Thoughts on the Serial Podcast and High School Education

Lady Jaye and I have been listening to Serial.

Being physically separated by a vast distance, we've gotten pretty creative about methods to spend time together ("TOGETHARRRRR!", in our couple's vernacular) without actually being... Y'know... Together. I heard the tail end of the first episode of Serial while sitting in the car on a Saturday back in early October, and was instantly hooked. Like, instantly. Like, so instantly that I still remember it vividly, I texted myself a reminder so that I wouldn't forget to download it, and I delayed going into Chik-Fil-A to get lunch so that I could listen until the end. And I love Chik-Fil-A... And I was totally hungry. It was that engaging.

I mentioned it to Lady Jaye, but she's not exactly the "podcast" type... At least, she wasn't. A few weeks ago, she was out for dinner with one of her co-workers, whose spouse wound up talking about it. Given that the spouse in question couldn't be any more different from me if she tried, Lady Jaye decided to check Serial out. She was hooked. She caught up on the entire run in two or three days, and we committed to listening together (TOGETHARRRRR!) every Thursday night. At this point, she's even got her mother listening. It's been a great boon for an already healthy relationship.

Cognizant of privacy - mainly the fact that I haven't asked her if I could talk about her, though this has gotten enough press and she's enough of an Internet celebrity that I doubt she'll mind - I'll describe another friend as simply "MJ". I suppose "friend" is a term I must use loosely - we're "Facebook friends", and I discovered her through her old YouTube channel. She's one of those people with whom I have very little in common, but I think she posts interesting, thought-provoking stuff; presumably, she keeps me around for the same reason. Anyway, she's closely acquainted with a guy named Michael Godsey, who's mentioned in this Wall Street Journal article about Serial. He was featured here, and wrote on his own website as well. The reason? He's an English teacher, and this semester he's suspended his usual curriculum of Hamlet in favor of Serial. Godsey advances an argument, and it's a compelling one, that the reason behind this switch - particularly uncharacteristic for him, as he describes his adoration of Hamlet specifically and the Bard generally - is that Serial more closely aligns to the Common Core standards than does a comparable curriculum based upon Hamlet. I've salted this post with a few choice quotes from the article on Godsey's own website. I'm choosing points to respond to on the grounds of my interest in them, but I want to note that I think that I'm largely in agreement with Godsey on the gist of his writings, and I think he makes an overall argument that's cogent and compelling.

That said, here are a few thoughts.

None of the standardized tests even hint at "appreciation of classic literature."

One point where I'd differ with Godsey is on the importance of instilling a love of classical literature in students. I have no beef with literary classics, and I think they can be entirely useful in the classroom. However, I question whether an appreciation of classical literature, aside from paying ego-related dividends, should be an overarching goal for educators. The more I think about it (and I have a LOT of down time, so I think about it regularly), the more I'm convinced that teachers' choice of literature is often governed moreso by personal preference and textbook availability, than by more relevant factors. The textbook availability issue used to be a big deal because, hey, if a teacher didn't have access to a set of textbooks, then they couldn't teach the content. Given that most kids have access to technology whose purpose is ostensibly to disseminate information, I think that's less relevant. Teachers have a much greater range to choose from, and students have many more options for accessing that material than they did even a few years ago.

The teachers' preference issue is a bigger challenge. Lady Jaye has vented to me on this issue on a number of occasions, as she's come into contact with other teachers who are dead set on teaching one item or another, even if it doesn't neatly tie into their curriculum. I can remember being subjected to a variety of supposedly fantastic books in high school that were awful, and which taught me nothing. I'm going to call Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and anything by Ernest Hemingway out on the carpet: all of them are considered classics without question, and I thought all of them were an unmitigated waste of my time.

Godsey's poison of choice is Hamlet, and while I take no issue with Hamlet or any of Shakespeare's other works, I question both the accessibility and the overall relevance of these works. I want to clarify that: I'm not saying that they're irrelevant; what I am saying is that it's difficult to gauge their relevance for high school students. Romeo and Juliet was part of my ninth grade curriculum, and was entirely wasted on our class. If I remember correctly, we examined both Hamlet and Macbeth in my AP English Literature class, and it was more interesting (probably due to how much better the instructor was), but I still can't point to any relevant knowledge or skills I gained from reading them. I can say the same thing for the Shakespeare course I took in college - twice, because I dropped, but kept auditing, the class the first year when the pretentious professor wouldn't let me take time off to go hunting. It was all very interesting, and I learned various things about English history (that I could have learned ten years later from the History Chicks), but I can't say for a fact that any of it was particularly relevant to my life. Hell, I don't think I've even cracked my Complete Pelican Shakespeare since I finished the course. Which leads me to my next observation...

I cringe at the idea that "preparing students for the workforce" is my primary job, but after I teach them the communication skills to the best of my ability, the students can choose whatever route they want, right? They can read Shakespeare on their own time. Or the [B]ible. Or John Green. Whatever they want.

Godsey's failure to capitalize "Bible" aside (it's a proper noun, sir, and you're an English teacher!), this begs the question: if preparing students for the workforce isn't your primary job, then what is? There's a lot of stuff on the Internet about how the overaching international education system dates back to the Prussian Industrial Model, and is more about conditioning people to work in factories than it is about actually educating them, and I get that. But really, what should it be about? Why should taxpayers and industry be taxed for public education, and why should education be mandated by law, if not to provide graduates with the skills they need to enter the workforce and become productive citizens? The question of how well we as a society are doing at that, and what should be done to improve it, are big issues for discussion elsewhere; but really, why should a taxpayer pay his hard-earned for some teenager to learn literature of any kind? If it's not to provide them with the written and verbal communications skills necessary to succeed in society upon graduation, isn't it sort of masturbatory? Appreciation of literature and/or media and/or art for the sake of appreciating literature/media/art is all well and good, but "themes" and "motifs" and "tone" are a poor investment if they can't be rather directly applied to post-school life.

And I don't want to just pick on literature for this. I actually think that we teach most students a lot of information that will wind up being entirely useless. I can't remember how old I was when I learned the Pythagorean Theorem, but that's basically the only mathematical concept I learned after middle school that I've ever used professionally, and I only used it once. I got awful math grades in both high school and college, only to learn that all of that math was a fairly egregious waste of my time. Mr. Godsey also notes...

The explicit message from local administrators: communication skills should be prioritized over the appreciation of classic literature. Literally one hour ago, an administrator told me: "I think English teachers got into the profession because they love literature, and so they cling to the story, which isn't ultimately that important. So they don't know Hamlet -- most adults don't. I mean on one hand, they can be learning more about the nature of man and all about the humanities, but on the other hand they could be learning about reading and writing so that they can function in the working world. Obviously we should favor the second case."

[...]

Method over matter: the taxpayers seem to agree.

And I think this speaks to my larger point: for the investment that we as a society make in public (not to mention private) schooling, and for the limited time available to educate students in only four short years (infinite though they may have seemed to all of us when we were at that stage), efficiency and return on investment are paramount. As Godsey himself notes in one of the quoted sections, students can develop an appreciation for literature on their own time (or not, as may unfortunately be the case for many graduates). Meanwhile, having worked in a variety of positions including technical writer, security manager, and risk management consultant, I can say with some certainty that the workforce's communications skills aren't up to snuff - and that includes people who should have no excuse. I've worked with retired military officers with master's degrees whose E-mails were indecipherable, who produced documents that couldn't be accurately described as "English", and who couldn't comprehend such basic concepts as citing sources - and that's just their written and/or verbal communications skills.

Godsey ends his thoughts with the following paragraph:

Put it this way, if our society read about, wrote about, listened to arguments about, and thought critically about Shakespearean characters even 1% as much as we do about Adnan and Jay, Ray Rice, or the situation in Ferguson, I would feel differently about what I'm teaching in class. But I play poker every week with a professor of English Literature, and we don't talk about Ishmael or Jay Gatsby -- we talk about Adnan and Jay. And what's the matter with that?

I say that nothing is the matter with that. In fact, I tend to think that many of the cultural elements we feel an affinity for, and that we feel a sort of obligation to enjoy, may best be left to niche audiences in favor of more contemporary offerings. I'm reminded of that aforementioned undergraduate Shakespeare course, in which the professor was fond of pointing out that Shakespeare "didn't write in Olde English" - which was all good and well, except that Shakespeare's "modern" English scarcely resembles that spoken or written today. (Being a student of Arabic, I'm reminded of discussions of "Quranic Arabic", which native Arabic speakers comprehend in roughly the same way that we comprehend Latin.)

Beyond that, and to bring it back to Common Core: for all its faults, and I gather that there are many, Common Core's goal is to introduce relevant standards into the American curriculum in order to ensure that graduating students possess the skills they need to succeed as adults. I gather that its record at doing so is, at best, controversial; however, if slaughtering a few sacred cows improves our society's results, then I'm all for it.

Also, I'm not saying that Adnan is guilty, all I'm saying is that Maryland doesn't have a case.