Much like Batman, I can claim that no one knows who I am. To my thousands and thousands of adoring fans, I'm no more than a shadow in the night who dispenses truth and punches. Unlike Batman, I'm not quite that naive. For one thing, Batman can't have never slipped up. He's told enough people that it doesn't even matter. It'd leak, it'd leak.
But anyway, I'm like Batman. But that doesn't mean that people don't know who this paragon of truth is, and that people don't know who my teachers are.
Now, I'm not a fan of my English teacher. It's got something to do with her personality, sure, actually quite a bit to do with her personality, but it's deeper than that. I'm not going to criticize her personality, because she's not the worst teacher I've ever had in that regard. Plus, it's petty to do that. Almost as petty as she is.
ANYWAY.
English has always been a favorite subject of mine. Part of it was that I really enjoy creatively writing, short stories and whatnot, but English classes have rarely catered to that. I can't really fault her for that.
She explained, on the first day, the type of writing she wanted. In her defense, she's teaching towards the AP exam. A lot of the problems I have with her teaching style are shared with the AP test.
One of the things that recent years of English have tried to eliminate is clutter. Clutter is the use of any words, no matter how well they fit, that do not explicitly add to the purpose of the piece. Or, to put it in clutter-free terms, "Clutter is extra words."
Now, clutter is never something that I thought much about. It didn't matter to me if it didn't directly add to the purpose of the piece if it was stylish, if it was unique, if it worked. Adding words for the sake of adding words is something I don't like. But to remove any superfluous words seems excessive.
To me, the English language, and language and general, thrives without rules. No author ever struck it rich by rigidly following guidelines. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, and Joanne Rowling- all had wildly different styles, based on what they wanted to write like, and all found extreme success doing so.
Language is almost an organic process. It's evolving, it's not rigid, it grows and it changes and it morphs and that's what makes it beautiful. Ask hundreds of people what their favorite part of English is- and count how many people say analytical essays.
Not to say that the preference has much to do with the "correct" way to teach English. I'd prefer to do no work at all, and just read- but that's not the best way to do that.
In the real world, most of your literary encounters are not reading and analyzing essays. It's reading books, writing books, writing and reading summaries, not reading a passage and responding. There is no job where you will have twenty five minutes to read a passage and respond. It's that simple.
As an AP class, I'm sure they're teaching to a subset of a subset. They don't need to have a broad-reaching appeal, but they should cover the bases. No History class worth its salt would only focus on reading primary documents. No math class would only use addition, at least not past third grade. Why have an English class with only one type of writing?
Thanks for reading and considering,
-J.Valett
I think this is the year of terrible English teachers. Mine is insanely conceited and does her best to terrify her students to appear more confident. Then, when she turns off teacher-mode, she's relatively nice. However, I've already noticed that she stresses a really uniform way of doing things. The only assignment we've had so far has been annotating text and she wants everybody to look for the same things and the same symbols and that's it. However, literature always has more than one truth, more than one component to find. What makes literature so beautiful is that everyone can see it differently and nobody is wrong because it speaks to every individual. But teaching a specific way to read and write because that's how you'll do well on a test? I don't know. I understand why that's necessary for an AP class, but now I'm debating whether or not I should have taken an AP class at all if I disagree with everything standardized testing stands for. Except colleges LOLOLOLOL basically.
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