Confessions of an English Teacher: A Memoir of My Teaching Years

By Richard P. Sinay

Confessions of an English Teacher was written to share the memories of teaching English at six high schools and seven community colleges in Orange County, California. From those e

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: May 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798822947504

Richard P. Sinay

Richard Sinay was a high school and college English and reading teacher for schools in Orange County, California, for thirty-five years. Recently, he has been writing books about his past and teaching career. He spends most of his time playing golf, reading, and writing. He has four previous publications: Who We Met on the Way to Stanford: A Father's Memoir and How to Get a Golf Scholarship to Stanford: A Parent's Guide. His newest publication, Observations of America and My Ancestral Past: An Epistolary Autobiography, is a daily account of a twenty-five thousand-mile trip around the country. His latest book, Crazy Little Children Are Jangling the Keys of the Kingdom: The Estrangement Epidemic in America, was published recently. Confessions of an English Teacher: A Memoir of My Teaching Years is the first in a series of books about teaching English in California high schools and community colleges. He resides in Palm Desert, California, with his wife, Tina.

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Copyright © 2024 by Richard P. Sinay

All rights reserved

No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means–electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or other–except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without prior permission of the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 979-8-8229-4748-1

Paperback ISBN: 979-8-8229-4749-8

eBook ISBN: 979-8-8229-4750-4

To Tina, for her never-ending love and support

To Those Teachers Who Inspired Me To Learn

Teaching is perhaps the most privatized of all the public professions. Though we teach in front of students, we always teach solo, out of collegial sight–in contrast to surgeons and lawyers who work in the presence of others who know their craft well. When we walk into our workplace, the classroom, we close the door on our colleagues. When we emerge, we rarely talk about what happened or what needs to happen next, for we have no shared experience to talk about.

The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life

—Parker J. Pilmer

Contents

Part I: Teaching at the High School

Chapter 1:

Imperial Junior High School (1973-1977)

Chapter 2:

Brea Olinda High School (1977-78)

Chapter 3:

Fullerton High School (1978-1980)

Chapter 4: Canyon High School (1980-81)

Chapter 5:

Laguna Hills High School (1981-82)

Chapter 6:

Valencia High School (1982-2008)

Chapter 7:

Great English Department Hallmarks

Chapter 8:

How California and Colleges Can

Improve the Teaching of English

Part II: Teaching at the College

Chapter 1:

Cypress College (1978-1983)

Chapter 2:

Cerritos Community College (Summer 1987)

Chapter 3:

Saddleback College (1983-1990)

Chapter 4:

Santa Ana College (1990-1993; 1995-2007)

Chapter 5:

Santiago Canyon College (1999-2006)

Chapter 6:

Fullerton College (2003-2004)

Chapter 7: Pikes Peak Community College (2017-2018)

Chapter 8:

Recommendations for Change

at Community Colleges

Conclusion

Works Cited

Author Biography

Acknowledgments

Part I: Teaching at the High School

Part I: Teaching at the High School

In 1885, the Concord Public Library banned Mark Twain’s book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to which Twain remarked, That will sell 25,000 copies for us, sure, he stated to his publisher.

Introduction

I wrote Confessions of an English Teacher: A Memoir of My Teaching Years to expose the problems I discovered as a high school and college English teacher in California schools. These are indeed my confessions of what I discovered to be wrong, even though confessions imply I did something wrong. I did nothing wrong except that I could not do anything about what was wrong. I am confessing to the public and to my former colleagues what I thought was wrong. I taught at six high schools in Orange County, California, from 1973 to 2008. I also taught at seven community colleges from 1978 to 2018, including one in another state. During my career, I learned that watching colleagues teach English was a perpetuation of problems I saw as far back as my high school days in the 1960s. I also experienced what I consider to be severe problems in Education, which will be part of my memoirs.

I will share my experiences teaching English throughout my career. In Part I, I will cover the secondary schools I taught at, and reveal the situations I thought were questionable. As a result of my conclusions, I suggest what should have been the hallmarks of a great English teaching program. In Part II, I will cover my memoirs of problems teaching at the community colleges. I will suggest some recommendations for change at the community college level that might shake up the world of teaching English at that level. While reflecting on these different schools, I will boldly relate to the reader those recommendations for change that I deem necessary to elevate our children’s literacy. Although some of these stories might sound negative, they do not reflect my feelings about teaching. I loved teaching, and I was good at it. I was a well-respected teacher by my students and colleagues, even more so at the college level than the high school level. I enjoyed doing what I was required to teach but saw some things that could be improved. After all my Education, I discovered how English was taught needed to be clarified for me. There needed to be more consistency in the teaching of English. Too much English instruction has remained the same for fifty or more years, so I questioned why the system has perpetuated itself without significant change.

In a short story by Shirley Jackson called The Lottery, she makes a fundamental comment about human society. She implies that people continue to perpetuate traditions regardless of the tradition. The town’s people have a lottery every year, and the winner of the lottery is stoned to death. After the stoning, the people go about their business like nothing happened. I suggest that English departments have established traditions that have continued for decades without a constitutional change because there have become such entrenched traditions that no one sees the importance and the necessity to change them. I am writing this memoir to change those traditions that have seriously affected our children’s literacy. Let’s look at some of those traditions at the high school and college campuses where I taught for quite a few years.

The book’s structure takes the reader through the sequence of schools I taught. Each school’s English department operates differently, and I highlight those differences in each school’s chapter. The schools are the settings for those incidents that illustrated my concern about teaching English and other educational matters. There will be scenes where English teachers earn their criticism as teachers. There will be scenes where English teachers embarrass themselves with their lack of knowledge. There will be scenes showing English teachers teaching literature poorly. There will be scenes the public might not want to know about. There will be illustrations of how incorrectly teachers handle the evaluations of writing. There will be scenes where I question the hiring practices of both high school and college. There will be scenes where I question grammar teaching at both the high school and college levels. And much, much more.

This writing is not to disparage anyone (as I name no one in this memoir) but to argue that English teachers need better training to teach English than they are getting. The preparation of English teachers must be improved, especially when five years of school has not prepared the English teacher to teach writing, grammar, or Reading. English teachers have the daunting task of improving our children’s literacy skills, and given that this country has a severe decline in literacy, it is essential to understand why that is happening. English teachers need a new and revised training program that prepares them for teaching improved literacy instead of placating the needs of college literature professors. After many years of seeing how English has been introduced, a better way to improve our students’ literacy is needed.

Through this writing, I will identify what I came to understand might be the best practices of an English department. These are the conclusions I drew from my varied experiences teaching at these different high schools. I hope to bring about some discussions in English departments around the country. Perhaps all I will receive is criticism for these outlandish suggestions. Let the chips fall where they may. My writing is intended to open up the discussion of what English teachers can do to improve their literacy impact on students. If the reader’s English department has all of the hallmarks of a great English department already instituted, then bravo for the outstanding work the teachers have accomplished. I know there are English departments well on their way to accomplishing most of these hallmarks. Let’s encourage more to make the same practice. Let’s look at my teaching experiences and what I discovered needs improvement.

Chapter 1:

Imperial Junior High School (1973-1977)

Every time you stop a school, you must build a jail. What you gain at one end, you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

—Mark Twain

W

hen I finished my student teaching and credentials to teach English, I was a happy man. With that accomplished, it was just a matter of getting a job. I didn’t realize that getting a job would be something I would have to do for many years after getting my first one. I wanted to teach in the school district where I attended high school or anywhere nearby, but I wanted to teach at something other than my alma mater, La Habra High School. I wanted to live in Orange County, California, where I had spent most of my time since my family moved to California from Ohio. After being awarded my teaching certificate for the state of California, I applied to La Habra City School District, a district considered an elementary school district with two junior high schools, Washington Junior High School and Imperial Junior High School, and several elementary schools. An English position was available at Imperial Junior High, so I applied. I got an interview right away.

My interview took place at the district office with the assistant superintendent of human resources. His name isn’t important, but I remember him telling me he graduated from the University of Southern California. I did my student teaching at USC and finished my coursework for the teaching credential. It was part of the reason why I got the job. It was a it’s not what you know, but who you know, and although I did not know him, he liked the connection we had of being fellow Trojans. It was more about taking care of one of their own. Little did I know that this is how the world works, and it was no different in Education than in the rest of the work world. If applicants know someone, they have an advantage in getting the job. A central theme of this memoir is the whole business of how teachers are hired. This teaching memoir will shed light on getting hired in Education like no one has ever heard. I hope it impacts how teachers are hired because it isn’t right how it happens.

After my interview, I got a call from the assistant superintendent when I got home. He asked me if I would like the job. I immediately accepted. I suspected our connection helped, but my reviews as a student teacher were quite good enough to get me hired. The district needed someone young in the English department at Imperial Junior High School since the other three 8th-grade teachers were all nearing retirement. I received two calls for employment at two different school districts, but I was surprised to find out I could continue to interview. Saying yes to the position was a commitment I had to honor. I missed the opportunity to teach right down the street from where I lived. Nevertheless, I did not regret celebrating my acceptance of the job.

I started teaching in the fall of 1973 and ended my junior high teaching in June 1977. It was four beautiful years of teaching English to 8th-grade students. Junior high students are open, honest, and fun but a bit too jittery for me. If one wants to learn how to teach, the challenge of teaching 8th-grade students showed me how to be organized and ready to teach when one has a room full of jumpy 8th-grade students. I was also in charge of the yearbook, an experience that will help me later in my career and life. The students I had to work on in the yearbook were some of the brightest in the school and such a pleasure to be around. When we finished our work, we all went to McDonald’s for lunch and enjoyed eating Big Macs.

The 8th grade English department consisted of four teachers. We each had our students for ten weeks, and then they rotated to the next teacher. We had the students for two classes: English (Writing) and Reading (literature). The lab was one of the best set-ups to improve the students’ linguistic skills. We could teach them reading skills for forty-five minutes, and in the second forty-five-minute period, we could teach them writing skills. It allowed the English teacher to improve reading and writing skills without juggling both simultaneously. However, what appeared to be the reading part of the students’ Education was a mandated poetry education. The English department had decided to teach the four different genres of literature as the reading instruction for students: poetry, short stories, novels, and drama.

Teaching Poetry

I was assigned to teach the students poetry. Another teacher taught them drama, another taught the short story, and the last taught the novel. I learned that an English teacher was just a Little Literature Professor transformed from college to secondary schools to teach literary terminology and make students love literature by teaching them its genres. It was what I was somewhat trained to do: teach literature. I quickly learned that I was not prepared to teach writing. I quickly realized that I needed training to teach grammar. I quickly knew that I was not qualified to teach speech. I quickly learned that I needed training to teach Reading. I was partially prepared to teach literature and somewhat ready to teach students how to write about literature. I discovered that I was not prepared to teach English skills. In a forthcoming book, I will explain how that happened.

I went to work preparing my poetry lessons by first learning that there was no textbook for teaching poetry. How does one teach poetry without a poetry book? It was the first time I learned that new teachers need not recreate the wheel when beginning teaching. In other words, someone before me had lessons they used to teach poetry, so why couldn’t I reference those lessons? Instead, I had to create the curriculum myself. My junior high teaching and other experiences arriving on different campuses to teach English taught me that English departments can and should be more prepared to assist new teachers. Instead of making a new teacher reinvent the wheel, the wheel should already exist.

But since this was not the case, I went to work. I decided that rather than teach traditional poetry, I would teach students the language of poetry using the day’s popular songs. Elton John was emerging as a singer in those years, so I introduced the song Benny and the Jets. Gordon Lightfoot was quite popular, so I taught the song If You Could Read My Mind and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters, to name just a few. All the songs I used contained poetic devices that students were to learn. The thought was that teaching poetic literary devices was the path to better poetic analysis.

When evaluated for the first time in my teaching career, the principal, came in to listen and watch as he saw thirty-five eighth graders sit as quietly as any group in church, listening to the sounds of those songs and watching students identify the metaphors and similes and other poetic devices in the songs. He thought it was magnificent, and so did my students. They loved it, and my teaching reviews got off to a great start. Whenever I managed to run into one of those students of the four years I taught, they always reminded me of how fun it was to learn poetry through popular songs. They never listened to music the same way after that.

It was not easy to use technology in those days. I copied the lyrics from albums I borrowed from friends and recorded the songs on a cassette. It allowed me to stop the song so that I could ask questions of the students about the poetry they were reading. Teaching poetry meant teaching them the terminology of poetry: metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, rhyme, verse, alliteration, assonance, personification, imagery, meter, couplet, stanza, sonnet, and many more. I had become the Little Literature Professor I had been trained to be. A central theme of this book is that English teachers are really Little Literature Professors. Teaching literary terminology was the mandate of the English department as well. The English department said nothing about making sure the students learned the poem’s message or anything about writing what the poem meant to them, but I did it anyway. I told them analyzing poetry is looking for the message and the meaning of the poem as best as one could interpret it.

It struck me as funny that this was a reading class. What were we reading? Granted, the other teachers would be reading since they would teach drama, novels, and short stories. However, I learned that the drama teacher did not read anything; instead, she allowed the kids to put skits together to perform the