And I think that’s the case for a lot of writers. Being a good writer doesn’t necessarily mean you know the mechanics of (proscriptive) grammar, style, and even spelling that finely. That’s what proofreaders and editors are for.
Funny, since RivkahChaya said it first in post #24. (Made me laugh.)
As to the OP, I always thought the teachers had the (pat) answers at the end of the
book. Some went by their “cheat sheet” and some wanted more.
But once you put a creative work out there it’s no longer “yours” and is open to any and all interpretations. And I agree that readers can discern meaning that wasn’t intentional.
There’s a JPG making the rounds on Facebook that touches on the topic of this thread:
Personally, I think it’s eye-rollingly stupid, but it’s getting quite a few “likes” and “Fuck yeah!”-type comments. One FB commenter said he was going show it to his English teacher and “rub it in his face” (I’m sure that went well). Evidently many people never get over the trauma of being asked to think beyond the surface of what they’re reading.
Some were, most weren’t. A good humanities teacher looks for quality of thought and execution, without having to agree or disagree with specific interpretation. Bad teachers expect you to blow sunshine up their asses while simultaneously sucking their dicks. Metaphorically. Most of the time.
FWIW, I graduated with a CompLit major, but started out (and regret not sticking with) engineering. No surprise that I prefer reading SF since it’s got a foot in both of these camps of thought.
The most valuable thing anyone can learn from literature classes is critical thinking. In fact, I think there should be critical thinking courses instead of just literature courses, since messages come in various forms of media. Learning how to critique a commercial, news story, or movie is arguably more valuable than picking apart literature, though not as complex or rewarding in the long-term.
You inevitably learn to apply that same kind of analysis to anything you encounter after a while, but I think it would be better to start with the assumption of application to everyday messages from the beginning and start with media analysis at a basic level, progressing to literature for intermediate and advanced students.
Making a change like this would parallel the way we teach other subjects. We learn basic math skills by applying arithmetic to everyday life problems instead of teaching algebra right after kindergarten. One reason literature seems so divorced from reality is that there’s not much of a skill ramp-up. They just throw you into the deep end with allegory and foreshadowing, following the barely dipping your toe into the water level that bloody book reports in elementary school represent.
This is why a lot of people who want to go to Law School major in English as undergrads.
I loved diagramming sentences, and it is useful when you have a confusing, poorly punctuated text in front of you, to diagram it, and see whether it actually makes no sense, and if so, what the error is-- and sometimes there is no error-- it’sjust complicated, but diagramming is helps you understand it.
Yay! CJ; this really bugs me.
Thanks
My Honors English teacher in 12th grade was a flake. The one thing I remember most vividly about her was one test when she asked “What do you think was the saddest line in the book?” and there was only one right answer. She decided a particular line of dialog was very sad and if we didn’t name that line, we got it marked wrong.
I know, it’s a stupid thing for me to still remember more than 40 years later, but it just pissed me off back then and it still does!!! 
And it probably didn’t help that even in 12th grade Honors English she was teaching grammar that I’d learned in 5th grade. Seriously, people, this stuff isn’t that difficult!!!
Maybe I need to see someone about this… :o
“copyedit” is a valid alternate spelling. So you’re good.
So your teachers did a bad job of teaching you. And the lesson you took from this is that for the rest of your life you have no responsibility to learn how the English language or dictionaries properly work?
That’s just the way I, through my personal experiences and filters, am interpreting the meaning of the words you are setting down.
Sigh. Another thing you were taught incorrectly.
No, he wasn’t. The last line of the poem has an asterisk, followed by this footnote:
[QUOTE=Ogden Nash]
*The author’s attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as a three-alarmer. Pooh.
[/QUOTE]
(To be fair, this part isn’t always included in anthologies.)
Dude- relax. Everything I said is factual. Your second sentence is just condescending badgering. Your last sentence is too, and according to the Google hits, different from is preferred over different than, especially if the from is followed by a noun.
I read Anna Karenina in eighth grade. And I got it - I mean, I followed the plot. Then I read it again in my 30s and said “oh, that was what that book was about.”
Currently I’m homeschooling my ninth grade son - who is a first level thinker - he doesn’t think beyond the surface. Getting him to see meaning and experience critical thinking is mind bogglingly frustrating. And part of it is that he is a ninth grader and part of it is how his brain works. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my favorite novels - he read it and it was like me reading Anna Karenina in eighth grade. " But Mom, it doesn’t SAY that anywhere." I decided not to have a poetry unit - we’d kill each other - and he’s doing free reading for the rest of the year.
And as I work with him - and my daughter who is someone for whom literary deconstruction comes naturally (although with eighth grade life experiences), I’ve pretty much decided its like singing - some people can just do it - train them and they’ll do it really well. And some people sound like a cat in heat and there isn’t a lot you can do. My daughter is the first, my son the second when it comes to literary analysis.
There is also “different to,” which is the more often seen in UK English than US English. All three forms can be correct, but, in both US and UK English, “different from” is the most common form and generally preferred. Also, in cases where “different [prep]” is followed by a noun phrase, the form “different than” is often less clumsy. So, if you want to be safe and not incur the wrath of conservative grammarians and other language pedants, use “different from,” although there is nothing technically wrong with “different than.”
This is about high school English…
I wouldn’t say full of BS, but I think a charitable opinion from me might be that they prioritized the wrong things (literary criticism & other literature type things), and somewhat downplayed the ultimately more useful and practical things like writing and composition.
I mean, being able to talk about the symbolism of the role of Alyosha in “The Brothers Karamazov” is well and good, but I think I’d have been better served had we spent that month actually learning how to write papers, letters, stories or whatever, instead of reading and discussing the book and then writing an essay about it.
I also thought that the English curriculum should have been more integrated with the other subjects we were in- for example, maybe teach us how to write scientific papers that we’d write in Biology, or how to write history papers about stuff we dealt with in history, etc… Of course I always thought that our education could have been so much more rich had it been better integrated- i.e. if we were required to take English literature, Art History and World History, maybe we should have learned about the history, literature and art of an era in lockstep- i.e. we’d read Sophocles at roughly the same time we’d be reading about the Peloponnesian War in History, and looking at Kouros statues in Art History at the same time. I don’t know about the logistics of doing that- maybe just have 3-4 coincidence points during a semester, but it would have definitely been cool and given us a more well-rounded idea of how they interrelated.
I’d hope that the latter was the case ! I seem to have the impression from somewhere, that Ogden Nash was Catholic: but in view of the envisaged propounding of the non-existence of Hell, your teacher – if “bonkers, but serious about the issue” – could hardly have been suggesting that Nash was slyly disseminating Catholic truth via his funny verses…
Someone else who got into the lama / llama priest / beast thing in light-ish verse, was Hilaire Belloc. (The quoted following, is not very politically correct; but it was written in 1897, when lack of respect from Christians for other religions; and taking it for granted that white Westerners were superior to other inhabitants of the globe; were commonplace.) Part of his poem, titled The Llama:
"The Llama of the Pampasses* you never should confound
(In spite of a deceptive similarity of sound)
With the Lama who is Lord of Turkestan.
For the former is a beautiful and valuable beast,
But the latter is not lovable nor useful in the least;
And the Ruminant is preferable surely to the Priest
Who battens on the woful superstitions of the East,
The Mongol of the Monastery of Shan."
*Llamas belong, of course, in the mountains, not in flat low country; but Belloc was big on poetic licence. (Or perhaps he just knew sod-all about South America.)
If I was a high school English teacher I’d be thrilled they read the god damn book and formed coherent paragraphs that weren’t ripped off of Wikipedia.
But if you are going to write a paper on your own fathers book, expect to have to bring your A game.
Well you made a good choice in getting a STEM type of degree. If you put the time in and get the good grades in Literature, the subject doesn’t really impress too many people, and the subjectivity of the grading is well known - and that’s probably an understatement. You could get the same grade in any number of stem courses and it will be much more impressive and demonstrative of intellectual ability to most people.
I also feel that literature is much easier to appreciate when you are able to just read it and let whatever happens happen, instead of looking for ways to craft meaning out of it. Maybe something doesn’t speak to you now; but maybe you’ll relate to it next year or in ten years. That is the real value of literature to me. It is an art form. I think essays and philosophical or didactic works can make for decent academic subjects, but novels and poetry do not. You could also have a class on Indie Rock for example, or Theolonius Monk, but trying to intellectualize things like that does not mean that they will have an emotional impact which is often the true benefit of an art form IMHO.
I think you misunderstood. STEM subjects were my strong point, but I ended up with an English Literature degree a bit unexpectedly. (Basically, senior year I sat down and figured out what was the fastest way to graduate, because I had a coursework all over the place, and it turned out I had a lot of credits that I could use for an English degree. At that point, one degree was as good as any other, and that degree was the only way I could graduate at the end of the school year.) At any rate, I don’t regret it. It was interesting pushing through a degree in a subject I barely tolerated in high school. English and History were always my least favorite subjects. (Although I did enjoy the mechanics of the language, and I enjoyed practical non-fiction writing like journalism.)
:smack:
You said you had a lit degree upthread. I misunderstood - I thought you had a degree in math or science, or an undergraduate degree in one of those fields and then got a graduate degree in English - (I think I was misinterpreting when you said you got an English degree after you finished college). It’s so much more often the case among the people who I have been around to get a STEM degree if it is easier for them, the earning potential is so much higher in the area I live in (and it has always been this way). Even in getting hired for a job that does not require any specific degree, companies seem to prefer math and science majors - those graduates always seem to have the best job prospects. I think I was reading too much into what you wrote. I am glad to hear that it turned out well for you.
The point of learning close reading skills is not to manufacture bullshit interpretations, but rather to gain insight into how and why you might have responded in a particular way to a work. If you don’t develop that sort of critical sensibility, you’re stuck at the “Loved it! / Hated it!” level of talking about your likes and dislikes. That’s not very satisfying if you’re trying to explain to someone else why they might like something, or trying to find other works that suit your tastes, or trying to find your way into a work from a different time or culture.
Maybe I’ve just been lucky- I’ve had a lot of GREAT English teachers, and even the “bad” ones were fairly competent.