What was your favourite part of your school English lesson? Mine was comprehension. Loved it with a passion because I always got top marks. Which is probably why I was always bottom in my maths class. Can't be good at everything!
My favorite part of English class... jeez... either the shenanigans with friends or the bell ringing at the end of class. I hate English with this fiery passion, oh my. For the past three years I've gotten Cs when I worked hard. Now I don't do anything and somehow I'm pulling Bs. I just talk quietly with my friends since we're in regular english and smarter than 80% of the kids in the class so we just pick up the material.
My last English class was... about 10 years ago, or just over. My favourite - when we were learning about writing devices. Metaphors, personifications etc, magazine displays and how the picture and its choice affects the reader, analysing just what a leaflet was doing to make you read it or believe it or buy a product. And then the best part - making our own, reusing all the devices we just analysed, making the pictures, writing it, having a beautiful leaflet or poster or brochure by the end. At GCSE I loved our creative writing coursework, when we had to write the opening to a story based on a painting given to us. We had one mock and one real. Loved them both. That was when my teacher came up to me and told me he thought my story was SO good he stayed up to read it and had to show it to his wife. I also loved it every time we had to write a poem and illustrate it. Writing and drawing together - what's not to love?
I'm in 12th grade and we spent the last four weeks learning about different sentences (Simple, complex, compound, compound-complex). *yawn* I hope it was a bit better back then. Oh, and no creative writing! It sucks!
Are you doing English Language rather than Literature? Sounds like you're doing linguistics, which is very different and yes, very dull lol. Is this in England or elsewhere? Anyway we never did any of that in either Eng Lit or Lang in my days. But then again that might be why the average English couldn't tell you anything about their own language... lol However in Czech schools, for Czech language, everyone has to know exactly the stuff you're learning. They also have to learn this stuff for English I believe. For a firm grasp of your own language and your second language, I think it's good to know. But definitely dull.
Mathematics has always been, and still is, my #1 passion. Until I took my first programming class in college (I already knew most of the material from self-teaching), mathematics was my strongest subject in school. But there were a few things I liked about English in school. Some fond memories: Writing persuasive essays. That class coincided with my first year of debate tournaments. I have been a highly opinionated person ever since I can remember. So much research and thought goes into everything I believe. It makes me who I am. It was a joy to discover simultaneously both a written and a spoken outlet for that part of myself. Science fiction. I loved one of the novellas we read -- it still influences my thinking, and I can still picture some of the scenes just as vividly as I pictured them when I read them. And although I did not realize it at the time, some of the writing assignments for that class were basically fanfiction. Those were fun to write.
Seriously, it seemed like the effort I put into writing something was inversely proportional to the grade I got for it.
"Common Core English 12 Regular" in an American high school. I honestly have no idea what it 'technically' is. We read books and do vocabulary for the SAT (even though we've all taken it???) and do grammar. It's dumb. I actually showed my writing to a teacher because I put 'creative writing' on my hobby list on the ABOUT ME sheet at the start of the year. The day after, before class, she pulled me aside and said "How did you do so badly the past few years when you write like this???" I just laughed because school doesn't reflect anything about my personal life.
My eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Parslow, aka Prune-face Parslow (and a few worse names), assigned a monthly book report. After working my heart out on a few of these reports only to receive C's and D's, I got sick and tired of it. So I wrote a report on a non-existent book. I got an A. Having found the right formula, I continued to get A's for the remainder of the year.
Studying Gatsby. Oh god, I'm so very happy I revisited it when the new film came out. Studying from the '73 film annoyed me at the time, the actress of Daisy was so annoying.
OMG! That sounds just like what we did! I remember the poster thing, we had a poster of two sporty people in the park advertising a well known sports brand (ok, it was adidas). At GCSE for the creative writing, I wrote a play and was told the same comments. Did you also do the radio advert??? We had to write an advertisement for something and then tape record ourselves doing the advert. I was off school so had to do it the following week. I was sent off into an empty classroom with my teacher watching with a very confused look as I'd asked for two tape recorders. I'd decided to do an advert for the film, Top Gun. My dad had the music on LP which he'd put onto tape for me, so I started by pretending to be a DJ saying something about being right back after the break, and then I launched into an advert for the film with the theme music in the background! Got top marks for that too. Did you also do the hot air balloon thing?? Everyone in the class had to imagine they were in a balloon that was sinking, we all had to give an argument as to why we should stay in the balloon and one by one, we got voted out. The winner was the last person left. I miss English classes!
I liked my college English classes far more than my high/middle school English classes. For one, the professors really knew their stuff. The discussions were also a lot better. While not all college students are interested in literature, a college class is far better than what you find in a typical high school class.
When I was in sixth grade I was reading an anthology called The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Lots of terrific short stories! We were assigned to write a book report, so I wrote one on that book. My teacher returned my report with the note, "Did you write these reviews?" I was simultaneously furious that she'd think I was plagiarizing someone (which I wasn't, of course), and flattered that she thought I was writing so far beyond my grade level. That was a scorchmark in my scholastic life. All through high school we'd have to write critical essays about books we were reading in class. The teacher would give us the generally-accepted interpretation, and most of the kids would just support that in their essays. I treated them as fun, and always took a contrary point of view, and I always got an A because I could argue my points. More than once, an essay came back with the comment, "You're wrong, of course, but you back up your points very well, so I'm giving you an A." All my English teachers liked me and I liked all of them, and I always thought English class was kind of cool, even though I was heading for a career in engineering. All of that ended in my last year of high school. For the first time in my academic career, I encountered a narrow-minded teacher (disgusting old Mrs. Walsh) who hated creativity in her students. She would tell us what's what, and she expected to see it regurgitated in our essays and exams. She hated students like me who would play devil's advocate. She hated having to evaluate someone's original arguments. It made her think, and she didn't like that. She and I fought tooth and nail over just about everything I did in her class. I was convinced she'd flunk me. But when the final report card came out, she, too, gave me an A. I bet she gritted her teeth to do it, but she did it. I thanked her on the last day of school and never saw her again.
I graduated from high school last year but I have a few fond memories from English classes over the year. I did lit in year 11 and 12 and really loved discussing all the books we were reading and debating the issues in them with everyone else in the class. I did love making silly jokes with my friends about the content. I loved the poetry portfolios we had to do each year. Each year we always had to do a class presentation to all the parents and making the content for them was always fun. One year the highlight was seeing how quickly in each class we could get our teacher going off on a tangent he wouldn't return from for the whole 80 minute lesson. Like many of you my marks didn't affect the effort I put into stuff. The few As I got for in class essays were the ones I spent forty minutes of the hour sleeping/planning. I always got Bs for poetry I wrote hurriedly the night before but Cs for stuff I put effort into. One poem I did get an A for. I wrote it by stringing the words I pointed to in my physics book together with quoting my friend. One teacher loved giving me 55% for everything even when I started deliberately trying to do badly to see if she'd change my marks. She didn't.
Oh I LOVED when we would diagram sentences. I just couldn't wait to get a sentence with multiple prepositional phrase and adverbs!
I never learned to diagram sentences. It was never part of the curriculum for Canadian students, I guess. I'm dazzled by all the weird pics I see of diagrammed sentences and I don't know how anybody ever got there. I hope it's useful for somebody.
@cutecat22 - Lol the radio and hot air balloon both sound like such fun assignments! But no, we didn't do them unfortunately. I do remember, however, being put into small groups and we all had to put on an interview at a TV show In History we also did some fun stuff. We had to write a diary as a slave on a slave ship. And another time we wrote a play and had to act it out, on the Spanish Armarda - it became a classroom competition and the teacher gave the winners celebrations (the chocolate) and my group won hehehe.
Since English isn't my native language, but I had it as a subject since third grade, my favourite part was...learning English! It was magical, being able to learn a new language that was really easy to speak and understand. I learned Russian at the same time and it was a lot more difficult to get right, loads more grammar and much less fun. Later, when I did one year of high school in Australia, English was incredibly boring because they basically spent weeks reading 'The Crucible' out loud in class. My favourite part of that was excusing myself and doing maths problem in the library whilst listening to U2 on my walkman Good old days of nerdhood...
I enjoyed my university classes more than high school, but the thing I really loved about high school was that we did everything. I took 4 Grade 12 English classes, so I had the opportunity to figure out what I really enjoyed and then take those specific classes at university. I can safely say my Grade 12 year made my university years infinitely more enjoyable.
