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Post by skyfire on Mar 27, 2010 15:52:29 GMT -5
Due to a scheduling conflict, I had to take my college lit class online instead of in person.
The format was that each week we'd read selections from the lit book, fire off a response to a piece the teacher selected, and then every few weeks we'd take a test.
The tests sucked in that it was obvious the teacher was just trying to find stuff in order to make a minimum # of questions. For example, one time I got a question which read "what year was _____ born?"
The final bit of jerkishness came when we had to do a segment from Thoreau's "Walden" as the response bit. For my response, I questioned what Thoreau would do if he knew that his policy of civil disobedience - which was astonishingly unique back in his day - was now a common method of protesting yet he himself was slowly being forgotten by the public at large. Cue epic ranting about how I was an "armchair quarterback" who didn't understand everything that Thoreau did in life.
**
As an aside, what were the worst books that people here had to read for English and/or Lit?
Mine would be:
"A Doll's House" (as Bill Watterson noted, there's no point in using a sledge when a much smaller hammer will do in making your point)
"Wuthering Heights" (too much melodrama; too little point)
"Things Fall Apart" (so you want to show how the African tribesmen were noble and how they suffered under colonialism... by depicting your hero as an asshole who kills himself because he believes he'll have no legacy and his tribe as a group of people who have no qualms with up and randomly stoning people to death whenever the mood strikes. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.......)
"Brave New World" (and the point of this book was what now?)
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Dan
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Post by Dan on Mar 28, 2010 13:37:16 GMT -5
As an aside, what were the worst books that people here had to read for English and/or Lit? All of them. Without exception the books used for our English classes were suicidally-depressing, tedious and miserable. It didn't help that the teachers wanted to over-analyse every last sentence, so it could take a whole lesson just to read half a dozen pages. I once came across a copy of John Christopher's Empty World, in the characteristic abridged edition that the school favoured. I had recently read the unabridged version, end enjoyed it immensely (everyone dies). But to this day I don't know what I would have made of it had it been in our syllabus - would I have been able to whip the teacher's arse (metaphorically!) with it using my prior knowledge, or would her approach to reading have destroyed forever my enjoyment of John Christopher? Sorry, off-topic! ;D
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Post by RavynousHunter on Mar 28, 2010 14:20:31 GMT -5
Yeah...the only one I remember actually liking was Ender's Game, mostly because one of Ender ends up killing the everloving hell out of one of his biggest bullies. Of course, that was before the days when we had to analyze fucking everything and it was more along the lines of "did you read what I told you to read?"
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Post by theeclipse on Apr 5, 2010 18:09:09 GMT -5
Ugh. Teachers should let kids read the book (and respond during reading, for example chapter responses, if you must) and then analyse AFTER everyone's read it. Way to kill a love of the literature.
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Post by lunarxero on Apr 7, 2010 20:27:12 GMT -5
As an aside, what were the worst books that people here had to read for English and/or Lit? Mine would be: "A Doll's House" (as Bill Watterson noted, there's no point in using a sledge when a much smaller hammer will do in making your point) "Wuthering Heights" (too much melodrama; too little point) "Things Fall Apart" (so you want to show how the African tribesmen were noble and how they suffered under colonialism... by depicting your hero as an asshole who kills himself because he believes he'll have no legacy and his tribe as a group of people who have no qualms with up and randomly stoning people to death whenever the mood strikes. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.......) "Brave New World" (and the point of this book was what now?) In New Zealand schools tend to have an obsession with only ever using New Zealand things. Especially novels. Nearly every one of the books I had to analyse in school had something to do with New Zealand or Maori culture. Basically, that shit gets old fast. More on topic. My schools English classes barely touched on any sort of creative writing beyond writing one short story to get a few credits and we had no specific creative writing class. The one year I actually tried to do the work in English, (I think I was 5th form; by that time I had started to slack off in school) it came to the creative writing and I thought it would be my time to shine. Until I was told I had to try and write about something that happened to me at some point in my life and whenever I would try to write something I wanted to write it wasn't acceptable. I hate writing about things that happen to me, because frankly, my life is boring. I don't consider it to be very creative either. So that didn't help on the creative side. Not until 7th From did I really start to have some sort of creativity come from school. That was the year I decided to take Art Design, it had a lot of Photoshop work and the teachers were really encouraging with getting creative. Was pretty sweet, too bad it was my last year of High School.
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letipex
Full Member
The true ouroboros
Posts: 197
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Post by letipex on Apr 14, 2010 11:16:04 GMT -5
I went to school in a french system, so it probably wasn't the same as you guys. I had a few rough years when I was 12 to 15 (teens are a bunch of morons... ) but it got really cool afterwards. I had pretty amazing teachers, so I guess that counts for a lot: A philosophy teacher who really made us talk, and with wich I used to stay after class because I felt like we only breached the subject during the few hours that we had. A math teacher who used to do completely random things, like recreate a lightsaber fight with a ruler, or do a class entirelly in consonnants, a physics teacher that taught us 72 different ways to use basic chemistry to kill someone or make something explode, another math teacher who was a crazy psycho that offered us champagne when we met him in bars but who would make you wish for death when you didn't know your lessons, a biology teacher who was a younger and blond version of jessica rabbit (and had the brains to go with the body to!)... How can you NOT love school when you get these? Plus I learned how to think. School is far from sufficient... But it's a necessary condition for it, I think.
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Post by dantesvirgil on Apr 14, 2010 18:13:23 GMT -5
I am still surprised and not surprised at the same time at my students' expectations of what college level English composition will be like. I teach freshmen who have to take English 101 (more or less), and we do different kinds of writing that involve things like exploring genres, research, writing from different points of view, creative nonfiction, all kinds of stuff that's a basic part of their semester. Most students start by saying that English is "not their subject" or that they're terrible writers, and most of them have had bad experiences. Once they get away from the crap 5 paragraph essay baseline, they do really well. Most of the time they surprise themselves at what they're good at and what they can do. I know that some of that is the teacher they have, not to brag, and the kind of feedback they get in the classroom, the atmosphere, the latitude you give them to do what they want while still meeting your requirements. But a good part of that seems to be that this writing is just not high school writing, and that all by itself makes it better. They almost all come in scared to death of what's going to happen, though.
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Post by davedan on Apr 14, 2010 18:24:42 GMT -5
I liked Brave New World - although the idea of a savage who at the same time was fully conversant with the works of shakespeare was a bit of a stretch. But then again I haven't re-read it since I was 13.
We got to read some great books at school - The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, Over the top with Jim, One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.
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Post by skyfire on Apr 15, 2010 6:35:09 GMT -5
I liked Brave New World - although the idea of a savage who at the same time was fully conversant with the works of shakespeare was a bit of a stretch. But then again I haven't re-read it since I was 13. Compared to the fare that I'm used to reading, BNW was pretty weak and rather half-assed at points. This is part of the reason why whenever I have the time to do so I tend to do a lot of reading; I can decide for myself what I do and don't want to mess around with. In the process, I've gotten to works that should by all rights be regarded as classic but are so new that too many within the literary world would still regard them as "pulp," including: *"The Peter Principle" by Peter & Hull (virtually unheard of outside of management despite pioneering a new field of cultural anthropology) *"Malice In Blunderland" by Martin (a somewhat obscure book that discusses how things work in a bureaucratic system) *"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Phillip K. Dick (read it while still in high school; blew away half of the required stuff by comparison" *"The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy (no matter how fucked up things are in his life, the male lead always has at least one plan in place to get himself up out of there. and in contrast to other such books, he pulls it off) *"Team Yankee" by Harold Coyle (although technically glorified fan-fiction since it was written using a scenario laid out by a real-life British military officer in another work, TY was so real-world accurate and internally coherent that it actually spawned a graphic novel and a video game.) *"Starship Troopers" by Heinlen (the movie is an insult to the franchise, as Verhoven didn't want to be involved in the project and let his feelings be known; about 98% of the stuff between the two is completely different.)
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Post by davedan on Apr 15, 2010 17:21:58 GMT -5
"Compared to the fare your used to reading" We read do androids dream of electric sheep in grade 8. Was the book bladerunner was based on. We also read fFowers for Algernon. Read the Peter Principle. - Hardly unknown after all it was the basis for the "Dilbert Principle". Hardly the basis for a field of cultural anthropology. I've read the Peter Principle, and I think it is important to tell you that it is predominantly a joke. It's not actually researched. It is satire. To suggest that any of those makes Brave New World looked weak or half arsed in comparison would suggest to me that the reader was missing something from Brave New World. What other 'fare' is your razor sharp mind used to reading pray tell.
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Post by theeclipse on Apr 15, 2010 20:05:57 GMT -5
So is reading creativity?
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Post by Vene on Apr 15, 2010 20:08:06 GMT -5
So is reading creativity? I'd say no
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Post by davedan on Apr 15, 2010 22:22:49 GMT -5
Of course reading isn't creativity but in my view it does foster creativity, although Nietzche would beg to differ.
Also we were having a discussion about the relative merits of books required for reading at school. A little off topic but so shoot me.
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Post by Vene on Apr 16, 2010 0:09:41 GMT -5
Of course reading isn't creativity but in my view it does foster creativity, although Nietzche would beg to differ. That is not something I'd argue against, mostly because I agree. Reading more teaches you how to use language, it exposes you to new ideas, and encourages thought. Sure.
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Post by davedan on Apr 16, 2010 0:30:08 GMT -5
Vene,
I think that is the only smiley I've ever seen that I actually liked.
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