Continuing my rants about English (I could probably write an entire book of rants), I will now explain what I meant in my first post by explaining everything chronologically. It all started in 8th grade with my English teacher (who is also the Assistant Principal) not teaching us how to write well. He just made us write these stupid and random writing assignments that didn’t help at all. So I went on to keep sucking at essays into the 10th grade.
Then, when I graduated and went to high school, they put me in Honors English despite my C average 8th grade. I later found out that this was because the only requirements were based on standardized test scores, which IMO is a horrible way to determine Honors. The same thing happened with Honors History that year. Since I didn’t know what I could do about it, I stayed in both classes ,nearly failed Honors English, and moved down in both (although at that point, I took a liking to History and was disappointed in moving down). After Honors World History was AP World.
In 10th grade, I suffered the “consequences” (which weren’t completely my fault) of 9th grade. After moving down in Honors History, I became determined to get back into AP, and through all of the essays in that class, I got good enough to move back into AP US. English was far different, however. My teacher was horrible. The writing style that was taught was completely impractical. They dictated how every sentence should be written and said you had to write exactly three paragraphs. This p*ssed me off to no end, as I believe any writing style should be accepted as long as it follows the basic rules. The worst part was that failure to follow the guidelines resulted in a C or D. Despite that, I refused to write that way but still passed because of everything else.
This year, I am in AP US, which I should be able to handle now that I’ve learned how to write, and American Literature, which basically the same writing style except now we get to write four (Yippee!)
paragraphs. On top of that, I have to write a term paper!
But now that I know how to write, English is starting to seem more and more useless. The only thing were learning about is so-called “Great Literature” for the rest of our high school career. Simply learning about literature is useless and boring. Once you learn how to read and write essays and all that, English becomes pointless and boring. I loathe the fact that English is required all four years of high school.
So that’s the end of my long rant about school.
