In which I pit my English teacher

The BBQ Pit
1

Let me start by introducing myself. Hi. My name is athelas. I am a high school student in the northeastern US.

This year, our school had a new AP Language and Composition teacher, whom I will call Ms. Norman. She is…shall we say…less than helpful as a teacher. The following is a from-memory transcript of yesterday’s class.

[Ms. N arrives two or three minutes late to class, holding a cup of Starbucks coffee. Whenever she speaks, imagine a voice 1 to 1.5 octaves higher than the average female voice.]

Ms. N: All right, settle down, [etc.] As I told you on Monday, there will be an in-class writing tommorrow. It’s an argument essay, like the one we did last week.
Student A: There’s no class tomorrow.
Ms. N: [irritated] On Friday then
Student B: Will we get those back?.
Ms. N: What?
Student B: The, uh, essays from last week.
Ms. N: No, why?
Student B: So we can…see what we got on them to prepare for Friday’s essay
Ms. N: [angry] No. And if you want to whine, go blame God [Note: considering her political alignment I would not be surprised if she mentally meant “god”, but I’m going with the traditional capitalization] for making me have to go to the hospital yesterday to see my mother.
[pause]

Later in class…
Ms. Norman goes around to check that we wrote an essay assigned as homework. She expects students to have the rough as well as the final draft, but does not penalize if the rough draft is missing. She does not actually read the essays.

Ms. N: [reaches Student B’s desk] Where’s your homework
Student B: [warily] Here. I…uh…didn’t bring the rough draft, but I could have it in by tomorrow
Ms. N: Nope. Too bad. Eye for an eye.
Student C: Huh?
Ms. N: You expect me to have your essays graded, I expect you to have your homework done. [goes around, not docking anyone else points for not having rough draft

What these exchanges do not show, because there were no good examples of this yesterday and I don’t trust my memory for past ones, is that she does not teach. Ms. Norman usually assigns sections of the work in question (right now it’s The Sound and the Fury and assigns essays (it is by intention a writing oriented class). She does not explain what the prompt means, for example, by “end [your essay] with a sense of person” or “analyze Faulkner’s complex use of place”.

While most of the class shares my sentiments, they do not dare to ask. I, as well as many in the class, am doing reasonably well, and do not want to potentially tip off Ms. Norman about my utter ignorance about what she expects us to write.

Nevertheless, I’m worried about what happens when the AP exam comes around. To obtain an A on Ms. Norman’s assignments, one must simply conform to her idiosyncrasies. For example, she expects us to, instead of saying “X uses the word/phrase/construction Y repeatedly”, count up the number of times the formula occurs, and write that. On an essay on “Analyze Lincoln’s use of language in the Gettysburg Address”, she wrote “Great analysis” next to my cynically noted observation that Lincoln uses “I” six times in the last seven paragraphs, making no notes about the rest of the essay, overlooking my other arguments, far superior (IMHO) to the mechanical counting. I fear that come exam time, not having learned a thing in that class, I will be hindered by these idiosyncratic preferences.

It does not help, of course, that the other teacher teaching the course (Mr. Gilpin) is a far superior teacher, who, when I had him last year, managed to teach me a great deal about plot analysis and, while a tough grader, is an overall great guy. I, along with about fifteen of the forty students that Ms. Norman teaches, attempted to switch into Gilpin’s class in the beginning of this year, but the 22 students a class limitation (Catch-22! Ha!) prevented that from happening.

Unfortunately, having taught several years in the other high school in the school district, Ms. Norman probably has tenure and is more or less untouchable by now. A few means of protest are still possible, however; I’m currently reading Othello, which Mr. Gilpin is currently teaching to his class but which Ms. Norman will not cover. I refuse to let her teaching interfere with my education.

2

Heh. You may have crazy politics, but this is a rant I can get completely behind. Bad English teachers suck. Make that suh-huck.

Of course when I had a bad teacher, I was a hellion of a student. I once had an assignment to write five pages of busywork on MacBeth, and I knew the teacher wouldn’t read it, so three pages into it I wrote a screed on what an awful teacher she was and how she needed to quit screwing up our education and let a real teacher take her spot, and she could go off and turn letters on a gameshow or something. And I turned it in.

She never commented on it, but a couple days later it occurred to me that she might read it after all, and I felt terrible. I actually ended up being a lot nicer to her after that–too late, of course.

Daniel

3

Any chance you could meet with Mr. Gilpin, and have him go over what he’s teaching his class on your own time (perhaps a study hall period or something)? I’m sure he’d remember you from your previous class with him, and your description of him makes it seem that he’d be happy to help a student. If he should ask why, just say you’re covering all your bases for the AP exam.

4

Faulkner’s a tough tough guy to teach.

Be comforted by the fact that, honestly, if you’re a good writer and have a decent sense of how to present an argument with a strong voice, you’ll do fine on your AP English-writing exam.

And, of course, just because she’s not teaching Othello doesn’t mean she’s interfering with your education. Assuming she has a syllabus and you’re covering a decent number of the works one ought to read to prep for the AP test, she’s at least acting appropriately in that respect.

5

My experience with early high school English was terrible. The teacher’s were essentially overpaid babysitters and we learned nothing. I was shameful in my disdain for the crappy caliber of my education. I would get up and walk out in the middle of class. I’d write the essay assigned at the beginning of a class that was due next week DURING that same class and turn it in at the end. It was in this early experience that I learned I could miss all my English classes in favour of smoking and chit chat with friends, not read any of the books, and still get an A. It was a fantastic early primer for first year University.

And then, I hit my last two years of school. I got put in a teacher’s class who was notorious for failing entire classes of students when they didn’t perform. He worked us to the point of exhaustion. I got my very first C+ from him. When I went to his office, indignant, his only response was “How long did you spend on the paper?”. When I answered about a half an hour, he shrugged, said “C+ effort = C+ paper, you can do better”, and walked away.

I have no patience for bad teachers. I feel your pain. But you’ll be fine, it’s just a shame you have to waste your time.

  • Rebekkah
6

Forgot to add, the guy who gave me the C+ is still a close friend, and was the best teacher I ever had.

7

Ah yes, AP English in high school. Luckily, my school had decent teachers for the AP classes (we had pre-AP for grades 9 & 10 and AP for 11 & 12).

Here’s my recommendation:
Talk to Mr. Gilpin, explain your concerns, and it sounds like he will be willing to help you.

You can get copies of the essay prompts from previous AP tests. Try a Google search, or ask either of your teachers. Then do them, and have Mr. Gilpin grade them on a 1 to 5 scale for you.

Read as many books off of the AP reading list as you can (IIRC, there is no actual approved reading list, but my teachers had a list of books that had been commonly used in the past. I am sure they got it from a conference of some sort, and you should be able to track it down fairly easily).

Relax. The main thing during the test is to keep your wits about you, and you’ll do fine.

Good luck!

8

Wow, your AP teacher sounds a lot like mine, Mrs. Kanipe. Wow, she was awful. Horribly complexe writing assignments with no actualy teaching involved. The only student in that calss who made an “A” was her daughter. Go figure. :rolleyes: Even worse, she absolutely hated me for whatever reason. (I actually think it might have been because it was 1984 and I was an early punk and the way I dressed offended her) She would give me “F’s” on papers without reading them because I hadn’t checked out a copy of the book. I freaking owned the book! She’s also the reason I never got my high school diploma. She claimed I hadn’t returned one of the books I hadn’t checked out so when I graduated, my little diploma folder had a note that read "tremorviolet owes $3.85. ARGH, OK, I’m happy I had a chance to rant about her.

**athelas[/b[, I sympathize. But work around her. I let my horrible experience turn me off writing and it drove me into engineering. I hope the same doesn’t happen to you.

9

I’m trying to decide whether this post is clever or quickly written. :wink:

For what it’s worth, I took the AP Literature test in May, and despite having had only one decent English teacher, I passed easily…primarily because I’ve always been big on reading. You seem the same way, so don’t stress over it too much. [Even though I didn’t take the Comp test, I’ve heard that the two English APs are a lot alike with regard to the skills necessary to pass them.]

10

While I sympathize with you on the whole, there is one thing:

If I may speak from a teacherly perspective for a moment, gauging whether the students will interpret the instructions for a given assignment the way you want them to is hard. There’s always an element of hit-or-miss, especially when you’re using an assignment for the first time. Most of us would much prefer that the students ask what the assignment means while there’s still time to clarify things, rather than having to grade a bunch of disastrous papers because nobody could work up the nerve to admit they weren’t sure what we were looking for.

Ignore this advice if your teacher is batshit enough to penalize students who ask for clarification, of course.

11

Yeah; that sounds like a good idea, although my fear is that he may accidentally let that slip in a faculty meeting or somesuch (I think he tries to fit the archetype of the absent-minded professor) or that Ms. Noaman may see or hear of it somehow. Having little defense against grading slants, especially in the more-subjective subjects, I’m not sure that I’m ready to take that chance yet.

That’s a good point, and usually I’d be the first one to ask for clarification on even the most tangential points of the lecture (to the annoyance of no few of my previous teachers). However, seeing that she seems to interpret my questioning as either holding up the class or challenging her authority, I piped down rather fast.

Thank you all for the suggestions. I was just about to get myself a nice substantive prep book, and will certainly look up any relavent credible information on the 'net.

12

That’s it, I can blame my poor coding and typing skills on her too! :wink: Actually, I just type to fast, constantly transpose letters, and forget to preview. I really am literate dammit! (despite having become an engineer…)

13

That’s :too fast", dang it. Man, everytime I post, my credibility erodes…

14

You’ve just proven Gaudere’s Law by yourself!

I’m sorry. I’m such a jerk. :smiley: