English 99: Literacy Among the Ruins

This article was really an attention getter. First of all this man proves that he basically has no heart. When the bored looking girls and the jocks are talking about their relationships and going out and partying he doesn’t even know what to write to correct their papers. “I would look at the word after I wrote it and cross it out because it seemed like a stupid thing to write” (219). But when the refugees wrote about theirs friends getting their hands blown off in the war or having to go into hiding because their families are being bombed on and all he can think about is how bad the sentence is. “Then I crossed out my corrected sentence. Sometimes after reading a few refugee papers I felt that instead of teaching English I was unlearning English” (219). “I remember circling the verb and writing, ‘agreement?” (219). He didn’t even seem concerned about what had happened to these people. Instead of writing verb agreement he should be writing the number for a councilor they should go to. After he was done teaching the class all he could think about was how thankful he was that he didn’t have to read these horrible sentences anymore instead how sorry he felt for these teenagers because of what they have been through. “But I went outside and walked home trying not to think in sentences” (220). It’s not really the refugees fault that they can’t speak English very well. That is why they are in the class so they can improve upon it. I thought that it was funny how he segregated the class into different groups. That ‘s something that I thought teachers tried to avoid and break up so then each group could share their thoughts with each other. He said the class was split up into the bored looking girls, the jocks and the refugees. He said that there was a “buffer zone” in-between each of the groups. I think he should have tried to mix up the class. He also said that each of the groups had their own topics that they wrote about. The girls and the jocks both talked about stupid stuff in life that didn’t even matter. Couldn’t he have pointed out that there was no depth to their writing? At least the refugees were talking about things that were a little more interesting. I thought it was interesting when he pointed out he was an imposter. “I was posing as a professor and English 99 was posing as a college course” (216). I have to give him credit for at least trying but he was so harsh on these kids that weren’t very literate. If I were in a class like that with a teacher that didn’t seem to care about the class then I wouldn’t want to try either. Of coarse they are going to feel stupid and not want to try.