I’m a junior in high school, which means I have been learning English in school in some form for over 10 years. Every school day, from ELA class in pre-K to AP Language and Composition this year, I’ve walked into a class that has the goal of improving my English, and I’ve almost never enjoyed it, until now.
I have always been an avid reader; from the first moment I could, I consumed chapter books like they were the most delicious food I’d ever tasted. As an elementary schooler, my parents would have to come into my room and tell me to stop reading, and I loved challenging myself to read the hardest book possible. By the time I reached middle school, I had already read classics like Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer, almost every fantasy book I could get my hands on, and a host of other books in various genres.
Throughout middle school, I continued to read intensely, and I’d brag about how I read for at least an hour each and every school day. When high school came around, I tried my best to read when I could, but I just didn’t have the time to read as much as I used to. Although the reading I’ve done in the past two years is an order of magnitude less than what I did when I was younger, my love for it never decreased, and I don’t think it ever will.
In my life, however, there has always been a strange paradox: I love to read, and yet English classes have always been the least enjoyable part of my day.
I don’t remember a single school year when there were more days I looked forward to English class than days that I didn’t. It’s not that I don’t like school; on the contrary, I love learning, and from a young age, I’ve always looked forward to coming to school.
What was it, then, about English that drove me to complain about it so much? It’s not that I had a string of bad teachers; I actually believe that the vast majority of English teachers I’ve had are amazing at their jobs and were well-intentioned. However, I’ve never felt genuinely engaged in an English class for a whole year.
Oddly, the only part of English I ever actually felt passionate about was poetry, which almost every other student I’ve ever talked to disliked. Each year, at the start of the poetry unit, I’d hear the teacher announce it and perk up from whatever was preoccupying my thoughts while the rest of the class groaned in annoyance.
I of course understand how poetry can be challenging and irritatingly subjective, but I think that’s actually what drew me to it. The challenge of making meaning out of words you know carry immeasurable weight in the heart of the poet is one I gladly take up, and I just as avidly write poetry that I believe carries more meaning than any prose can.
Perhaps it was the lack of this “meaning” I found in poetry in other parts of English that drove me away, then.
Learning vocabulary and grammar always felt like a waste of time to me, and though I recognize its importance in life, it never engaged me. I think I’ve learned a total of 10 new vocab words throughout my entire high school experience so far, and there’s not a single grammar rule that didn’t feel like common sense or something you could spend five minutes on and never look at again.
I’m not saying that learning vocab and grammar is useless or meaningless, I know it’s not, otherwise I couldn’t write this essay, but it often felt that way for myself.
The other part of English that never ceased to vex me was literary analysis. I find extracting and writing about the meaning of a piece of literature that was meant to be read, digested, and then used by the reader to improve their own or others’ lives for a grade incredibly pointless and a waste of what could have been.
In my eyes, the point of reading is to incite new ideas and morals into the mind of the reader, whether it be by entertaining them or pulling at their heartstrings; it is not to be analyzed and regurgitated onto a piece of paper or a Google Doc that has no other purpose than to be rated and used as a metric to determine if a student can think in a manner that will get them the best grade.
Why does it matter if a student can identify a use of imagery in a passage if that was all they had to do? Why must a student read a piece of literature with the singular goal of figuring out how they can get the best grade by writing down an interpretation that sounds like it was thought out? What does it matter if that imagery doesn’t engrain a picture in their mind that would go on to influence an actually influential decision they make later in life?
These are all thoughts that have lived in my brain for years, and I thought that this was how English would always be. However, AP English Language and Composition has changed everything for me. We still analyze passages, but now I can incorporate these analysis techniques into my life in ways that I feel my past English classes didn’t encourage.
When I listen to someone speak in an advertisement, I can use the skills I’m developing in AP Lang to understand how they are attempting to convince me, see through it, and then make my own educated decision on what to or not to buy. When I write a rhetorical analysis, it doesn’t feel as if I’m solely looking for a meaning to get me a good grade, but rather just continuing to develop my skills in seeing through others’ arguments.
With all of this said, I understand the importance of English class. Being able to write intelligently is an incredibly important skill that the class is meant to teach. However, I must say, the biggest improvements I’ve ever made to my writing have come from being in the school newspaper, AP Euro, and AP Lang.
What then, does that say about the 10 years of at least one hour spent per day I’ve spent in an English class?
