Junior Year English

This is just a small collection of memories from English class at Orange Glen High during my junior year in 1969...

I arrived there around March and - as I've alluded to many times - I was pretty far from OK... I mostly kept to myself and I liked it that way... Well - I didn't really like it - let's just say it was more comfortable that way...
That's why it was so important to react correctly when (a few days after I got there) the big obnoxious guy sitting next to me in English reached over and wrote an obscenity in my textbook... I feigned surprise and said something like "Hey! You know how to spell it! ... I bet your folks are so proud!". I apparently passed the test - he laughed it off and left me alone after that...

Then there were these 2 girls who sat in from of "obnoxious guy"... I'm not sure I've ever seen friends that close. It was like they shared a brain - they were so cute together - I actually envied them... But they could not stop talking. It was incessant - they were constantly getting into trouble for it... Is there a point? Not really. They were just fun to watch :-)

At one point we were studying the structure of poetry and the teacher was choosing students at random to read various examples. Almost all of them recited in a stumbling monotone while staring at the book. It was really painful to listen to... Then one day I was called on to read a love poem.
OK - in an earlier blog post I mentioned having taken Speech during my sophomore year. I was pretty darn good at it - unless my best friend was trying to distract me :-) So I had experience and training - plus I had learned to project my voice from my mom (who was an opera singer) - and I knew all about drama just from being around her...
The upshot is I absolutely nailed it - the timing, the inflections, the passion - everything. I even managed to maintain eye contact most of the time... When I finished you could hear a pin drop. I glanced around and everyone was (to say the least) surprised... So I sat down and crawled back into my shell :-)
Given how much I kept to myself I'm sure everyone expected me to just mumble quietly... And instead I gave them "shock and awe"... I found that incredibly gratifying. I'm just not sure why :-)

I'd like to preface my final topic with a description of one of my favorite movie scenes:
In "Back to School" Rodney Dangerfield's character gets an F on a report about Kurt Vonnegut because he obviously paid someone to write it for him... The professor (Sally Kellerman) says: "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!" In the next scene Dangerfield is on the phone saying "... and another thing, Vonnegut! I'm going to stop payment on the check!"

Yeah - by the time I reached high school I had concluded that scholarly analysis of literature is a bunch of crap... Apparently whoever wrote "Back to School" shared that sentiment :-)
Book reports are just another way of taking an activity (reading) that should be pure enjoyment and turning it into drudgery. Not only that, but there are apparently "right and wrong" interpretations of a particular work - a concept that probably mystifies the author as much as it does me...
So when the English teacher at Orange Glen stopped me after class and asked me why I didn't turn in my book report I told him that I didn't do book reports...

I wish I could describe the look on his face - apparently that was not one of the expected responses... He eventually recovered his composure enough to ask why - and I explained my reasoning... I added that I was totally OK with an F on the assignment but I was simply not going to do it. He was adamant that I write something - so we agreed that I could do a paper on my favorite topic instead... So I wrote 6 pages about me :-)

One more tidbit: He made us spend a full class period listening to a recording of Beowulf in the original "Olde English"... It might as well have been "War and Peace" in Russian... Yeah - that's 50 minutes of my life I'll never get back...