Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

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I'll say this: more so than any other department or discipline (yes, including computer science), I think a person would benefit most from a few properly taught college English classes.

Well-taught classes (and I took enough good and bad English classes to recognize the distinction) are completely irreplaceable by Google or MOOCs. They focus overwhelmingly on the art of discourse: sure, there are papers and exams but the soul of the class is in the daily lecture; everyone comes in with X, Y, and Z read and you discuss it, growing and pruning theories and interpretations of literature as one would an oddly looking tree. A good professor wants to teach you that Frankenstein is an allegory for the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of Man; a great professor knows the conversation that Shelley had with Chaucer and Milton and everyone in between -- and knows how to help their students figure out everything themselves, with just enough help along the way.

A good English course only needs a semester to teach you how to make a point, argue it, research it, defend it against a multitude of competing and contradicting points, and ultimately handle the reality that the point has been made many times before by people much smarter than you.

(This experience is magical, and something that really can't happen in a room with more than forty people, let alone a web app with hundreds.)

You develop along the way a finely honed level of communication (I had a fellow CS grad once suggest to me that 100-level English classes were about punctuation and grammar, and it made me inappropriately angry); you learn how to approach questions with no answer and conversations with no real goal, how to talk with peers, mentors, and people who died hundreds of years ago. You learn a tremendous amount about yourself and others through the lens of literature, honed tightly by a great professor and a greater book, because the way you approach any experience is of course colored by everything about you.

I switched out of the English department my sophomore year to pursue Computer Science, but British Literature II was the most valuable class I've ever taken.

"100-level English classes were about punctuation and grammar"

They are--which is, luckily, one of many reasons I placed out of them.

"A good professor wants to teach you that Frankenstein is an allegory for the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of Man; a great professor knows the conversation that Shelley had with Chaucer and Milton and everyone in between..."

Or they could write a book and you could read it for free at the library, or online. Why limit knowledge to people who have $50,000/year to blow on college? Not everyone is rich and upper class. Can only people from well off families become "properly" educated? I've met a lot of educated people from all walks of life, and all levels of education. To me, at least, intelligence and a drive to learn are far greater indicators of someone's likely degree of sophistication than how much their parents spent on their four year vacation to some over priced campus.

Well taught classes are a nice idea, but most people will never have access to a good teacher, much less a good classroom environment. I've had good teachers but a ruined class experiment by sufficiently unprepared or even just unintelligent classmates.

There's nothing magical about college. You can do just as well with finding informed and (likely more enthused, even) peers at a open access book club, if not the often maligned internet forums dedicated to literature.

I've seen too many english and other writing intensive liberal arts majors graduate without knowing the difference between your and you're, its and it's, to really have any respect for the degree. Oddly, my scientist friends have few problems with attention to detail and understanding basic syntax, despite not spending four years on mastering the subject. I suspect this is because they already mastered it in high school, if not earlier, much like myself.

If you have to go to college to learn, you're doing it wrong. (And these days--also very expensively.)

Or they could write a book and you could read it for free at the library, or online.

Because, as I said in my original comment, the value of good English courses lies less in the dissemination of information and more in the underlying discourse. To borrow a weak metaphor: reading a lot of criticisms and interpretations is like having someone lift the barbell while you're on the bench. Sure, you might tax your arms a little bit but you're not actually working out.

Why limit knowledge to people who have $50,000/year to blow on college? Not everyone is rich and upper class. Can only people from well off families become "properly" educated? ... To me, at least, intelligence and a drive to learn are far greater indicators of someone's likely degree of sophistication than how much their parents spent on their four year vacation to some over priced campus.

This is completely irrelevant to the point I made, and it appears you're just trying to rail against the college system as a whole. Which is cool, I guess.

I've seen too many english and other writing intensive liberal arts majors graduate without knowing the difference between your and you're, its and it's, to really have any respect for the degree. Oddly, my scientist friends have few problems with attention to detail and understanding basic syntax, despite not spending four years on mastering the subject. I suspect this is because they already mastered it in high school, if not earlier, much like myself.

I don't want to disparage your anecdotal evidence, but I -- and imagine many, many others -- have had the exact opposite experience. The average literacy and communication ability of a STEM graduate is far below that of a humanities grad. Also, the implication of this passage is that anyone who goes into a liberal arts major is less intelligent than anyone who goes into a science. I'd like you to qualify that because it sounds condescending as hell.

A big problem lies in secondary school. There's very little exposure to formal argument, and heavy emphasis fitting ideas into a rigid paragraph structure.

IME, I was pushed into the 5-paragraph form more during primary education; in secondary school, there were no such requirements. (That might be a consequence of having been moved into AP classes; I never looked into what regular English did.) I think this was a good thing, since I was forced to learn to support my claims and look at them structurally.

The issue is that "English" is a non-subject. In early education, it's about literacy: being able to read and write at all. As you advance, it becomes about logic: being able to coherently express your substantiated view. And then, at the end, it becomes about literature: using deeper historical contexts to analyze a work deeply and interestingly.

These are each vastly different subjects, but we call them all "English". Which is silly. We have other words. People with English degrees should know that.

The 5-paragraph essay gets a lot of hate, much of it deserved as it gets overused, but I've found it a very helpful tool to get students to organize their thoughts. I used to help tutor East Asian ESL students and getting them to understand how to make an argument and then support it with evidence was difficult, but once they grokked how it worked, vastly improved their communications.

Were I a regular English teacher, I don't think I'd let a student coast in 5-paragraph beyond a semester.

> The issue is that "English" is a non-subject. In early education, it's about literacy: being able to read and write at all. As you advance, it becomes about logic: being able to coherently express your substantiated view. And then, at the end, it becomes about literature: using deeper historical contexts to analyze a work deeply and interestingly.

A very good point. We used to call "English" education by the subject you were learning "reading" "writing" "grammar" "spelling" "punctuation" "letters", "creative writing", "technical writing", "literary analysis" etc. But in some grand scheme to simplify things I guess we just use "English" now, which is frankly lame.

the 5-paragraph structure is wonderful. I used (a 4-paragraph version of) it for my MCATs in one essay and used the french equivalent (these - antithese - synthese) in another - mind you you have 30 minutes to organize and write each essay. It forces you to do exactly that, think about what your point is and put in a place where your reader will actually see it, and not drown it in a sea of words.

A scientific paper is basically that, except expanded into bigger sections. When authors take liberties with the structure it really results in incomprehensible gibberish. Even for general expository writing - I found that reading through internship essays, for example, when the essay was a ramble, I would chuck the whole application, but when the essay had clear topics and supporting information structure, I kept it.

Well, make no mistake: the 5-paragraph structure is a crutch. It's like a coloring book: all the lines are drawn for you and you fill it in. That's not a bad thing, though, because you're learning about muscle control and coloration and texture... but it's completely different from drawing your own picture.

At the point you've learned how to construct an argument and substantiate it with supporting claims, you're ready to leave it behind for longer (or shorter!), less structured forms... or to pull it back out when you feel it's appropriate.

Goodness, yes.

My academic background is a mix of humanities and third-rate engineering (history and economics, hah).

I find that even at high levels in undergrad history, there's little sense that arguments don't have to-- and usually don't!-- adhere to the 5-7 paragraph template/bullshit one's often taught in secondary school.

I used to tutor a fair bit, and weaning people off that stilted and artificial convention became one of my preoccupations.

Now that I'm done bloviating, an interesting historical analogue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay

I think that's a good point -- humanities classes at the high school level in general (at least in my experience) were focused on retaining information and spitting it out in a proper format. I remember reading the Iliad for AP English and being quizzed on the name of Achilles' horse.

I think questions like that are meant to check that you actually read the book, and with a certain amount of detail. High school students are notorious for skipping or skimming readings and/or relying on resources like Sparknotes, especially with more difficult texts like the Iliad.

(I may or may not be speaking from personal experience...)

Your definition of a good English course sounds more or less identical to a Philosophy course.

I completely agree. The, by far, most useful course I took in high school was English literature. Far more useful than any math or science class, despite going on to study physics and getting a degree in maths.

Well, more than anything it sounds like you had a good teacher. I think the essence of this experience is possible with any material, provided the teacher is good. I mean, your description almost reads like the kind of martial arts training you see in movies. (This is not a bad thing.) But, I'll agree that it's more likely in the humanities, in a small class, with a passionate teacher. The advisor/advisee relationship in grad school seems like a great place for it, in an ideal world.

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