Bait/Rebait: English Teachers Have a Responsibility to Teach about and from Television

Abstract

The questions, What is English? and What precisely is the English teacher's domain? have never been fully answered. Nonetheless, most descriptions of what English teachers do advocate the teachers' attention to communications environments. To say that television is important to contemporary communications environments understates the obvious. In this context, we can be thankful that what we teach can maintain certain traditions while still allowing us the flexibility needed to respond to changes in the universe of discourse. Natural links between the content of television and the English curriculum are clear. TV tells us stories which can humanize us, and some which can dehumanize us. TV informs and misinforms us. And television can entertain us in grand style, or resort to entertainment appealing only to baser instincts. English teachers can clarify the differences. In The Rhetoric of Television, Ronald Primeau shows how all television programming proceeds from the basic rhetorical principles which have always guided and framed human discourse. English teachers can clarify the links between modes and forms of communication. Our subject matter must embrace television as surely as television has embraced our subject matter. If TV has too often debased and trivialized content, rather than extended language sensibilities and potentials, perhaps the fault lies more within our classrooms than within our TV networks. Television education must begin in, and be at its best, in the classroom. New technologies and laws make it unnecessary to assign home viewing. (As I type this, I think of Masada--marvelous programming, and oh for a class of sophomores to view and discuss with!) But even beyond the inherent rewards teaching from television offers, English teachers should be teaching about television. Watching TV is just like reading a book as some would argue; nor is watching television not at all like reading a book as others would claim. Television is neither inher-