English Class

Brace yourselves, this is going to be one of my "Making a point" type blog entries. I haven't written one like this since Don't We Get a Say in All This. This time I want to focus on English class. I have long held English class as my least favorite of all the subjects (with geography a close second). Last year it seemed more brutal than ever, which is what inspired the aforementioned post. This year though, it somehow got worse. This year's English class is the second of two classes that have ever made me angry. Thinking about what the homework is, and what it will be, and what we will be doing for the next few weeks, it bothers me. Basically, in a nut shell, what we are doing is finding the longest, most uneventful, boring and depressing stories we can, and going over them slowly and painfully to suck out the hidden meaning. It's enough to drive a person mad, or at least put them into a bit of a depression, if it goes on for too long. Personally, I find these stories hard to read, and even harder to re-read. Between the boringness, the sadness, and my short attention span, I keep realizing that I haven't actually read any of the words on the last three pages, and keep having to go back. So what does one do about this? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing that can be done. Either you just suck it up, do the work, and feel like garbage for the next few hours, every day, or you don't do it and you fail the project, get a low English mark, and are rejected from university. There is no real way of protesting this. Even if everyone in the class protests together, the result is just group failure. And if you do do the work? No guarantee you won't just fail anyway. All these stories can be interpreted several different ways. Everyone will find different hidden meanings and messages, depending on personal biases. Of course, you tend to only do well if you pull out the same meaning as the teacher, who "knows" the hidden meaning. The only way to really know the hidden meaning is to ask the author, not that the teacher has ever done that. Their conclusions are based of assumptions made by other people who think they have it right. You can't ask the author yourself either, as they tend to make sure the authors of all the stories died at least a decade ago. So there it is, the boring, angering, depressing, futile thing that is grade 12 academic English. Until next time.


I REALLY don't like English. :(