. Last year I’ll live in my room. Last year I’ll teach the Sunday school. Last year I’ll see my library.I’m in my Senior year, and already it’s been zipping by. It’s a countdown until I go to college, and I’m excited and apprehensive and elated and breathless at the idea. My mind has been a whirl of scholarships and homeworks and people and colleges all flashing by to the songs that always run through my head and provide some sort of familiarity in this time when I’m seeing everything in a new light.

We’ve begun the application for Patrick Henry College located in Purcellville, Virginia. It is a Christian college and one that has undergone quite a bit of publicity for its stance on different issues. They absolutely refuse to accept government funds and they will only spend money that they have; they do not go into debt. PHC, founded in 2000, has been endorsed by Mike Huckabee and many of the political science students there go to internships in prestigious places. Their literature program (undergraduate) sounds absolutely beautiful: accomplished professors teaching classics from a Christian point of view. I’ll get my B.A. there and Lord willing then go to graduate school and get my Ph.D in both literature and teaching.

It scares me, what proper book-reading does to people. I used to think that I’d grow into my personality and become a bit more normal, but now in my senior year I’m not so sure that’s going to happen. Of course I don’t think I can blame all of that on reading—I’m a born-again Christian, and that too makes me different.

I’m different, but what is weird is that I can see it and begin to understand how it affects other people. All the same it has some jarring effects. My English class at the junior college, for example, doesn’t know what to do with me. We’ve been studying an essay on education by Paulo Freire. In a nutshell, he wanted to do away with what he called the “banking concept of education,” where the students are used as mere depositories for information that will be quickly forgotten when no longer needed. According to him, the banking method stifles creativity and an inquisitive nature. Freire wants to entirely abolish the banking method and use the “problem-posing method” instead. It says that students should never just be told stuff but should figure out on their own using the teacher-student to help. Basically, it’s learning from an existential rather than academic point of view. This, he claims, would keep the common man from becoming oppressed by the rich.

Now, I’m all for learning things by experience, but within reason. Does Freire expect me to figure out Euclid’s theorems on my own? Discover gravity? Come up with Freud’s bombastic theories on my own?

Another thing I thought somewhat important was that he wanted to blur the distinction between teachers and students. The teacher was to become the teacher-student, open to learning from her students, and the students were to become student-teachers, or, able to teach others as well.

Although I respect Freire because he lived out his theory as much as he could, I can’t agree with it.

But when we first began reading the essay EVERYONE agreed with him except for me. Everyone shared stories of mean teachers who only, always, and forever used the banking method, or did not even deign to deconstruct students’ objections to their ideas, or didn’t explain the material enough, or treated the students like mindless drones who didn’t know anything.

As a homeschooler and furthermore one who’s been pretty much on her own the last couple of years, I was at sixes and sevens when everyone was commiserating.

One can’t teach unless one has something to teach. If we completely abolish the banking method how then do you expect students, who go to school to learn, to have anything to teach teachers?

Furthermore, isn’t it the right and the privilege of a student to research something out, especially if they don’t understand it? If the teacher doesn’t explain enough, what’s to stop you from looking it up for yourself? I mean, when I was little my mom wouldn’t tell me how to spell a word or what does it mean; she would always tell me to look it up in the dictionary, and now all my friends and family come to me for obscure words and archaic definitions .

And, if the banking method stifles creativity and dulls inquisitiveness, how do you explain all the people that overcame an education steeped in “banking” to become writers, inventors, scientists, even politicians?!

And one thing more, didn’t the “oppressors” go through a banking education too? What sets them apart from the poor little “oppressed” man. It just doesn’t compute.

One thing that I thought was a major cop-out on Freire’s part: he rarely backed up his points with concrete examples because, as my teacher said, he wants us to come up with our own examples because that’s a good way to learn through “problem-posing.”

Stylistically, Freire writes terribly. He’s so very extreme (I’d be willing to admit that the banking method is no good unless one has a balance) and he says things without proving them. He scissors back and forth between denigrating the banking method and praising the problem-posing method.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, whenever I’d try to explain my point of view or my understanding of a paragraph all the students would blink and say “what??” One girl turned to me and said “You have to dumb it down for us.” I was kinda speechless—why? I didn’t use big words?! Aren’t you college students?! I was glad not many of them know that I’m still in high school; that would have been embarrassing. I guess I just expected too much from junior college—I was expecting something like LitNet, I guess.

This class wasn’t even the original English class I was going to take, but the first trial ended horribly!! No way I was going to stay in that one! At least the one I’m taking acknowledges I have brains. The first one thought he was a gift to humanity. He came in, rather disorganized, and began speaking before he even got to the desk. He handed out the syllabi and suddenly began talking of us the students, how we look at reading, and then embarked on a discourse about the philosophy and psychology of why we think of reading the way we do. Evidently nobody likes to read. He announced that he would stay away from lecturing as much as he could because that’s supposedly proven to be the worst way to teach a class.
By this point I was getting angry. Who is this guy and how dare he insinuate that he knows how I look at reading when he doesn’t even know my name? Who proved that lectures are the most ineffective way to teach?
Then he began to speak about the texts we would be reading. Already familiar with one of the chosen books (George Orwell’s 1984), it was the first time I had heard its irony being praised as its special merit—that it is a book written in the past about the future is generally far less prevalent than that it is a book written about how the future could become: a seething, chilling mass of Communistic tyranny.
After giving glowing reports of the elevated natures of the other selections we would be discussing, he said that one of the main topics would be ‘power and how it affects us.’
His words seemed a little at odds with the grandiloquent manner he had been using beforehand—a massive buildup only to culminate in as common a subject as power. Thanks to my own reading, I felt familiar enough with the subject to think that there were other topics far better for me to spend time on. As such, after he set up a documentary on the hardships of reading for us to watch I told him that I didn’t think I’d be a good fit in the class. Taking me outside the classroom, he leaned laconically back against the wall and asked me “Why?”
As I couldn’t exactly say what was on my mind, I only told him that I was used to reading heavy deep stuff like Dostoevsky. When he heard that he rolled his eyes and said “Oh. You’re one of them.” He didn’t deign to tell me who “they” are, so I went on to say that the topic of “power” did not interest me in the least and I had no desire to reread a dystopia. “Well,” he told me. “I only mention the power because most people are interested in that, and it makes them think that maybe the class won’t be so bad. We talk about other stuff too, like why do you think people stay in the box they create for themselves, for example.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. If power is a familiar subject then what does that make insecurity? Sensing my hesitation, he told me that he really thought I should stay in his class. I had no desire to, but I was feeling somewhat guilty about getting so angry with him. I agreed to stay for the one class and after, if I couldn’t find another English class, I’d stay in his, figuring that even if it wouldn’t be fun, it wouldn’t be hard either.
So we went back inside and I watched the documentary made by Chabot students. Throughout the entire feature I found myself getting more and more disgusted and embarrassed and even puzzled as student after student broke down or admitted “how hard” it was to read and how the teachers “just didn’t understand.” Reading has always been such a huge part in my life—and yet as I continually read and pushed myself to more difficult texts it got easier and easier.
Soon enough, the docu-melodrama ended with a few choice words on how to make reading easier. The teacher commented, asked a few questions, laughed long, hard, and loud at our answers, and dismissed us. I left without a backward glance.

Thanks for reading, all! I'm interested in what you'll say.