English Literature

I'm currently in my second semester at Villa Julie. So far, my classes aren't too challenging. They're hard and time consuming, but nothing is making me say, "oh wow I didn't know that." or "that's extremely interesting." or "I'll definitely have to remember that." you know?

Among my regular core classes for the Business communications major curriculum, I'm taking English Literature. The teacher is, for lack of a better word, an idiot. She can't spell, she fails to pronounce specific vowels and consonances when saying words like "fRustrated" - note the capitalized "R." She teaches basic concepts that all of the students should obviously already know. Metaphors and similes? Come on now...don't spend 20 minutes lecturing the difference between the two when all you could've said was, "you all know the difference between metaphors and similes, right?" I suppose the lack of interest in the question caused all the other students to just kind of sit there like mindless zombies. So I then took it upon myself to answer for the class to say, "Yes. We do." However, my sarcastic and somewhat rude reply may have sparked her desire to have a discussion on both concepts anyway.

She's one of those teachers who makes you want to be bitter and sarcastic. I'm generally very happy to discuss literature. Except that what we're reading, I've already read. So the questions she's asking, I already know. It's like the class should be re-named to, "Re-do High School English from Freshman Year 101." I mean seriously. We all know what symbolism is. We all KNOW (or so I hope) what allusions and foreshadowing is. STOP ASKING! FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

I can only imagine what other people are saying about the course...Although, I did get the chance to revise a students paper during the course for an essay we had to write. The punctuation, grammar, and spelling was terrible. I'm still not even sure if she even had a point to the whole thing. The teacher told us not to be "too harsh" but when you're correcting basics, where do you draw the line? This is all stuff she should have known by now! I don't know how the college accepted her with all the essays we had to write for the application. Maybe she didn't write them. I don't know... But I tore this thing apart. Red marks everywhere.

I'm telling you...I could NEVER be an English teacher. I'd be a really good one, because I'd probably get to the heart of everything we did, but I would expect too much and scold all those 5th graders for spelling onomatopoea wrong. "For goodness sakes Jimmy! Go sit in the corner!"

Yeah...that would not be pretty.

Anyway... my English Lit class definitely has the potential for being an excellent class. Don't get me wrong either. The teacher isn't totally off base with everything. It's always little things that I just make explode into huge problems when it comes to English. She's very organized and constructed with everything, so there is method to the madness... But it's the madness that I do not like. I'm debating whether she's actually supposed to be our teacher.

It reminds me of Harry Potter actually. Our "real" teacher is tied up at the bottom of some chest in our current teachers quarters, while to maintain the looks of the real teacher, she has to drink polyjuice potion every so often. Maybe that's why she has spasms in the middle of class...

Who knows...

I'll stick it out, but right now, I'm not all that thrilled about my first class being cancelled for snow and still having to go to that one. Plus, she always keeps us kind of late and right after that I have a class 20 minutes later at the other campus. It takes me 15 minutes to get there. If she keeps us 5 minutes late, I'm there split-second on time. And that's if there's NO traffic! You do the math... Maybe i'll just start getting up and leaving as soon as the class is "supposed" to be over. Ha