English class

[Hades]

During my semesters of creative writing mandatory from college, i had a great prejudice for the class. It was my experience that the two teachers i had were the stereotypical pretentious notebook carrying latte drinking at starbucks for 8 hours a day on the weekends because it offers free wifi connection english teachers. My first paper was an 8 page persuavively driven paper about the limitations of morals and their effects on science. I felt it was the best written paper i had to date; the writing staff also agreed with me as it was required to spend 4 hours a week with the separate writing lab.

However, the teacher did not feel this way. I received a grade of I, for incomplete. She felt it was not gradeable. Her reasoning was i needed to convey my message to the reader; speak as though the reader has no predisposition to the material. Confounding her belief was not only the writing staff, but another english teacher i got an opinion from. I finally concluded she felt it as a personal attack on her intelligence and simply conformed to boring monotony required to pass the class; the next paper was on eating disorders... like everyone else.

But, this correlates to this problem in the sense that when i took two years of literature, depending on the teacher, it can really open your eyes. If the teacher who lectures to you is passionate about the material, it seems he wants the students to also feel the same; uninhibit yourself when deciphering dickinson, or on a lesser extent, become literal when reading frankling. Teachers like this have no insecurity about their own abilities and never feel threatened by outside opinions on the readings. That is a good teacher, and with that your writing and analyzing tactics will significantly grow.

sorry for the long post. cheers

 

:edit: who the hell is frankling

 

"franklin"

[coquina]

The best English teacher I ever had was for 10th grade American Lit. I really enjoyed learning about "the lost generation".

 

That year was the first year our school was integrated, and there was a single black kid in the class.

 

One of the things we had to learn to do was to read, think, and speak in dialects other than our own. We had to read our stories to the class. She assigned me one of the Uncle Remus stories ( which I bet are not taught in school today - has anybody here read about Brer Rabbit & Brer Fox? - "Doan you go throwin' me in that there briar patch?") Anyway - the black kid was assigned to read, "To a Mouse", by the Scot poet, Robert Burns.

 

She didn't cut any of us any slack, but we were all crazy about her.