But I loathed my English teachers.
They were boring, completely unengaging, but the primary reason I loathed them was that they were inconsistent. I could always ace my math classes, but nope, not English.
I didn't diagram the sentence correctly.
I forgot what the dangling participle was.
I used "their" when it should have been "there."
Forgot my last name.
Or I just didn't write "good."
It seemed to me they would do it on purpose, some of them favoring girls over boys, and while I could never prove either, in my core of cores I knew they were at least unfair and dishonest people.
Of course, as I've gotten older I've realized them for what they were - the laziest of the lazy of education majors. Primarily women who didn't give a rip about children or have a passion for literature, as much as they did a selfish and lazy ego that only wanted an easy job and the "faux" sense they were actually professionals at something.
Oh sure, that may sound harsh, but it's true. They were hacks. They were frauds. There wasn't one English teacher that inspired anybody in my school to read, and had no problems holding 30 kids at a time hostage for 8 hours a day for 13 years all so they could get a pension for 75% work. And for that I will today and into forever expose, rip apart, and humiliate English teachers for the vermin they are.
I'll point out a kid who flunked out of 7th grade English has more fame as an author than they ever did.
I'll point out they could only read what they could never write.
I'll point out they never "changed the lives" of a single student.
I'll point out the entire professional life they dedicated themselves to in literature only got their pictures in yearbooks and that is the ONLY piece of memorable "literature" the universe will ever remember them for.
But it came to my attention quite recently of another crime they committed. I couldn't believe it because of just what a bad taste they left in my mouth, but they still managed to get one last sting in.
They ruined reading and literature for me and hundreds of millions of people.
I always thought I hated reading. It was inefficient, it was boring, there was plenty of other things to do. The ONLY books I ever read were the "High King" pentalogy by Lloyd Alexander. Ever since then the only books I ever read were textbooks or terabytes of economic reports. In the meantime, for the past 30 years, I'd rather eat chalk than read.
But then something funny happened after I finished Bachelor Pad Economics. With the new-found free time I didn't go on a video game playing binge like I promised I would. I didn't go and watch the entire Charlie Brown cartoon series. And I didn't watch all the spaghetti westerns I said I was going to watch.
No, I kept going back and reading blogs, and even reading books people had sent me. And it literally hit me last week.
Shit, I like reading.
Not the crap they tried to force down my throat in the 80's.
Not the crap my liberal arts prereq profs made me trudge through.
But if I was given a choice in following my interests and reading what I wanted, reading was actually quite enjoyable. So enjoyable that I got more mental stimulation from reading than playing Battlefield Bad Company. This then behooved the question, what did I miss out on? What other books or authors would I have thoroughly enjoyed? Not that I didn't enjoy playing the Final Fantasy series or hiking mountains, but if I was allowed to read what I wanted I could at least understand what Aurini and Molyneux were saying half the time!
So touche, English teachers. Touche. You made life miserable for millions of children. Probably scarred a couple young boys along the way. Unnecessarily cost us some GPA points. And your coup d' etat was ruining literature for us well into our adult lives. But once no longer in the education system and under your auspices, we will slowly and surely wake up and realize reading doesn't have to be the pain you made it be. And while in a vengeful way I'd love to look you guys up to see if you've ever amounted to anything in the literary world, unfortunately I can't remember your names. You were like all other English teachers - immemorable and unnoteworthy.
.JPG)
0 comments:
Post a Comment