Poorly to say the least. I ended up dropping out of school in 9th grade and taught myself from textbooks and reading until I got to the age where I could enroll in jr. college English without them calling the truant officers.
Thank you. It would be several years off but I like to keep my mind occupied. I do speak German and teaching the language to others would certainly be a pleasure. I like to see people's reaction to German verb structure.
My talent brought me ahead in English. My laziness brought me back, especially when I ran into a teacher who enjoyed giving busy work. I wanted to write what I wanted to write. When given an assignment, I often tore the subject matter apart just to get myself through it. When it came to this, the teachers I had were usually merciful enough.
English was the one subject I was good at; I hated school and had a lot of problems that didn't allow me to do well.
I did very well in highschool. Got all A's at my highers (17-18years old). Ended up going to Uni and did Civil Engineering, which was a terrible mistake as I was always better in English than in Maths, didn't do terribly well in it and couldn't get a job when I left Uni. I did equally well in both subjects at highschool just things in English came easier to me and now I'm writing novels... I really wish I'd done something more creative at Uni but oh well. I love writing steampunk and technology based stuff so my engineering degree at least comes in handy there.
I did terrible at school and skipped a lot of classes and didn't start writing until after I got kicked out My favourite subject was Truant101 I often wish I had known that today I would be looking back and wishing I had a more positive experience at school. I love writing and reading and I could have done well if I wanted to, and tried.
I got an 'A' for English at age 16, the last time I studied it - after that I concentrated on mathematics and sciences. I really enjoyed creative writing but kind of lost confidence when I was 12-13, and didn't get back to trying it again until I was almost 30.
For a lot of complex reasons, I was a painful underachiever until part way through college. My success in high school English classes varied directly with the level of my enthusiasm for what we were reading at the time. But I remember the first day of school in my junior year. We had a new teacher for English, Mr. Neyland, who was part of a group of new hires who were all kind of New Left (very unlike the rest of the faculty, and most of them stayed only that one year). He asked us, "How many of you have already read Animal Farm?" Only two or three in a class of 40 had not. "That's what I thought," he said. "I'm going to try to replace it on the reading list with Catch-22." A few of us started to laugh. I mean, he was going to get Brother Karl, the chairman of the English department (and not known for his liberal viewpoints) to have us read Joseph Heller? In a Catholic high school?? In 1969??? Good luck with that! But he did. And when he announced it to the class a few days later, I went up to him afterwards and (smart ass that I was) asked, "What if I've read that already, too?" Instead of dismissing me as a smart ass, though, he said, "Read it again." I rolled my eyes, and he asked me, "When you read it, how did it strike you?" I told him I thought it was hysterically funny. He told me that if I read it a second time, I'd probably find it to be very bitter; and if I read it a third time, it would likely strike me as very philosophical. So, I did, and it did. But in my senior year, while I really enjoyed the reading list - it included Ibsen, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov - I had what, looking back, may have been a very damaging experience for me as a writer (which I was starting to consider myself). We were assigned to write a play, using a pyramid outline. I had just broken up with my first really serious girlfriend, and the play became a kind of outlet for me. I remember early on, even before I had the notion of the story itself down, I decided on a big, climactic emotional scene, and I built everything up to that. I was very excited when I handed it in. When I got it back, I got a grade of 80 (now, how one can give an original piece of writing a numeric grade with that kind of specificity is a debate for another day). Needless to say, I was completely deflated, all the more because there was not a single critical comment made, and at 17, I was ready for critical comment. I even admitted to myself shortly afterward that it was, all things considered, a pretty terrible play, but that wasn't the point. I really thought he (Brother George, the English teacher, who knew I was on the school newspaper staff and who had heard me talk to a friend of mine in the class about writing) really should have said something.
To this day, I wish I had dropped out of school at age 15 and gone on to the University of Idaho, right then. As a land grant institution, they had to accept you if you had a HS diploma. POOF! I'm a college student. High school was such a a waste of time, for me. Although, (back to Mr. Mongello) one English teacher handed out the list of books banned by the school. He told us to hit the library and check out every last one of them. Read each one. "Find out what it is that the school does not want you to know." Ahh, the beginnings of rebellion against censorship. Barnes&Noble's has a section specifically for and appropriately labelled "BANNED BOOKS" I love it!
Not sure how this compares, but I graduated as an International Baccalaureate (sounds fancier than it is), but basically it's a high school degree. The grades were from 1-7, and I got 7 in Higher Level English, but the final exam was really easy. All we had to do was write essays about a few novels we read and orally analyze a passage from one novel (in my case it was 1984). I didn't put so much effort in English -- I had my hands full with math!
With the exception of IB (what's that?) this could have been me. I graduated with honors in 1967, went on to do the same at University in 1971, then briefly taught high school English until I realised I didn't enjoy being a teacher and moved on to other things. I'm sure our high school English teachers assumed that college-bound students needed to know how to write good expository essays; they were right, too. But dang. Even at a Class A high school in Michigan, there were NO creative writing courses whatsoever. I have had to teach myself the tricks of the creative writing trade over the years, and dump the expository form altogether, which has not been easy to do. Surely they could have given us both? Ach, well...
I'm still in high school, and I don't do well in English. I don't do a good job in any of my classes actually... But when it comes to writing, I am a master. I love structuring a piece of work, and putting my imagination into work. Essay, short story, or novel, I write all the same way, the same style, and always give the same flavor. As long as you have fun, and take pride in your work, then it'll be a hit... At least that's what I think, and it has never lt me down... of course i'm still a high school student though.
That's very interesting because I don't know of any books that were banned by my high school. Granted, I never sought them out. I grew up in a suburb of Cincinnati in a town where a Democrat hadn't won the district since the 40's or something. The county was deep red country and it was even odd to find a democrat teacher, who are historically more liberal. Even in this school I knew of no books which were banned (I'm sure some were but I hardly view 50 shades of gray as necessary to the education of a child) I remember finding out that my father had read "Mein Kampf". I asked him why he'd want to read something like that and he told me it was important to understand how such a horrible crime happens. I went to my school library the next day and found my own copy sitting there on the book shelf. Read about 20 minutes of it and decided it was a horrible borefest I'd never be able to suffer through. Now I will never know the deep thoughts of Aryan racial superiority. Shame. Later I discovered that book is banned in most European countries. I remember thinking that it was ridiculous to ban a book, no matter how hateful the message. My inner American screamed at the censorship.
I was a stereotypical underachiever in high school. Looking back, I think it was simply a matter of not feeling very challenged by my teachers, the lesson plans, etc. I was a kid who got bored very easy. My English teachers saw my writing talent but my attitude made them refrain from encouraging it. Things changed markedly when I went to college.
I did really well in high school English. And I enjoyed it all for the most part - even the Shakespeare. I definitely could have lived without have to write 'comparative essays' and having to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce. God I hated that book.
I took a few extra courses in addition to the compulsory ones and got a steady row of nines (9/10) on my diploma, 8 in total, I think. I never got a 10 in high school because I was always skipping classes to go to band practice (I played in 12 bands at one given time at best/worst, so I had to skip quite a few), I never did any homework, didn't study for any English tests (not even finals), and, well, I was a cocky bastard back then (with an attitude problem and pathetically little merit), so that affected the grade a bit too, according to the teachers. I was still the pet of every English teacher I had because I was the best in my class. Sometimes the teachers would accept the correct answer from another student (say, regarding word order), and then say "T.Trian, you probably know another way to say this correctly," and I did. Imagine what that sort of pampering did to the already bloated ego of a teenager who thought way too much of his pathetic skills? It was only when I started studying English at the uni that I realized just how much I still had (and have) to learn about the English language and its use. If I could go back in time and meet my younger self, I'd kick his ass and tell him to study, because Finns aren't that good at English (on average) that being the top of my class would've ever been anything to be proud about.
Uh, guess most people here aren't from the UK so won't understand my *ahem* demonstration of talent. I got an A* at GSCE in both English Literature and Language. That's the highest grade possible and it's yet more impressive when, for the same set of exams, there was a huge outcry about how the English GCSE Exams had been marked far, far too harshly. Hundreds of thousands of students got remarks, apparently. Remark, shmemark As far as the enjoyment goes, I did really enjoy the lessons. I had an absolutely fantastic class (there was genuinely never a dull moment) and our teacher was brilliant as well, both in terms of his ability to teach and his ability to get on well and banter with us students. I enjoyed the course as well and I did enjoy the works we read (or at the very least appreciated them), which were To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, MacBeth and Animal Farm. We also read a fair bit of poetry, which was the dull bit frankly. Most people didn't like the way the course was structured either but it suited my work ethic and pattern so I guess I thrived on it. We also got to do a lot of performance and spoken stuff, which was really good fun and is something I love doing and I'm really good at. I didn't choose to continue studying the subject, though it was on my shortlist, mainly because I wasn't sure what career I wanted to pursue, so ended up taking a combination of subjects that gave me two distinct, yet strong, paths. Even if I had dropped one of the subjects I take now, English would still have to fight for a place with Latin though.... Ooh...
I was horrible in English. All of my life I struggled and I learned over the years I was "slipped" under the cracks. It was not until I wanted to write that I became better at my English Classes. Also I have to say there was a big influence on the teachers as well. I am not the kind of person that loved books when I was in middle school. I only liked one and it was "the giver" and that was about it. Once I got to high school the books that I was reading were more mature and had more meaning. Besides I hated reading children-young adult stories.
