As we continue reading about how English studies have progressed from there to here, I find myself thinking about my own experiences as an ELA student. It seems that, regardless of national movements and/or major schools of thought, students often become the followers of an English teacher’s passions or whims.
I remember devoting half of my eighth grade year to a study of Evangeline by Longfellow and the second half diagramming sentences. My freshman year was a complete disaster. My sophomore year was a pleasant mixture of Julius Caesar and parts of speech. My junior year was my introduction to the dreaded research paper. And my senior year was the year I was chastised for not immersing myself more in the classics. In total, I survived because I understood the rules of schooling and because I was a competent reader and writer.
It appears that my English teachers were guided by their own experiences. They all saw a need for grammar studies, and they selected literature that they enjoyed as students or that they felt comfortable teaching. This comfort probably stemmed from a reliance on the "tried and true" anthologies. True, they may have been influenced by national trends of the time or by a popular philosophical stance. But at the end of the day, those ladies chose to teach what they knew (and loved) best. It is interesting to see the bigger picture courtesy of Applebee.
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Your last paragraph resonated my undergraduate study on English literature. I remembered how my professor explained his interpretations of Wuthering Heights while everyone annotated on the margin because they would be tested. I could really see his experiences with that book, but I was hardly related to it. So, I think it's a good point to think about how teachers could balance between choose what they knew/loved and those students knew/loved.
"Relevance" for the student seems to be missing in your education.
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