College English

During my brief stint at a local community college, I suffered through a repeat of my previous English classes. English was always my worst subject, and college didn’t exactly raise the bar to acceptable levels.

Where to start? How about the obvious?

“A noun is a person, place, or thing.” If you have been reading my blog, you should already know that this is a lesson that I grew to hate over the years.

My teacher even came up with a rule to help us out. If a word follows a “to be” verb (is/are/was/were/etc.), it has to be a noun. I remembered the old cliché, “The ball is red.” If you have somehow managed to avoid hearing this sentence, teachers like to use it to demonstrate the parts of speech. “Ball” is supposed to be a noun and “red” is supposed to be an adjective. According to my college teacher, “red” would have to be a noun.

I didn’t buy it. Her quick test was clearly wrong, and I developed a bit of an opinion of her. She was stupid. Since “Stupid” was after “was,” “stupid” must be a noun. Thank you Mrs… it’s probably not best for me to share her name.

In all honesty, I actually made a slight mistake in something that I wrote. I used “fun” as an adjective. That was the specific word that her lesson surrounded. I had never heard that “fun” is strictly a noun, I have heard others use it as an adjective before, and I simply didn’t think through my use of a seemingly simple word. That said, a simple correction would have been plenty for me. Wasting an entire class on an invalid test was completely uncalled for.

It wasn’t just her response to a simple mistake. She gave me feedback on my paper that was little more than, “I didn’t like it.” No offense, but that’s not exactly constructive criticism. How am I supposed to use that to improve my writing?

This paper, how she treated me, and her general attitude had me convinced very early that I was going to fail the class. I was already struggling to repeat my language assignments from kindergarten. With failure practically guaranteed, I had less reason than ever to do my assignments. Of course, that removed that pesky “practically” qualifier.

I had other problems with her class. She deviated her lessons from English. For example, she had us looking for logical flaws. According to her, anything that doesn’t provide a full proof of a point is a logical flaw. I found a logical flaw myself, but I conveniently kept it to myself.

Then there was her Oprah obsession. “All talk shows are bad… except for Oprah.” I don’t know how many time that came up in class. I should point out that I might have been jumping to conclusions. She never specifically told us that she liked Oprah. It just seemed like a good guess.

She didn’t care much for me. One day, she ridiculed the Running Start students (I was among them) for not understanding that college is not the same as high school. At times, her ridicule seemed aimed at students that she disliked (I was also among them). The primary reason that I didn’t last in college: it was the exact same thing as high school. She had no idea what I was going through.

Near the end of the semester, she asked the class to write her letters to help her know how she can improve. I remember her reading a letter that accused her of being too biased. How did she respond? “No, I’m not.” Maybe I’m paraphrasing a bit, but it really doesn’t seem like much of an attempt to improve yourself if you are so quick to brush off criticism.

My college English teacher did a horrible job and helped convince me to absolutely despise the process of writing. You don’t think that I’m writing this for fun do you? Fortunately, I know that my teachers in general were wrong. I might not be the best writer in the world, but I can at least push myself to put some of my thoughts into words. Perhaps there will be a day when I can reach a level of proficiency in writing that I could have only attained had I dropped out of school. Until then, I will have to live with the guilt of letting the schools discourage me from bettering myself.