Edit to say because I kinda feel bad now: I have nothing against English teachers! Please don’t send your mafia of learned lit nerds after me! …Or do, lit nerds are hot.
My 7th grade English teacher changed me. Hope you’re still busting balls and wearing outlandishly chunky necklaces, Mrs Locke.
Granted she only managed to change me from an idiot kid into an idiot who wanted to be smart, but it was a start.
Yeah, English was always a fucking pain. As an adult though I wish I remembered the parts of speech and how to structure English documents well. A huge part of my job in tech is explaining things in English text.
Engineer on an enablement team
In high school an English teacher helped start me on the path to wind up here by making us learn about McCarthyism and making me do a report on the Vietnam war (everyone had a 20th century event to report on). The whole incident left me more open minded towards left wing anti authoritarianism
I wish there were more like that, who have you engage with topics and reach your own conclusions
you laugh until your STEM-only software engineer tries to write marketing copy, he circumnavigated the marketing department and sent the ads at a conference straight to the contact without getting it approved.
I can’t post the text as it’ll dox me but here’s an approximation, about running, but instead imagine it’s a software product
#NO RUNNING
or exercise
^just ^running ^ability ^made ^better
Yeah I made the mistake of learning to write well in high school then majoring in engineering and being good at it. Unfortunately that meant I was the designated person in group projects for both doing the thing and writing it up
Circumnavigated? Like, sent it around to everyone in marketing, one after another?
That…doesn’t make much sense in the context you provided. Autocorrupt strikes again?
navigated around, to mean avoid, definition 2 here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/circumnavigate
That still doesn’t make a lick of sense in this context. It has the feel of someone picking the wrong word entirely.
just agree to disagree I guess? I considered circumvent which is similar, but really there’s little etymological or metaphorical difference except personal preference
but also it might be an EN-UK vs EN-US thing (I grew up in England)
EN-UK vs EN-US thing
That might be it. Circumvent in this context would make perfect sense to me, but circumnavigate threw me for a loop.
Also ruining children’s love for books by making them read “classics”.
That’s often the state curriculum. Don’t hate the player hate the game baby
Some classics are good enough to read. The problem is in forcing kids to try to do in-depth analysis. Even Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte isn’t all that bad to read, until you are squinting at every third word and wondering if this could mean something in the context of the whole book and just maybe you can write about it well enough in your stupid journal that you really want a B in so your parents don’t whip you with the belt again.
You mean ‘Great Expectations’? The most fucking boring book ever written in the history of mankind?
I disagree and offer Old Man and the Sea.
I get it, there’s a bunch of symbolism and blah blah blah… I could sum the book up in a sentence and not miss much.
Lol you are missing a lot. You just don’t give a shit about what you are missing and that’s entirely fair to have that experience
Grapes of Wrath. My class spent an hour and a half discussing a 2 page chapter about a turtle crossing a road…
It was torture.
That was roughly my experience with East of Eden.
The Glass Menagerie. Introduction of sad, boring characters. Nothing happens. The end.
Of Mice and Men: a book in a hurry to get from nowhere to nothing at all.
I’m talking about Touching Spirit Bear (a book that contains two chapters worth of graphic descriptions of a boy, having been mauled by a bear and barely staying alive, doing things like cramming a live mouse into his gullet to survive). I’m talking about The Jungle (a book my brain has blocked out most of which involves a lot of main character deaths, committing horrific sins just to survive and then not surviving anyway, and a general endless barrage of “so there’s this guy, right, and his life sucks. I mean, it sucks. His wife just died, he watched his coworker get chopped to bits, his boss is raping his sister and if he speaks up about it he’ll be fired and they’ll both starve, everybody has shunned him, oh his life might be looking up never mind he just got outed as a fraud, suffice it to say, his life SUCKS. Also communism is good.”) I’m talking about Fahrenheit 451. I’m talking about Lord of the Flies. I’m talking about books that make kids hate reading.
Why can’t we read Discworld instead?
Those books are all fucking awesome.
My brain is having trouble with the idea that anyone could read any of the books I just listed and come away feeling anything othet than revulsion
Terry Pratchett is great and all, but don’t you have any interest in learning new things? The Jungle is essentially journalism, it exposed real shit that was happening in our own country… and being fed to us. It changed minds. It basically led to the creation of the food and drug administration. It saved lives. That’s a powerful work of art. Revulsion is the intended response. It’s kind of a horror novel.
The other books you listed…. How about wonder? Hope? Fear? Fascination? Dread? Excitement? At least they make you feel something. Boredom is what kills love for reading in my experience. None of the books you listed are boring.
And Terry Pratchett is boring? Reading Thud! and exploring racial tensions through the lens of British humor is not worth doing because it doesn’t give me the thrill of watching someone go out of the frying pan and into the fire, only to realize the “fire” was just a bigger frying pan which he has just come out of and is currently on a downward trajectory, over and over again, for 300-odd pages?
Even apart from that, you of course do you, but if I’m going to read a book for high school, boredom is WAY preferable to revulsion. I’d rather read a physics textbook word for word than be forced to continue reading every time someone dies.
Books like The Jungle are undoubtedly important from a journalistic standpoint, and having students read them and analyze them as such is important, but 1) I’d like to do that and not talk about what the main character is thinking and 2) I’d like some books that aren’t …that… thrown in for variety. If my parents didn’t thrust their Pratchett stash upon me at an early age I might’ve grown up thinking all Serious Grown-Up Literature was like that.
I’m absolutely not denigrating Pratchett or calling him boring. I sincerely think he’s great. I just think those other books are pretty great too. They’re all really interesting reads. I don’t mind reading disturbing material though, my first grown-up novel was The Shining swiped from my dad’s bookshelf.😅
This resonates. I had 3 English teachers from 3rd to 6th grade that were replaced by either long term subs, which was decent, or a rotating cast of clowns that shouldn’t have been around children.
Yeah you either luck out and get great ones, or it’s a job equivalent of adult daycare
can’t relate, all of my English teachers have been male and they have almost without fail been insane
As a former English teacher, I can say that I have made some rash decisions in my life
My favorite English teacher quit teaching altogether when she got pregnant, and her husband was my Spanish 2 teacher who left to take a principal position at my school’s rival school 1 town over.
English continued pretty normally, but they had a helluva time replacing the Spanish teacher, just as they had when my first Spanish 1 teacher got cancer and retired. I barely learned anything in either level because we would have a new teacher just start from beginning of the curriculum every 2 to 3 weeks. :/
Que embarazo
Damn, did you also have that stupid video where the teacher is trying to explain the joke of one dude trying to say embarrassed but instead says pregnant all while I’m just trying to not fail the class?
Good for them
English mother fucka, do you speak it!
this is wildly out of pocket, english teachers are CATCHING HANDS right now, jesus.
I had exactly two English teachers who were good, which was all I needed.
One when I was young, taught me how to communicate and understand complex ideas properly.
Another my first year of college, who taught me that deeper meanings and subtleties in fiction wasn’t entirely bullshit. Surprisingly, she did this by making us read Frankenstein and watch Blade Runner.
Everything in the middle though…woof. Learning to write academic papers has no value unless you’re an academic, and the other 10 literature courses I took all just made me hate reading, even the year where we just read my 4 favorite books.
Hey, getting pregnant is hard work
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Reminds me of that psycho english teacher i had .
