I
signed up for advanced placement English class because it was good
for college credit and reading and writing was what I liked to do in
my spare time anyway so perfect fit right? No, no it was not. My
teacher who had also been my French teacher was not a good teacher in
any sense of the word. The deal with literature is that no matter
your interpretation of a passage, poem or book there is a book or
article to back you up. It is more true the more mainstream, like
high school reading, the material is. If you ever feel like wasting
an afternoon type in the name of a book and then a school of thought
like feminism, socialism, objectivism or any other -ism and marvel at
how people have been able to prove conclusively that both Karl Marx
and Ayn Rand are proven right in their world view by The
Lord of The Flies.
My teacher didn't know about the almost infinite malleability of
literary interpretation and she was always marking papers wrong based
on their ideology and not their style or content. I was also in
calculus and I was okay with the teacher marking my work wrong
because if you gave the problem to a hundred trained instructors they
would all see if an answer was right or wrong. So it was not a matter
of me not being able to take correction. It was just irksome when she
would tell me my interpretation was wrong and I would argue and she
would dig in and mark me down. Her condescending self-righteous
attitude and intractability on the meaning of Tom Joad's trek into
the west and down the rabbit hole of murder made it really easy for
me skip her class as it was the end of the day any way. My lack of
attendance really came back to bite me in the end. All because I
couldn't swallow my pride and just tow the rope and write what she
wanted written.
