The Ghost of English Classes Past

Over spring break, I went through a large folder containing sample of my writing since 1st grade. My mom has saved everything she could get her hands since my siblings and I started school, and though she contemplated throwing it away one summer while trying to get rid of the "stuff" that somehow accumulates in our house, she couldn't. I'm thankful for this, not only because it will help me write my autoethnography, but also because the experience of reading something I wrote long ago was surreal and exciting.

One piece of writing stood out to me:

ENGLISH IS
Boring,
Worthless,
Pointless,
Mind-numbing,
Dull,
Glum,
Sleep-enforcing,
Unproductive,
Dead-raising,
A Drag!!!!

As a future English teacher, this minimalistic, angsty poem really took me by surprise. The only reason I can think of for my apparent disdain for English is that my school tended to split literacy learning into a Literacy Arts class, which included reading and writing, and an English class, which in earlier grades was phonics and by 5th grade was a prescriptive grammar course. Even as a young student, I was unhappy with a class that told me what I could and couldn't do with my writing. The strangest part about all of this is that I remember 5th grade Literacy Arts as the first class in which I actually enjoyed the material we read. This poem emerged out of that LA class, along with a sample of a fictional narrative about a nerdy kid who becomes cool with the help of an Eastern European wizard (complete with an attempt at writing a character who speaks in a dialect) and a research paper on ancient Rome. As much as I apparently hated English class, I'm thankful that I had a literacy arts class in which multiple genres of writing were used.

As we've discussed all semester long, teaching Standard English is appropriate because it allows students to develop the writing skills that will help them in the academic world. At the same time, however, we must take careful steps to make sure that students realize that the five-paragraph essay written in SE is only one tool in the shed of literacy. As a teacher, I hope to teach the importance of SE, but also its limitations. Hopefully I'll do a good enough job of emphasizing a variety of genres that my students will never refer to my classes as "Dead-raising."