Consider This: Teaching High School English to Maths Students

I was a Mathematics/Science student at school and I struggled with English. The worst of it was poetry - could I understand those few words that seemed to convey so much meaning and emotion to others? No! And then there was determining themes in narrative and writing essays. Totally useless.

And then I learned to fake it. And then I did a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing and received a Vice Chancellor's Award for Academic Excellence! I guess I got it, eventually.

But in all of that process I realised that my brain works very differently from those who, in my MA course, had studied Arts or English or Literature at Uni (I had studied Electrical Engineering - so a completely different field of study!).

AND YET, I could mix it with them, but my answers, my contributions came at the same material from a different direction.

Now, that is all stuff I spoke about in my talk to the Society of Women Writers. Since then, I have been helping my youngest son with his English, who is sitting the NSW Higher School Certificate this year. He's a Maths/Science student, too, and he's struggling with English. We've had some pretty awesome talks about his struggles and way around them.

His topic area is "Discovery" and one of his modules is "Distinctly Visual". The first requires him to analyse texts to draw out themes. His text is actually a TV series - which good for him being that he is a Visual Person AND he can remember the spoken quotes MUCH better than having to remember them from a written book. So, this is brilliant for a Visual Spatial thinker. But, the teacher had not really defined Discovery nor given his class a concrete way of analysing the text in a way that made it accessible.

One hour later, we had a framework of concrete ideas which we were able to apply to almost every sample exam question he could find online.
1. STARTING POINT (initial perceptions)
2. WHAT DISCOVERY WAS MADE
& HOW WAS IT MADE (challenges made to the initial perception - or not!)
3. CHANGE as a result of the DISCOVERY - and did it address the initial perception.

And then we looked at the essay questions and took the airy fairy and made them concrete, too.

Then, "Distinctly Visual" requires textual analysis, particularly or narrative techniques. Brilliant! I did that at Uni in my MA. NONE of the techniques I introduced him to had been covered in any detail at school, if at all.

1. Point of View - 1st, 2nd or 3rd person? Present tense or past tense? Who is the narrator? Who are they talking to? Is it an older version of the person in the story? Do you allow them to intrude with other information?
2. Time - where does the story start? Are there flashbacks (prolepses) or flash forwards (analepses)? How do these work? Does time go fast or slow? Where does it slow down and why?
3. Speech types - direct, indirect, reported, internal etc. What effect does this have on the narrative? Why use it where it is used?
4. Language types - colloquial, formal, contractions, etc.
5. Senses - which senses are being evoked? Why?
6. Metanyms - yes, something that you really don't hear about. We know metaphors and similes, but metanyms... what are those? A Metanym is where a part of a thing replaces the thing to describe it. For example, to refer to a business man you just call him a "suit". This brought is to talk about how a reader brings their own understanding to a text to bring meaning to the text. That the writer and paint a broad stroke but then allows the reader to fill in details.

And it was this last idea (called Cognitive Narrative Theory, by the way) that has inspired an idea for his Creative Writing, which is brilliant. Now he just has to pull it off. Does he have the skills to do it? Maybe. But it could mean some more awesome sessions as he works through it.

I can see some pretty interesting types of workshops I could run for Maths Students struggling with English. Just wish I had a way to do it.