I also disliked the emphasis on literary analysis. It so often seemed like contrived flimflammery crossed with psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. If tvtropes (or allthetropes) had existed back then, I think I would have performed much better on my English homework. After all, those sites do include the Jungian archetypes and the basic plots as a subset.
As it is, my high school English classes drove me far away from anything even remotely similar until a lifetime of reading fiction, a shameful amount of blathering on Internet message boards, and the exhortations of the "National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)" organization convinced me to try to write a novel in November of 2012. Two years later, I have written 500 kb, with maybe 130 kb left to go before I snap it off and start the next one. Then there's also the matter of the default HTML stylesheet, continuity notes and timelines, the character, vehicle, location, and artifact indices, working hyperlinks, and testing the release version on all available e-reader programs and devices.
As for my old English teachers, I bite my thumb at them, like Sampson. I give them the fig, like Vanni Fucci. And just as golf is a good walk, spoiled, English class is a good read, ruined. Even with those ancient cultural references rattling around my bonebox, I find that an increasingly large fraction of my memes are drawn from television, film, music, video games, and popular web sites, and a vanishingly small portion from the old literary canon.
That's how I know that the Belmonts love Devo. If you understand why, you probably won't need to thank an English teacher.
All I really ever needed was a pile of books that I enjoyed reading and a copy of Strunk and White (minus the part about always putting sentence punctuation inside the quotes, because that's just madness). What I got was about 10 years of pedagogical torture that discouraged me from trying something that turned out to be a fun hobby.
I also disliked the emphasis on literary analysis. It so often seemed like contrived flimflammery crossed with psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. If tvtropes (or allthetropes) had existed back then, I think I would have performed much better on my English homework. After all, those sites do include the Jungian archetypes and the basic plots as a subset.
As it is, my high school English classes drove me far away from anything even remotely similar until a lifetime of reading fiction, a shameful amount of blathering on Internet message boards, and the exhortations of the "National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)" organization convinced me to try to write a novel in November of 2012. Two years later, I have written 500 kb, with maybe 130 kb left to go before I snap it off and start the next one. Then there's also the matter of the default HTML stylesheet, continuity notes and timelines, the character, vehicle, location, and artifact indices, working hyperlinks, and testing the release version on all available e-reader programs and devices.
As for my old English teachers, I bite my thumb at them, like Sampson. I give them the fig, like Vanni Fucci. And just as golf is a good walk, spoiled, English class is a good read, ruined. Even with those ancient cultural references rattling around my bonebox, I find that an increasingly large fraction of my memes are drawn from television, film, music, video games, and popular web sites, and a vanishingly small portion from the old literary canon.
That's how I know that the Belmonts love Devo. If you understand why, you probably won't need to thank an English teacher.
All I really ever needed was a pile of books that I enjoyed reading and a copy of Strunk and White (minus the part about always putting sentence punctuation inside the quotes, because that's just madness). What I got was about 10 years of pedagogical torture that discouraged me from trying something that turned out to be a fun hobby.