A Daily Email--a Flood of Memory

Every day--and I'm not positive just why--I get an email called "ELA SmartBrief." It's about education issues, and I'm guessing I receive it because I'm a decades-long member of the National Council of Teachers of English. ("ELA" seems to stand for "English Language Arts.")

I often--not always--scroll through the SmartBrief, which provides links to various news stories about, well, education issues. Sometimes, I confess, I simply delete it without even seeing what it offers that day.

Anyway, the other day was a day that I looked, and I saw a story about a high school in Marietta, Ohio. Its English Department has reorganized itself and is now offering to juniors and seniors a choice of semester-long courses on such topics as Early Works of Stephen King, Women in Literature, Poetry of Springsteen and Friends, and Civil War Literature. (Link to the story.) (BTW: The ELA SmartBrief was not so smart in one instance: It also indicated the story came from Marietta, Georgia.)

Reading this, I immediately found myself in my little Time Machine and was whirling back to the 1970s at the Aurora Middle School (and, from 1974, Harmon School--the new middle school building that opened that year). I taught there for about thirty years.

For some (remarkable) reason the district had hired too many middle-school English teachers back then, and so we decided to employ ourselves by offering not just a "traditional" curriculum to our sixth, seventh, and eighth graders but also a series of electives.

This was a long, long time ago, but off the top of my (hoary) head I can remember these: Playwriting, Black Literature, The Western, Film Study, Fantasy Novels (pre-Harry Potter!) ... oh, there were many others. I just can't come up with them right now. (Later, after I post this, they will, of course, cascade over me like whatever that big waterfall on the border between the USA and Canada is called.)

I'll speak for myself here: I loved those electives. It was a chance to have a very different relationship with the students, who seemed, by the way, to enjoy the electives very much, too. (Hey, it beats underlining nouns and verbs and circling direct objects!)

I had the playwriting course, and we actually produced the scripts we wrote. The kids ran around making 8 mm and Super 8 films, and we had a public showing each year. One of them did well in a student film festival sponsored by our local PBS station.

But ... times changed ... Back to the Basics, etc. By the time I retired (January 1997), Ohio had already bought into the idea of proficiency testing--Big Time. And the elective days were over. We got ... Serious.

So, based on the news from Marietta, Ohio, perhaps that fabled pendulum is starting to swing back?

Let's hope so. I'm betting that kids are really hoping so.