I told you before the first class and only I have ever gotten an 'F'
in was AP English. The teacher and I spent a lot of time, when I
would go to class, arguing over whether or not different
interpretations of the works were valid. Now that I've been through
college and met with a lot of other literary criticism I know I was
right. No one, even the author sometimes, knows why they wrote some
of the stuff and if you want to chase down the final authoritative
interpretation of any work you are on a fools errand. There are
hundreds of schools of thought and personal interpretations of every
great novel, play or poem and with no chance at objectivity all that
have justification in the text can be equally viable. She was more of
the opinion that whatever she thought was right was actually right
and if your essays didn't reflect that they were wrong. The good news
was that I had an AP test that would be judged by outsiders without
her input. She told me over and over that if I used my style and my
ideas I wouldn't do well on the test and that I need to do it her
way. I disrespectfully disagreed. When I was reading the test and
taking the test I was excited, this wasn't going to be hard at all.
My confidence was justified when the couple of weeks later we got the
test results back and I had scored better than anyone else in the
class. I couldn't wait for the next class. Now, in my opinion,
smartassery is an art and when I came in that day with my paper I was
intent on painting my masterpiece. I asked quite loudly around what
everybody else and scored most of had scored enough to pass but then
I told him that I'd scored higher than all of them by not listening
to the teacher. I told her that now objectively we could see which
method worked better and if she felt like apologizing I would accept
her apology then and frankly forgive her. She did not feel like
apologizing, I forgave her anyway because that's what the bigger man
does. I never went back to her class and I think that made us both
happier.
