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I always felt like school-level English classes were very hazy, muddy environments where you didn't need to have clear thinking and the structures (the English

I always felt like school-level English classes were very hazy, muddy environments where you didn't need to have clear thinking and the structures (the English language mainly) didn't strictly follow any internal logic, opposite math. Peers got good marks for presenting half-baked ideas in inarticulate, thesaurus-abused essays, as long as they made sure to repeat their limp argument, cut up into a specified number of points, in the extremely redundant structure imposed by the curriculum (say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you said, with different synonyms each time) and use different joining-words or whatever term they used for obnoxiously putting "also" "further" etc. at the start of every new paragraph. Intellectual laziness was rewarded by the system, purposefully or not. Those classes probably turned off a sad number of would-be good writers from learning how to write creatively, efficiently, or even reasonably. I had exactly one English teacher who was reasonable and only taught to these abominable standards as required by the state but let real writing be rewarded in other assignments; he understood the reality of the language and that the point of your writing should be moreso effectively articulating ideas, effecting desired emotional responses, or provoking thoughts rather than some nonsense a committee at the Department of Education decided is proper and that legions of English teachers across the country take to heart as dogma and revel in the sadism of. Otherwise, throughout the years it was splitting hairs over prescriptivist grammatical minutiae, the aforementioned ridiculous essay structure, memorizing obsolete Shakespearen-era "vocabulary words" that no writer writing for a living audience would even consider using, and going on about how any grammatical structure or word that appeared after 1900 is objectively wrong. I could have put much less effort into them than I did and still gotten As but I preferred to use them as an exercise in trying to work good writing around the myriad deeply-rooted problems in how I was forced to present it. That's the only bonus point I can give to it as a learning environment. English classes in college have just been the same disappointment with a different mask on for the most part, except for exposure to real research methods, but still lag behind the real world in forcing you to use non-internet sources. Was the experience different for you?

logfromblammo 12y ago
That echoes my experience very closely. I also disliked the emphasis on literary analysis. It so often seemed like contrived flimflammery crossed with psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. If tvtropes (or allthetropes) had existed back then, I think I would have performed much better on my English homework. After all, those sites do include the Jungian archetypes and the basic plots as a subset. As it is, my high school English classes drove me far away from anything even remotely similar until a lifetime of reading fiction, a shameful amount of blathering on Internet message boards, and the exhortations of the "National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)" organization convinced me to try to write a novel in November of 2012. Two years later, I have written 500 kb, with maybe 130 kb left to go before I snap it off and start the next one. Then there's also the matter of the default HTML stylesheet, continuity notes and timelines, the character, vehicle, location, and artifact indices, working hyperlinks, and testing the release version on all available e-reader programs and devices. As for my old English teachers, I bite my thumb at them, like Sampson. I give them the fig, like Vanni Fucci. And just as golf is a good walk, spoiled, English class is a good read, ruined. Even with those ancient cultural references rattling around my bonebox, I find that an increasingly large fraction of my memes are drawn from television, film, music, video games, and popular web sites, and a vanishingly small portion from the old literary canon. That's how I know that the Belmonts love Devo. If you understand why, you probably won't need to thank an English teacher. All I really ever needed was a pile of books that I enjoyed reading and a copy of Strunk and White (minus the part about always putting sentence punctuation inside the quotes, because that's just madness). What I got was about 10 years of pedagogical torture that discouraged me from trying something that turned out to be a fun hobby.

logfromblammo 12y ago

That echoes my experience very closely. I also disliked the emphasis on literary analysis. It so often seemed like contrived flimflammery crossed with psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. If tvtropes (or allthetropes) had existed back then, I think I would have performed much better on my English homework. After all, those sites do include the Jungian archetypes and the basic plots as a subset. As it is, my high school English classes drove me far away from anything even remotely similar until a lifetime of reading fiction, a shameful amount of blathering on Internet message boards, and the exhortations of the "National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)" organization convinced me to try to write a novel in November of 2012. Two years later, I have written 500 kb, with maybe 130 kb left to go before I snap it off and start the next one. Then there's also the matter of the default HTML stylesheet, continuity notes and timelines, the character, vehicle, location, and artifact indices, working hyperlinks, and testing the release version on all available e-reader programs and devices. As for my old English teachers, I bite my thumb at them, like Sampson. I give them the fig, like Vanni Fucci. And just as golf is a good walk, spoiled, English class is a good read, ruined. Even with those ancient cultural references rattling around my bonebox, I find that an increasingly large fraction of my memes are drawn from television, film, music, video games, and popular web sites, and a vanishingly small portion from the old literary canon. That's how I know that the Belmonts love Devo. If you understand why, you probably won't need to thank an English teacher. All I really ever needed was a pile of books that I enjoyed reading and a copy of Strunk and White (minus the part about always putting sentence punctuation inside the quotes, because that's just madness). What I got was about 10 years of pedagogical torture that discouraged me from trying something that turned out to be a fun hobby.