English Should not be Compulsory in High School

[angrysoba]

I was in Brazil for 7th grade, so I got Portuguese literature. Ended up arguing with the teacher about whether the title character was the main character of the novel. The teacher argued that he was in the title, so he was obviously the main character. I argued that if you actually read the story, he played a bit part. The driving force in the plot was someone else.

And of course when I returned to the States and matriculated in high school, they wouldn't give Lit credits for the Portuguese lit I'd read.

Q: Godot is the main character. Discuss.

 

[Darat]

As a child, I could recite 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834, happily that memory is now lost to time.

It was weird circumstances, I'd played the lead in the school production of 'Lieutenant Cockatoo' which was very loosely based on the poem.

After the play was done, I followed up by learning the poem.

Both of those things probably served me well for learning lines for other performances.

But I'm really glad that it's not all stuck in my head.

(One of Rosencrantz's speeches was stuck in there for about 20 years, the one that started with:
"The single and peculiar life is bound, with the strength and armour of the mind, to keep itself free from 'noyance, but much more that soul upon whose life, depends and rests the lives of many..."

(Now I'm annoyed that, that part is still in there taking up room.)

Memory can be weird, I was in a production of Androcles and the Lion at school - I played the Editor character - I can still remember my lines from that, but where I put my keys down half an hour ago.....

ETA: Just went and found the text for the play, I can't still remember my lines - I remember only about half of them, there's a whole section that I'd forgotten.

 

[Vixen]

And me: mine insisted that EM Forster's The Machine Stops, which was in a short story collection we "did" for O-level Eng Lit, could not possibly be sf, as Forster wrote it.

My reply, as the resident sf head, was that it wasn't good sf but it was still sf.

Still, it was better than utter deus ex machina, contrived bollocks like Great Expectations.

Same bloke tried to tell me the Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder wasn't well written, when we "did" that a couple of years earlier. Oddly, he couldn't explain to me how and why it was badly written, aside from saying that it was sf, so it had to be bad.

And he couldn't explain to me why certain passages in GE where "symbolic" of something or other, just that "it's obvious". When I argued that something else in GE was "obviously symbolic", while giving reasons, he dismissed me.

I was a pain in the arse during Eng Lit, as I detested it. Same bloke taught me for Language, at which I was good.

Ray Bradbury!!! His Day of the Triffids was exceedingly well-received by our class; possibly the most popular text of all. Re sci-fi, we also had Huxley's Brave New World although Mr. Truman was probably more keen on it than we were.

As for Lord of the Flies I can't see that it's sci-fi. It's a thumping good novel but I am afraid the over-thinking, over-analysis spoiled any enjoyment of it. I was reduced to tears writing essays about Piggy and Jack and the deep freaking meaning the novel supposedly conveys about 'society' and 'civilisation'. Even the film, supposedly a 'shocking' 'horror' film is little more than a Pseuds Corner candidate. Piggy's fat face and his smashed glasses. Piss off. Note to English Lit teachers: sometimes a book has no hidden meaning at all. Sometimes it is just meant to be a light read.

 

[Vixen]

Memory can be weird, I was in a production of Androcles and the Lion at school - I played the Editor character - I can still remember my lines from that, but where I put my keys down half an hour ago.....

ETA: Just went and found the text for the play, I can't still remember my lines - I remember only about half of them, there's a whole section that I'd forgotten.

We had Androcles and the Lion in the first or second form. I remember lapping it up and thinking it absolutely brilliant. I wonder if GBS is still on the syllabus? Probably not.

 

[Vixen]

On Poetry

I once had a large book of popular poems for my eighth birthday and learnt every one of them off by heart ('The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold' still springs to mind).

Then one day I had a massive strop with my mother and in a tantrum, aged about nine, ripped my beloved poetry book to pieces. Must have been some rage.

Can't recall doing that much at school other than Keats and Coleridge but so glad we didn't have to suffer Ted Hughes, like my older sibling did.

 

[sphenisc]

Day of the Triffids

John Wyndham

 

[Vixen]

John Wyndham

Ah, thanks!