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 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. :/
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?
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.
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.😅
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 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
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)
yeah but we all, unfortunately, need jobs, and jobs are at companies, and companies make money from sales, sales happen on a market, and you need marketing so people know it exists.
I’d happily abolish the whole stack for a free house, garden, entertainment and groceries for life.
that is precisely what SERP and sales prospecting marketing is. Except paid SERP placement and plaintext email displayed in a browser or email client rather than a text editor.
Marketing these days goes far beyond putting out awareness of existence (that step I’m aware of and support - it’s great when a YouTube ad shows something interesting I actually need). These days it’s all psychological reinforcement of an invented need.
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
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.
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.
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
My 6th grade English teacher was the hottest teacher in the school. She’d sit in a boys lap and then ask them to come to the board to answer a problem.
Later it came out publicly that much of the school administration and teachers, city council, and some of the religious leaders were involved in a large and well-known (among the adults, I guess?) swingers club. Small towns get down.
It did largely change the dynamic of the town after they all moved and got fired from what I hear. The abusive kids elementary gym teacher and later high school boy’s weight lifting coach became the principal, one or two principals after one fled the country because of rumors of inappropriate relations with a minor.
Edit: I’m curious if this is going to be one of those comments that get 10 replies from 10 different people from small towns of “Was this in Y city/state?”
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.
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