If teachers aren’t passionate about their subjects, how can students be?

I’ve recently been analyzing discussions conducted among University of Georgia undergrads who plan to become secondary school English teachers. One comment during a discussion caught my eye: “In high school, whenever a teacher would get really excited about their subject matter and I could just feel their passion toward it, it affected the way that I learned. I would pay attention more in class, and I was interested because they were interested in it.”

This testimonial reminds me of my son’s reading of “The Great Gatsby” in high school. His main literary interest had been Harry Potter novels, but he liked this old story, too. When I asked why, he said it was because his teacher loved it, and got excited during class when they discussed it. The teacher’s passion was so contagious that my son caught the fever.

But school can be dull. In 1984, John I. Goodlad, after studying many classrooms, described the prevailing environment in school as emotionally flat. Teachers talked a lot; students tuned out a lot. A pervasive monotony filled the school day. Since then, schools have become structured to stifle emotions even more.

One factor in making education tedious is the increase in standardized testing. I found prepping students for standardized tests to be one of the least interesting, least inspiring and least educational things I did as an English teacher from 1976-1990. In retrospect, we did very little testing, and very little test prep. I still resented every minute of instructional time I had to devote to reviewing for it.

Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at The University of Georgia, an inductee into the Reading Hall of Fame, and former co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English. (Courtesy)

I feel for teachers who nowadays have to spend massive amounts of time prepping kids for standardized, multiple-choice tests many times every year. Or, for mass testing of writing, teaching the five-paragraph theme. This familiar form includes an introductory paragraph stating three and only three points, a paragraph providing an example to support each point, and a conclusion that restates the introduction, whether it makes sense or not. Because that’s what the test rubric specifies. Teachers, check your passion at the door.

Another emotionally stifling development has been an overhaul of the curriculum to eliminate just about anything that teachers and kids would want to talk about with earnest commitment. This muffling has included the silencing of students’ and teachers’ explorations of contentious, political, social or ideological topics — not only in the U.S. but in much of Canada. Topics that elevate the passions and stoke students’ learning, often called “divisive,” have been banned from education.

I’ll use one often-banned book, Angie Thomas’s “The Hate U Give,” to exemplify the problem. It was published in 2017, and within a year topped The New York Times bestseller list for 50 weeks, was made into a feature film, and won the Coretta Scott King Book Award, the Michael L. Printz Award, the William C. Morris Award, and other awards.

It was also, by 2018, the eighth-most banned book in the U.S. for language considered profane and offensive, and for depicting drug use, police violence, and other societal problems that adults don’t want teenagers to think about, even as they think about them all the time. The novel has continued to be banned annually for the same reasons.

Yet it sure does make classrooms lively. In a recent study, we described one alternative schoolteacher as having a mission to engage students “by choosing texts and themes that resonated with their lives. She selected ... ‘The Hate U Give’ because she felt students would find its events and themes relevant to their lives. [She] reported that the novel enabled critical discussions of relevant social issues that were typically not taught in schools. When they would read it aloud daily in class, they often ‘begged’ her to continue even after the bell rang.”

These are alternative school kids who were generally disaffected with school, yet didn’t want class to end when the bell said it was over and it was time to move along to the next class.

I worry such opportunities are increasingly denied to teachers and students as the curriculum narrows to eliminate issues that stimulate kids’ interest and bring out the passion in teachers’ instruction. Perhaps a safe, boring curriculum, and quiet, emotionless classrooms is the goal.