I Hate English

I Hate English
By Barbara Hancock Cole

"I HATE ENGLISH." How many times have I heard this comment?

At the beginning of each new quarter of freshman composition for twenty-five year I have asked my students, "How many of you love English?" Questioning further, I often find that whole families hate English—"always have," the students say. A strange phenomenon when you stop to think about it. How can we hate something so much a part of ourselves. Languages is us—our ideas, our successes, our failures, our hopes, our dreams, our joys, our fears. Why do American students develop the preposterous notion that they hate English? Impossible. Or is it?

With so much opposition to my positive attitude toward the language, I often ask myself, "Why do I love English?" Immediately I recall a fifth grade teacher who kept a yardstick in her hand always to pop her desk or somebody else's—or maybe even somebody, we worried—to emphasize her demands to learn something new. "For tomorrow you will memorize the adjective rule. Adjectives modify nouns and pronouns. You must understand modification if you are to be successful at diagramming sentences." I had never heard the word modification before fifth grade. It was the biggest word I knew, and I was glad to know it. I cannot say I understood it, but I memorized the rule. We never forgot the yardstick, and we memorized rule after rule and diagrammed probably a thousand or so sentences. I was "good at English," but I cannot say I loved it. What I did was the job of a fifth grader. I wanted to go to sixth grade, and this work was merely one of the hurdles to jump to get there. I am reminded of the story of two men laying bricks.

When asked what they were doing, one man said, "Working nine to five." The second one said, "Building a cathedral." In fifth grade I built no cathedrals. I did not see the big picture of language. In the past by the time students reached ninth grade, they often did hate English; they had not had a teacher who loved English enough to major in it in college. English meant rules, punctuation and spelling errors, headaches and a bad feeling about self based on poor or average grades.

In the ninth grade things changed drastically. Our English teacher, for the first time in all our years of school, was an honest-to-God English teacher, a dyed-in-the-wool, graduated-from-the-university English teacher. We expected many sentences to diagram, exercises to punctuate, and impossible papers to write. We were ready for him, armed with the rules; we could recognize dangling modifiers and diagram sentences with verbal and absolute phrases. We knew about restrictive and non-restrictive clauses, but he threw us a curve. "Tomorrow," he said, "we'll begin our study of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The next day he came with a record player and "Victory at Sea." This was a strange thing for a university graduate English teacher to do—a ditch digger could have done this. For most of the period we listened and talked about what we had heard and how we felt and what we thought as we listened to the music. We almost forgot he was the teacher and this was English class. He didn't act like any teacher we'd ever had.

"Tomorrow we'll continue our study of Coleridge's poem." We thought he was making a joke. No mention of the poem had been made the entire hour. The next day he came to class with no book once again. He sat on the desk and told us he grew up in Colorado and after high school joined the Navy and eventually went to sea. He talked about being on a ship, about homesickness, seasickness, loneliness, boredom, fear, distance, clouds, wind, rain, icebergs, danger, day storms and night storms, fun fear, colors, fish, birds, sounds, sunrise, and sunset. And then he answered our questions. None of us had ever been on a ship. "Tomorrow we'll continue our study of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

At last the next day the teacher came to class with a book and he read to us most of the hour. We flew with the words and the ship, and we dragged in the heat, and he let us all read aloud with him and feel the words race and then slow clumsily until we sat "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." We could see the albatross and the ice mast high; we could hear it growl and crackle; we could see the blue green water and, yes, even the water snakes. Some of us had seen the ocean, but none of us had ever sailed out of sight of land before we met the ancient mariner and our strange teacher.

Before we left that piece of literature, we talked about many things, much of it dealing with how we felt about characters, how we would have reacted had we been the mariner, or the holy hermit or the pilot's boy. We identified verses we liked most of all and talked about our choices. I don't recall anyone being bored or not liking The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

DOES MY LOVING ENGLISH have anything to do with the ninth grade teacher who made me see clearly through the power of language a world and people totally foreign to me? Surely, it does.

I'm glad I learned the rules of English beginning in the fifth grade. I still remember them. I am sorry I was frightened into learning them and sorry I missed years of seeing the wholeness of language, of something more than mere rules—something that could teach me about myself and about others. I have always been an observant person, but what more could I have seen if someone had taught me to perceive the world around me in a broader frame. Once I brought my daughter a bottle of water from the Jordan River. "But what does the river look like?" she asked. She was telling me what we all know but sometimes forget: we appreciate whole things—a dress, not seven yards of fabric, a spool of thread and needles; a car, not a collection of steel and plastic parts; a cathedral or a pyramid, not a stack of stone; and a river, not a cup of water. What happened in the fifth grade cannot be judged all bad. There were dividends. But think of the payoff which that teacher could have claimed if she had gone a step further and made the rules fit reading and writing and discussion situations—she could have made language a real part of our lives, maybe without the yardstick.

Language is a powerful tool. Winston Churchill armed it when he had no real weapons to hold back the enemy, and it worked. Can language usage, self-expression, self-esteem and positive attitudes and what our society call success be totally separated? If Churchill could fight a war with language, handled with care, what battles could we help our youth win with it?

When I learned the rules, I never wanted to do more than what I was told to do. It was, after all, just a job. In the ninth grade with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner I could see the cathedral, and I wonder, "How did Coleridge do that?" I wanted to know the infrastructure when I had a reason to do so. In 1954, the year I was in the ninth grade, there was no whole language movement in education. That would come thirty-two years later. We simply had a teacher who seemed intuitively to understand the inseparability of language, writing, rules, literature and life, and his fascination inspired his students to look at the world with inquiring minds, seeking to put ideas together into some kind of meaning. Some call the whole language approach a fad, but for the first time many young students, even kindergarten students, are beginning to make sense of language, to see and understand its force and its beauty. I expect this year someone will retort, "I hate English," but someday soon, I think, somebody is going to say to me, "I love English. It's the greatest thing going."
Barbara Cole is professor of English at Sandhills Community College and author of Anna and Natalie, Wash Day, and Texas Star. This essay is reprinted from the March 1996 issue of North Carolina Conference of English Instructors CEI Newsletter, Rick Lewis, editor.