English

While English has never been my favorite subject, I will say that in my past three years of high school I have had exceptional teachers. Overall, they have been wonderfully interesting people and have provided useful feedback on work, which has allowed me to tremendously improve my writing and analytic abilities. While I may not have been smitten with each of these classes all of the time, it was typically a result of my relative lack of interest in English. However, there is a potential for my experience in English this year to break from that happy pattern. It is still too early, I think, to seriously judge the merits of the class, but based on my experiences thus far, I am skeptical.

The first characteristic of the class that I have found distasteful, is its emphasis on preparation for the AP English Lit exam. True, the class is designated "AP English", and some time should be spent preparing the student for the particular sections of the exam, but the course should not be designed according to the exam. While such a strategy can work fairly well for math and science AP courses, it is inherently flawed for humanities courses--and especially for English. The english exam is primarily an analytic examination, not a content-based test. While some information necessarily must be memorized, such as various literary terms, the test primarily judges the student's ability to analyze literature. A course that is structured specifically around this test necessarily ends up stressing exercises like writing timed analytic essays on short stories and poems in 40-60 minutes. While this is a truly important skill to develop for college, it isn't as valuable or worthwhile as carefully crafting thoughtful and detailed essays. Quality of writing is not adequately emphasized in the AP mode of instruction, nor is depth of thinking and argumentation. Today in class, for example, we read a 40-minute essay on a short story from the 2005 test. The question asked the student to discuss how literary devices were used to convey the author's purpose in a short story. It seems to me that in order to write the essay one must adequately define and defend what the author's purpose is while simultaneously showing how literary devices support that interpretation. In the example essay, the student's thesis was vague, a borderline literal interpretation, and it was poorly substantiated throughout the essay. Instead of addressing what the author's purpose truly was beyond literal facts, the test-taker harped on what attitudes and emotions the literary devices conjured up in the reader. The analysis also made several leaps of logic that were wholly unsupportable with the frame of reference of the story. It received a mark of 8 out of 9. This kind of test-specific preparation fails to actually teach the student how to do much other than simply pass the test. And passing the test is by no means indicative of any mastery of writing or literary analysis.

Only adding to my criticism is a certain difference in philosophy between my teacher and me. While I don't pretend to be an expert of anything--least of all English--I can't help but disagree with my teacher's particular notion of "multiple interpretations" of literature. Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that literature is open to many, possibly infinite, valid interpretations, but I think that the infinity of wrong answers is vastly larger than the infinity of plausable ones. It seems to me that an argument should be based firmly in empirical evidence drawn from the text it describes, and it should encompass evidence from the entire text without conveniently "ignoring" certain sections. While there are flaws in every argument, the flaws should be minor enough that they do not pose a significant threat to the stability of the thesis. On the contrary, my teacher has stated outright that a valid interpretation "can have holes and leaps of logic, as long as they're not gaping", and can completely ignore certain sections. Thus, it seems to me that he is a firm believer that analyzing literature is not a rigorous deduction of the purposes of author and the subtextual implications of the written word, but rather an exposition on the impression and ideas that are provoked in the reader by the story and how specific components of the story elicited them. He seemed to think that the essay we read in class provided a reasonable analysis and thesis. Although I would have to reproduce the story and essay here to adequately convince you of its inferiority, I will propose that there is absolutely no way that it would pass Boly's infamous "so-what" test. Needless to say, I think I'm developing a dubious reputation for being disagreeable in that class. While Leeor, Jon, and I were getting in the car to go to Lewis and Clark, Dom drove by and shouted, "Adam, I disagree!!" And yes, I do disagree.