1. A semicolon separates two independent clauses.
2. Man is inherently evil.
3. If you highlight something, you know it.
I try to learn something from all of my teachers, even if it's something so bleak as how-not-to-be-a-human-being, so here it goes. What I learned from Ms. R:
~*~*~*~
1. I learned the semicolon thing quite well; I use them near-constantly now. Of course, I read Emma by Jane Austen that same year; that probably helped as much as anything; I counted an extremely robust seven semicolons in one sentence that spanned the entire length of a page and a bit more. Remarkable, remarkable. Wherever I got it from (normally I would assume it was the reading, as what I read affects my style in general, but a few years of French and I have become much better at cobbling abstract grammar rules into something useful), that, I learned. Moving on.
2. This one was a lot harder for me to sit still and listen to, I confess. In that year, sophomore year, we read the books The Pearl, Lord of the Flies, and Night; we read short stories of the To Build a Fire and The Lottery type. There were two things we read that I liked that year, Roald Dahl's Lamb to the Slaughter which convinced me that Mr. Dahl's writing for adults was as splendidly twisted as his writing for children, and the poem A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes.
I'm digressing madly again; I have a tendency to think of my English classes in terms of literature instead of what we actually did--the books stay with me longer, except in the case of Ms. G, but that is another story.
Most of the year was spent on Lord of the Flies which, if you do not know it, is a symbolism-heavy little book of the sort where everybody dies. (Apologies for spoilers: I had it spoiled for me, at my request; "Should I get attached to anyone?" I asked in the shorthand of people who are wont to cry over books; "No," someone a year older than me said emphatically, so I didn't.) This book was the ultimate proof of Ms. R's thesis that all man is inherently evil--a claim she did not make with qualifiers such as "in the context of the book" or "in William Golding's opinion" or even "it seems to me that." No, "Man is inherently evil" was repeated with the same bleak certitude as "Use a comma after a coordinating conjunction."
Well, stylistically, the coordinating-conjunction-comma is going out, and I couldn't believe her about the philosophy, either.
I remember she gave us one essay to write about babies or small children: are they good or evil, do you think, she asked. No fence-sitting, she insisted, they can't be both, and I swore. Well if they bloody well are both than your false dichotomy isn't going to change anything, you nut! (Pardon me, I was somewhat upset. I don't like to lie in essays; it's harder than just telling what you think.) I wrote that babies were good and perfect and I just barely avoided saying they were as close to God as we ever can get. My parents never impressed into me the doctrine of original sin (I thank them for this very much; I didn't need one more thing to feel guilty about) and they are both very close to Buddhists or Humanists or heaven-knows-what-ists, so it is a natural and easy position for me to take and one that I pretty much viscerally believe. My parents worked with small children a lot, and apart from one or two little psychos (I mean it affectionately, sometimes even they were all right, really), I found plenty of evidence to back up my position, which wasn't exactly my opinion, but close enough.
Nice try, Ms. R wrote on my essay, and it was war. She had the more impressive ammunition, naturally, striding back and forth in front of the class, delivering loud hear-it-down-the-hallway lectures about how babies are evil because they are entirely selfish and children are nasty because they need to be forced by society to share and to not hit and otherwise not be little tyrants. Ms. R didn't particularly like children--she told us this candidly, while speaking of her two grown-up twin girls. She likes them much better now as teenagers; as toddlers they used to hold their breaths until they turned blue and fell over.
Perhaps I am unkind to Ms. R, perhaps she was not trying to impress upon us the doctrine of original sin as much as trying to remove from us the doctrine of the Noble Savage, the theory that in the natural state man has no war and no evil and no fighting and no unpleasantness at all. I would respect that goal--Stephen Pinker's books have installed in me the thought that the Noble Savage is an overly-simplistic concept based on a denial of human nature. Human nature, which is a product of evolution and contains "good parts" and "bad parts" but really just is what it is, anyway.
What it is, said Ms. R, is evil, and that is that. Evolution too was tied into her convictions, evolution that she said only produced selfish, survival-of-the-fittest, dog-eat-dog animals. I read The Selfish Gene that year too. I wished I'd had Dawkins around to explain for the eleventy-millionth time that selfish genes don't necessarily imply selfish creatures; that genes for empathy and altruism exist and can be an evolutionary advantage as well.
Back to Lord of the Flies. The boys (and they were all boys, which I thought was telling, but Ms. R never mentioned) of course descended into absolute chaos--because, Ms. R told us, of the absence of the society that had kept them in check. The, and I quote, "thin veneer of civilization was peeled back to expose their true savage natures underneath."
Hobbes, I thought, and I wondered if perhaps she though a monarchy would keep it all in line so much better. I never was a Hobbes fan.
On the topic of Lord of the Flies, my mother commented to me that she thought it was really much more about what happens to young boys when they're in those old-fashioned English schools where the older boys can beat the younger boys and the whole thing is just a cycle of misplaced revenge. That made a lot more sense to me. I read Boy, by Roald Dahl, again that year.
My resistance was subtle and consisted of making the best arguments I could--not to her, but to her students, my classmates, everyone who she'd ever tried to impress this idea upon. I often take up the position of Devil's Advocate, but I think that time would be more aptly named Angel's Advocate, or Man's Advocate, or something to that effect. I don't how much I had to do with it, but by the time we got to 11th grade English we were a little terrorized, unduly skittish ("Do we put our name on it? MLA or standard? Do we have to spell out the date? American form?"), but only one or two of us really believed anything she'd said. I dunno if she was trying to inspire critical thinking, or whatever, but there was a lot of thinking that was critical of her in that class, this I know.
3. Highlighters, I have found, distract me utterly and on occasion I actually retain less highlighted text than normal text. I learn in full sentences, not fragments; this is why I'm crap at taking notes. Sigh.
1. I learned the semicolon thing quite well; I use them near-constantly now. Of course, I read Emma by Jane Austen that same year; that probably helped as much as anything; I counted an extremely robust seven semicolons in one sentence that spanned the entire length of a page and a bit more. Remarkable, remarkable. Wherever I got it from (normally I would assume it was the reading, as what I read affects my style in general, but a few years of French and I have become much better at cobbling abstract grammar rules into something useful), that, I learned. Moving on.
2. This one was a lot harder for me to sit still and listen to, I confess. In that year, sophomore year, we read the books The Pearl, Lord of the Flies, and Night; we read short stories of the To Build a Fire and The Lottery type. There were two things we read that I liked that year, Roald Dahl's Lamb to the Slaughter which convinced me that Mr. Dahl's writing for adults was as splendidly twisted as his writing for children, and the poem A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes.
I'm digressing madly again; I have a tendency to think of my English classes in terms of literature instead of what we actually did--the books stay with me longer, except in the case of Ms. G, but that is another story.
Most of the year was spent on Lord of the Flies which, if you do not know it, is a symbolism-heavy little book of the sort where everybody dies. (Apologies for spoilers: I had it spoiled for me, at my request; "Should I get attached to anyone?" I asked in the shorthand of people who are wont to cry over books; "No," someone a year older than me said emphatically, so I didn't.) This book was the ultimate proof of Ms. R's thesis that all man is inherently evil--a claim she did not make with qualifiers such as "in the context of the book" or "in William Golding's opinion" or even "it seems to me that." No, "Man is inherently evil" was repeated with the same bleak certitude as "Use a comma after a coordinating conjunction."
Well, stylistically, the coordinating-conjunction-comma is going out, and I couldn't believe her about the philosophy, either.
I remember she gave us one essay to write about babies or small children: are they good or evil, do you think, she asked. No fence-sitting, she insisted, they can't be both, and I swore. Well if they bloody well are both than your false dichotomy isn't going to change anything, you nut! (Pardon me, I was somewhat upset. I don't like to lie in essays; it's harder than just telling what you think.) I wrote that babies were good and perfect and I just barely avoided saying they were as close to God as we ever can get. My parents never impressed into me the doctrine of original sin (I thank them for this very much; I didn't need one more thing to feel guilty about) and they are both very close to Buddhists or Humanists or heaven-knows-what-ists, so it is a natural and easy position for me to take and one that I pretty much viscerally believe. My parents worked with small children a lot, and apart from one or two little psychos (I mean it affectionately, sometimes even they were all right, really), I found plenty of evidence to back up my position, which wasn't exactly my opinion, but close enough.
Nice try, Ms. R wrote on my essay, and it was war. She had the more impressive ammunition, naturally, striding back and forth in front of the class, delivering loud hear-it-down-the-hallway lectures about how babies are evil because they are entirely selfish and children are nasty because they need to be forced by society to share and to not hit and otherwise not be little tyrants. Ms. R didn't particularly like children--she told us this candidly, while speaking of her two grown-up twin girls. She likes them much better now as teenagers; as toddlers they used to hold their breaths until they turned blue and fell over.
Perhaps I am unkind to Ms. R, perhaps she was not trying to impress upon us the doctrine of original sin as much as trying to remove from us the doctrine of the Noble Savage, the theory that in the natural state man has no war and no evil and no fighting and no unpleasantness at all. I would respect that goal--Stephen Pinker's books have installed in me the thought that the Noble Savage is an overly-simplistic concept based on a denial of human nature. Human nature, which is a product of evolution and contains "good parts" and "bad parts" but really just is what it is, anyway.
What it is, said Ms. R, is evil, and that is that. Evolution too was tied into her convictions, evolution that she said only produced selfish, survival-of-the-fittest, dog-eat-dog animals. I read The Selfish Gene that year too. I wished I'd had Dawkins around to explain for the eleventy-millionth time that selfish genes don't necessarily imply selfish creatures; that genes for empathy and altruism exist and can be an evolutionary advantage as well.
Back to Lord of the Flies. The boys (and they were all boys, which I thought was telling, but Ms. R never mentioned) of course descended into absolute chaos--because, Ms. R told us, of the absence of the society that had kept them in check. The, and I quote, "thin veneer of civilization was peeled back to expose their true savage natures underneath."
Hobbes, I thought, and I wondered if perhaps she though a monarchy would keep it all in line so much better. I never was a Hobbes fan.
On the topic of Lord of the Flies, my mother commented to me that she thought it was really much more about what happens to young boys when they're in those old-fashioned English schools where the older boys can beat the younger boys and the whole thing is just a cycle of misplaced revenge. That made a lot more sense to me. I read Boy, by Roald Dahl, again that year.
My resistance was subtle and consisted of making the best arguments I could--not to her, but to her students, my classmates, everyone who she'd ever tried to impress this idea upon. I often take up the position of Devil's Advocate, but I think that time would be more aptly named Angel's Advocate, or Man's Advocate, or something to that effect. I don't how much I had to do with it, but by the time we got to 11th grade English we were a little terrorized, unduly skittish ("Do we put our name on it? MLA or standard? Do we have to spell out the date? American form?"), but only one or two of us really believed anything she'd said. I dunno if she was trying to inspire critical thinking, or whatever, but there was a lot of thinking that was critical of her in that class, this I know.
3. Highlighters, I have found, distract me utterly and on occasion I actually retain less highlighted text than normal text. I learn in full sentences, not fragments; this is why I'm crap at taking notes. Sigh.
0 comments:
Post a Comment