Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
High school English
You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly English k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!
Suisan’s reminiscences about her schooling in English made me think about my high school English teachers. I owe them a lot, those gals. I credit them with teaching me to write, a skill which paid off big time in college. It’s frightening how few college students know how to write a coherent paragraph (let alone a coherent essay), particularly during timed final exams. I’m sure many of my As had more to do with the quality of my grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence variety, rhythm, and clarity, than with the quality of my ideas.
I don’t remember much about my 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Baca. At the time, I thought she looked like Liz Taylor. I think she made us do one of those idiotic assignments where you write up your dreams for the future at the beginning of the year, do it again at the end of the year, then compare the two to see how far you’ve come. I doubt I came very far*.
We read The Old Man and the Sea that year. I hated it. I still hate it. I’m going to make Jake read it this year so that he can hate it, too. (See, Suisan? I didn’t learn anything from your post.) Seriously, though, what am I supposed to do about exposing Jake to Hemingway? I’m tempted to have him read The Best of Bad Hemingway and call that his Hemingway experience**.
But I digress.
Disclaimer: I’m tired. Dog tired. Double dog tired. So tired that the Monty Python pic & quote above seem relevant to the topic at hand, that’s how tired. Read on if you must, but you’ve been warned.
My 10th grade Advanced Placement English teacher, Andrea Thais, impressed me from the start by making us read Gulliver’s Travels in the summer before school began. I don’t have happy memories of Gulliver’s Travels. We read a prose version of The Odyssey that year, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet, too. Good heavens, I don’t remember 10th grade very well, either!
Oh, we read Dante’s Inferno, too. I recall Mrs. Thais’s delight that one of the damned was named Thais. No Hoffmans in hell, unfortunately. We’re just too good.
Best part of 10th Grade English was the time I gave a precis of Hamlet to the class. I remember I had them in stitches over Ophelia’s death. Bottomless, the comedic potential of Ophelia’s drowning.
I’m on firmer ground with 11th Grade: Charlotte Cardin, a former stewardess-turned-teacher, lover of all things Emily. Emily Dickinson, that is. Ms. Cardin, despite her enthusiasm for Emily, never made me see the light. But she did do a damned good job teaching me how to explicate poetry. Appreciate poetry? Meh. Explicate it? Fuck yeah.
Bloody hell, I can’t remember any of the novels we read in 11th Grade. Sis, help me out here. All I remember is e.e. cummings and Emily and T.S. Eliot. Lots and lots of poems. Did we read any novels that year? Ethan Frome, I think.
Maybe that was the year we read Turn of the Screw, the book that introduced me to literary criticism. Our edition had several essays at the end, each discussing various shades of the question, “What the fuck is this book about?” I loved literary criticism. I loved it every bit as much as Suisan loved hunting for symbols. (I hated hunting for symbols . . . ever since I had Christian symbolism crammed down my throat in 9th grade, first with Old Man and the Sea, then with A Separate Peace. Hah! I remembered another 9th grade novel!)
Senior English was my favorite. My teacher: Cheryl Sylanski, a nearly six-foot-tall hippie chick who drove to school in a green Karmann Ghia. How did she fit into that thing?
Ms. Sylanski rocked. That year, we read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Macbeth (and she took us to see Roman Polanski’s Macbeth!), Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (or was it Return of the Native?) Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (wasn’t that 12th grade?), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Probably more, I don’t remember.
My English teachers wanted me to stay in the humanities. They often talked about luring me back from the Dark Side, whose Darth Vader was the nun-like Grace Verburg, the science teacher who taught us the mysteries of the Dry Scientific Passive Voice. Mrs. Verburg made us read papers from Science and Nature, then write abstracts in our own words. Hellfire, I still can’t understand 90% of those articles. How did I manage it at the time? (Easy answer: I faked it. We all did.)
Beats me how Mrs. Verburg won and Ms. Sylanski lost. Ms. Sylanski was hawt in a tall, mannish, hippie-chick kinda way. That alone should have decided it. What the hell happened to me?
In the late 70s, recombinant DNA was just beginning to capture the public’s imagination. You know yesterday’s post about Chimparillas? That’s what recombinant DNA meant to me. Cat dogs. Flying mice. Pocket-sized elephants. The wave of the future, man, and did I ever want to ride it. Yeah, that’s what happened to me.
And here I am spending hours, and I am not exaggerating HOURS, cleaning wax out of people’s ears. So I ask again, what the hell happened to me?
I warned you I was tired. You were expecting coherence?
D.
* If I had been honest, my essay on dreams would have been brief, and would have been the same at the end of the year as at the beginning. I want a girlfriend. I want to be loved.
** The Sun Also Rises, that’s what I’ll make him read. I still enjoy it in a twisted way: how the nutless Jake Barnes is more a man than that vile Jeeeew, Robert Cohn, who is vile because — gasp! — Cohn learned to box in school not for love of the sport, but to keep from getting his ass kicked. I’m not kidding. That’s why Jake hates Cohn. That, and the fact Cohn still has his nuts. Not that he’s a real man, you know, one with afición.
Perhaps that’s why I love The Sun Also Rises so much. It’s good Bad Hemingway, the best, written by the man himself!
I can’t remember much of what I read in high school, even though I still have all my old text books. I know there was a lot of Shakespere because I can still quote it, but that’s it. OH, and I did a book report once on The Prince and the Pauper. Otherwise, high school was a blurr of hormones, snogging and cigarettes. College was a blurr of hormones, sex, cigarettes and alcohol…but somehow in that I became student government president….I don’t think it had to do with any of the blurr though, I was actually pretty good at it. I like power. I do remember I always did well in English Lit., and I liked those teachers best. I think it’s weird you know their first names. I never knew any of my teachers first names.
I remember trying to read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 9th grade and I hated it. 10th grade was all about short stories and I was E.A. Poe’d out – why are so many short stories so creepy?? Suisan reminded me of how macabre my reading lists were as a kid.
I have mixed feelings about Hemingway myself. One the one hand, some of his short stories are simple masterpieces. “Hills Like White Elephants” is probably the best example. But I don’t think I’d have liked Hemingway himself, and I don’t like a lot of the men he writes about as a result. Personally, I think he’s overrated.
And on the other hand, I have studied Hemingway’s narrative drive. Hemingway, whether you liked the people he created or his evident manly pretensions, knew how to make a story move forward.
Monty Python’s always appropriate. Especially when you’re tired.
I had fairly sucky teachers overall. Teaching Shakespeare by having the kids read the plays aloud in class… and giving the slowest readers the largest parts, ostensibly to help them become more fluent, but actually as a way to torture teenagers (god knows we deserved it often enough) doesn’t engender appreciation for his works.
All those As weren’t from good teaching, but from insatiable reading.
I’m not sure where my kids get it. Maybe it’s genetic, because they don’t read nearly as much as I did, but all three of them, regardless of the course or the teacher, get As on writing assignments. They’ve had better teachers than I did, certainly, but it’s been more a matter of refining what’s already there.
As for books–I loathed every single book I was required to read for school. If I read it on my own, that was a different story. I swear, my teachers were geniuses at being able to suck the enjoyment out of literature.
well high school is not as far away for me than it is for y’all, so i can remember a lot…i loved all my teachers and they all loved me, especially my senior year teacher, ms hammond, who gave us maybe two papers the entire year and was just the funnest person ever.i almost all As, except in sophomore year with mrs hearn, who is one of the toughest birds in that hs, who always wrote comments on my paper like “Why?” “explain further” when i thought i had explained perfectly well what i meant. hmph. it always pissed me off.
i almost…MISS high school english! weird.
Weird, I’ve been thinking about A Farewell to Arms this week, then blogged about it today, then saw this post. I would recommend Arms over Sun…but that’s just me liking Arms more (likely due to my WWI fascination).
It’s strange that as much as I always loved and adored English classes that I can’t recall very much at all about them now. My Freshman teacher is more memorable due to her helmet hair. That year is most memorable to me for a) Being directly after gym class which was on the opposite side of the school. Consequently I arrived at each class sweaty and panting and needing a few moments to get my head in the game, b) Telling a friend to “soak it in a little milk” when she accidentally got ink on her blouse in the breast area. It took me a good 5 beats before I made the connection between breasts and milk which she had made immediately. We laughed for days over that one, and c) Reading Working and realizing that I was not cut out for a career as a stewardess as I had previously fondly imagined and that Rip Torn’s bit was about the most interesting thing in the whole book – so there were a few pages of good surrounded by hundreds of pages of torture. I remember Sophomore year and the brilliant teacher and all the Fitzgerald we read. I recall Junior year when I was in one of the “Advanced” classes and instead of the usual classes involving reading set books, etc. we were able to choose an author and do our “thesis” for the year on that author. I chose Kafka. I was depressed after a long illness. (Well, obviously – who chooses Kafka and is not depressed?) I’ve never been able to read Kafka again.
There are very few other snippets I can recall which utterly amazes me given how much that was always my favorite subject. But then, at a recent reunion, my HS BFF and I were talking about how most of our HS memories (that don’t involve one another) are a kind of blur of the people seated directly around us in classes, some of the teachers, and a handful of the subject matter we ingested – so it’s not just English I’ve forgotten.
Anyway, I recall a few discussions at Michael Dirda’s book chats on the subject about how assigning certain works in school has the opposite affect on kids than what is desired. That is, it leads them to hate those works that are collectively considered “classics” instead of love them. It’s a tricky thing to tackle since apparently one of our goals in schooling our youth is for there to be a set amount of “base information” that we have in common – and if the system messes with the base, then the whole system is in danger of toppling over. And as much as I loathe, detest, and would gladly burn, rip to shreds, then burn all over again Robinson Crusoe, it’s considered a “classic” and so remains on the menu to this day.
Doug, I didn’t know I had inspired you. Thanks for the hat tip!
With the exception of seventh grade, where we learned about Russian literature, yaaawwwn, I loved all my middle school and high school English classes. I loved trying to find symbols: “Oo! A Chair! Oo! A Table! Oo! A dinner! The Last Supper! Traitors! Gods! Strictures of polite society!” to which my English teachers would say, “Maybe it’s just a dinner so that the author could get all the characters into the same room.” “Oh.”
And Hemingway? Spare the child. Have him read a short story or two, but then get him going on F. Scott Fitzgerald. There. Now you’ve done the American Abroad and the disillusionment of the early twentieth century. Oh, and give him some good WWI war poetry too. Dulce et Decorum est is especially gruesome.
The only Hemingway I ever remember liking was The Sun Also Rises, but I wouldn’t inflict it on someone unless there were a Fitzgerald chaser. Maybe Tender is the Night.
And I agree with you:
The best English teachers are the ones who teach you how to write too. I think reading deeply, crticizing the text, and then being asked to get all that out on paper is an intellectual exercise that cannot be overlooked. It builds the brain’s muscles up.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane considering I worked with all those people (except Miss Baca of course). We all used to wonder how Sylanski fit in that car of hers.
Junior English novels you might have read: The Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, Great Gatsby. Any of those ring a bell? Now they do Beloved in junior Honors.
You’ll have to e-mail me and tell me what Carden did to make you so good at explicating a poem.
Thanks for your memories, folks.
Sis: Huck Finn and Gatsby, yes (and I’ve reread both since, too), but Scarlet Letter? I don’t think so. And what’s Beloved?
I honestly don’t remember what Carden did. Her method was good enough to get me through AP testing, but not so good as to give me any lasting appreciation of poetry. As for any ability to WRITE poetry, you need only click on “poetic mishaps” under the categories section (top left, Sis).
I’ve never read Beloved. It’s about a slave who kills her own children. I think Oprah made the movie and starred in it. Lots of controversy among parents who didn’t want their kids reading it. The Honors teacher had trouble with this a couple of times.
Oh — THAT. I’ve heard about it but I don’t think I would ever want to read anything like that.