Guess it all depends on the teacher. Brian
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And apologies to the list. I broke my rule never to post while drinking... The trouble is it's great fun to write while drinking...
I re-read that post this afternoon and thought oh, christ. Another anger management issue. So, I'll explain.
It must definitely depends on the teacher. I just had bad luck with English teachers. It got to be such a trend at the time late 50s early 60s that I decided the whole trade was rotten and full of vicious language police.
I've written about this before but two quick examples. I was flunk out of Senior Composition, which was an essential HS class for college entrance. The pretext was more than four typos and too many spelling errors on a term paper where most of the grade depended on the paper. I knew it had errors and thought C minus. Many some credit for picking a tough subject.
The real reason was the topic, the Israeli-Arab 1956 war. I tried to write a neutral view, balancing Arab and Israeli views of the war and then current cold war conflict. It was too big and difficult a subject. All the material quoted and footnoted was from UN sources. But the real reason for the stunning grade was the teacher was an arch conservative and Jewish. He thought I was an anti-semite.
Just this year a HS alumni called me to buy tickets to a fifty year anniversary. We got to talking about Mister Horowitz. It turns out in her class with Horowitz, he slapped a male student in the face for something but she couldn't remember.
Next example. I was taking yet another required composition class at CSUN. I first asked to write on Waiting for Godot. I had just read it and loved it. Prof said no. This is a non-fiction course, and besides you won't understand the play. Okay asshole, thinking to myself. So I picked some cold war liberal hack's analysis of the US v. USSR and ripped it a new asshole. I did a really good job. I was very proud of it. It read well out loud and seemed mostly correct for grammar and spelling.
He gave me NO GRADE and wrote, SEE ME! in large red letters on the title page. At his office he said that I plagiarized the paper. If he could prove it, he would give me an F. I tried to convince him I wrote it because I knew every word and sentence. He didn't believe it. As a compromise he gave me a C for the class, the average between A on the final and F on the paper. What's with this asshole?
At Uni Iowa, I took Speech as a substitute so I didn't have to write for another English teacher. It was taught by some kid about my age from some Texas religious college. I gave a final speech or talk on induction and cosmology, which nobody understood. It was a freshman class, and I was almost out of BA. They and the teacher had never heard of any of this kind of stuff. Just weird. I got a C.
Now over and against these examples were several great ones. First was an intro to comparative lit where I got a B+ and the other was a drama class on Hamlet which I sat for no grade at UI. Later at Berkeley I went for several lit classes covering German and Russian lit. The ones I wanted in French were always full.
The other thing missing in my rant last night was the growing understanding that nation states create their own mythology of state and culture through their big name authors, that is through language and its symoblic forms. If you are growing up in opposition to the national myth, then you are going to get intellectually punished in most places and thrown in jail in others.
This is not an English teacher problem at all. It's a political historical reality. This is what Shlomo Sand was writing about. This is what the language police are for, keeping the sacred myth and sacred texts pure.
CG