Cool English teachers

[soxfan[$]]

What was your high school English class like? Was it like Dead Poets Society? Or just dead?

I was lucky enough to have a couple of pretty cool teachers. My 9th grade English teacher challenged the class to a game of Trivial Pursuit (the Silver Screen edition), which we of course lost. He'd also do things like reading horror stories with the lights turned off and giving us logic puzzles for bonus points.

And my 10th grade English teacher told us to decide whether Oedipus Rex was a classical or a modern tragedy, and let us make our case however we chose. Our group put together a video and adapted it rather freely for modern-day LA, though Apollo and Athena had cameos.

Ailsa

[murasaki]

My 10th and 12th grade English teacher, Mrs. Fisk, was fantastic. She, incidentally, was gone for my junior year of high school because she'd won Nevada State teacher of the year and took a sabbatical with the grant money to work on her master's.

We did our own Greek plays, played Scattegories with a literary theme, all kinds of inventive things. I remember some of the skits and scenes we did from classic literature better than I remember the books we read. She also had a reading competition--based on number of pages that had everyone in the honors class reading 1000+ page novels. She even made a game out of learning the Greek and Latin roots of words--which I would have greatly appreciated my junior year with the sub, before I took the SAT and ACT.

She was the best high school teacher I ever had.

--naomi

[theeye]

My 10th grade English teacher, Mr. Ciociola, was the best high school teacher I ever had.

I loved that class. I wrote essays that went on and on way beyond the official page requirement and which I threw my heart and soul into.

And they came back, not just with A's on them, but (oh, joy!) with comments! Real comments -- not just "very nice writing" or "well argued" -- but comments that actually discussed my thesis, that engaged me in a real dialog as though I were someone worth having a serious discussion with, as though I had presented an insight that he found genuinely interesting. It was heady stuff for a teenager. (Hell, it's still heady stuff as a middle-aged dabbler in Epinions -- leave me comment like that and you'll win my heart.)

It was that experience (actually started by my almost-as-good 9th grade English teacher) that finally won me over to English class. I hadn't liked it before and I think the reason is one that educators ought to pay attention to.

Until the 9th grade, the writing assignments I had been given in English class were exclusively "creative writing". Writing short stories or poems. I tried very hard to write good short stories, but there was one problem. I was reading good literature. Really good literature. And I knew damn well that my little stories didn't measure up. They embarrassed me. I wasn't creating literature and I knew it.

Then in 9th grade, we were assigned what they called "paragraphs" (my "paragraphs" were a little excessive as they tended to go to about 5 pages). These "paragraphs" were really essays. For the first time, I was asked to argue a thesis instead of being asked to create the great American novel. And the assignment just happened to be right at the same time that I had discovered, and was voraciously reading, Bertrand Russell's essays.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that writing a good essay is easy. I'm not saying that anything I wrote then, now or in the future could be put in the same room as one of Russell's essays.

But I do think (and I hope I express this clearly enough) that the entrance bar for fiction is higher. A short story has to be inspired to be worthwhile; an essay simply needs to be competently argued and nicely written.

Writing those essays in 10th grade, I was, for the first time, not embarrassed by my writing. Proud even.

And Mr. C.'s comments validated that pride in a way that no grade could ever do. I hope he knows what an exceptional teacher he was and how fondly he is remembered a good quarter century ( I really shouldn't have done that math!) later.

[frazzledspice]

I had a creative writing professor in college who decided that writers should write the way painters paint.

She hired a figure model so that we could capture her in a written "sketch."

Perhaps this is common now, but I thought it was very daring at the time (of course I had just gotten through with twelve years of Catholic school.)

[jenninca]

It was my 10th grade honors English teacher that forever changed my impression of myself as a writer.

Mrs. Maser's class was definitely the coolest one I had in high school. She made the class feel like a family. Everyone got along with everyone, and everyone was willing to work with anyone. This atmosphere made us willing to truly critique each other's work, instead of slapping a "good job" on the paper out of fear of retaliation. (I carried this attitude into 11th grade English, where my constructive criticism caused another student to write nasty comments on each paper that was passed back the row to me for the rest of the year!) Every time we wrote a paper, we worked as a class to develop criteria for evaluating it, then spent a day in class reading and evaluating each others' papers according to the criteria.

Then she would take our papers and give us a grade. She told us she would spend an HOUR on each paper, and then returned it to us with almost as much red as type. Her comments questioned word choice, corrected verb tense, and asked why one page wasn't as good as the one before it. She also pointed out parts that she dubbed "flashes of professional writing." Having so many helpful comments made it hard in tenth grade to get back a 300-point research paper with a single "Nice job" written on the front of it. Mrs. Maser was the first English teacher that didn't think my writing was "good enough" to just leave alone. She gave the constructive criticism I had always been craving.

She also did other fabulous things, like designing an entire unit around areas we had trouble with in our first paper (such as commas and splitting verb phrases) and letting us read Macbeth with the lights off in front of a fake fire.

My senior year, she accepted a job as a guidance counselor at the city's other high school. She was mourned by my entire class. I still write to her every few years telling her what an impact she is still having on my life.

Cindy

[lambchops]

High school English...hmmm...I had one class called "Writing Workshop" taught by a Mr. Raymond. There was one problem, my younger sister was also in that class. Of course, we were both overachievers as it was, so to be in the same class turned into an exercise in endurance. Mr. Raymond sat us in alphabetical order horizontally. That meant that Cheryl and I were sitting next to one another. Simply put, we didn't stop fighting all semester. It was a good class, but the subject matter turned out to be rather easy for both of us. We wrote plenty of essays (I recall specifically writing one about how badly I wanted a car-Mr. Raymond insisted that I give it to my parents and it eventually worked), papers, and plays. Anyway, end of the story was that we ended up having the two highest grades in the class. Something like a 104% and 105%. I won (although I attribute it now to having two years on her).

Not quite Dead Poet's Society...

[vania]

My 12th grade English class was SOOOOO dead that when we studied Hamlet, our teacher told us that when Hamlet said "Get thee to a nunnery," he was insulting Ophelia by telling her to become a prostitute because nunnery was a synonym for whorehouse.

Sad sad sad.

[Redlass]

Vania: Did we have the same English teacher?

[vania]

"Vania: Did we have the same English teacher?"

Ha! If we did, it's a miracle that we're both so into books and literature!!!

[Redlass]

Now I'm going to have to do some research, 'cause my 10th and 12th grade lit teacher (the same person) also told us that "nunnery" was synonmous with whorehouse. There must be some commentator somewhere that tried to push that translation.

How curious!

[vania]

Originally posted by Redlass
Now I'm going to have to do some research, 'cause my 10th and 12th grade lit teacher (the same person) also told us that "nunnery" was synonmous with whorehouse. There must be some commentator somewhere that tried to push that translation.

How curious!

Very strange. I guess maybe there is a translation somewhere that twists the meaning around. It doesn't really make as much sense in the context of the story, though. Plus, when the dictionary clearly defines "nunnery" as a convent, why push a strange translation on a bunch of 17 year olds??

Never mind the fact that it's easier to talk about convents than brothels with teenagers!!!

v.

[bupkiss]

I was incredibly lucky to have amazing English teachers from 8th grade until 12th grade. Two were evil and mean, but they taught me so well. Another was rather aloof but an excellent teacher, and the last one was very caring as well as helpful. I excelled throughout high school English and felt much more prepared for the AP English test and college lit classes than most of my peers. In college, I am continuing to have luck with my English profs--caring, accepting of dissenting views, and interesting.