Carmen's Reflection 4

Being two weeks into practicum, I was able to learn more about Literature as a subject in my school, St. Andrew’s Secondary School (SASS). I was assigned to a Secondary 3 class for Literature, which is made up of only 30 over students out of the entire Secondary 3 level cohort. Due to the small number of students taking Literature in Secondary 3, I only had 5 periods of Literature lessons as compared to my 13 periods of Mathematics. In SASS, Literature is only taken as an elective and the school does not offer pure Literature. The subject is also seen as just an elective and hence does not seem to hold the same importance as the other core subjects like English, Mathematics and the Sciences. Despite the principal’s interest in the arts, the number of experienced Literature teachers (with teaching experiences of more than 3 years) in this school was disappointingly very limited. The number of beginning teachers teaching Literature here was also quite small in numbers.

I had the opportunity to talk to some of the Secondary 3 boys taking Literature before lesson began. I asked them what they had learnt so far in Literature.  To my horror, some meekly replied that they had not learnt anything at all since the start of the year from the Literature lessons! I then asked them their reasons for taking Literature and some stated reasons like Literature seeming to be the elective that is easiest to score or no choice since Literature seemed like the “lesser evil” out of all the electives. During lesson, I had also observed that most of the boys did not display enthusiasm or interest. Very few of them actually participated in the class discussions and did very “half-ass” jobs for their work. The usually vocal trait of a typical SASS boy was missing in the class and even the ones answering questions in class did not seem to have the confidence in answering, as they mumble their answers out to the teacher and the teacher had to guess roughly what they were saying.

Currently, the Secondary 3 boys are learning Unseen Poetry, followed by Unseen Prose and Lord of the Flies in the next term. I only managed to observe a lesson that the my Literature CT taught. (The other periods for observations were wasted on term test and free period due to the teacher’s absence.)From the one lesson that I had observed, I noticed that it was very teacher-centered, where the teacher talked and the students listened most of the time. The teacher also showed model answers on the screen and got the students to copy them down. On one hand, this was good as the students could learn from the model answers how to display their answers in the PEEL format. However, on the other hand, it did not give the boys much room to come up with the answers themselves. Most of them just waited for the answers to be shown to them and half the time that the teacher talks, the boys were copying the answers instead of listening. Copying of answers also got the boys to focus o the wrong things. They were more interested in the skills to write a good essay than appreciating the poem that they were analyzing.

Looking at the articles on the recent drop in number of students taking Literature as an O levels subject, I find this situation even more depressing. If you were to compare the class size of a Literature class with that of a Geography or History class, you can see that the Literature class is considered really very small in comparison. It is even more depressing to see that some students are even deprived of the opportunity to take Literature as an O levels subject due to the lack of numbers to form a class. Fortunately, this problem does not affect SASS as students are given the opportunity to choose the elective of their choice and the students will then be streamed into classes for their elective. This means that the Literature class comprises of students from different classes and the school does not need to meet a requirement of having a minimum number of students to form an elective class. 

I find that Literature is no longer a subject that students study for enjoyment. Rather, pressured by the results-inclined society we live in, students only care about the right techniques in writing a Literature essay. As a result, in order to cater to our students' needs, teachers have to adapt their lessons accordingly. Lessons become more dry and boring with teachers constantly drilling the many different literary devices and techniques in their students instead of appreciating the Literature as it is. Maybe, it is time for teachers to stop spoon-feeding our students with the "right way" of writing Literature essays start cultivating the students' interest in Literature.