Doctor Robert

My workload for my class has not lessened since I last wrote; the last several mornings (my class runs all afternoon, so I've been getting up at 8 and working for three or four hours) have been quite hectic. I just realized, though, that the alternative would be to stay home all day, every day, as my sister has been doing. We'd probably kill each other, or our brains would atrophy on diets of Calvin and Hobbes and Oprah. At least I'm getting out of the house, and when I'm at home I always have something to do. The actual class is fun, too; as I said, I like the teacher, and she thinks of different things to do; she's not just lecturing at us for four hours. That's the major problem; even a lively discussion can't keep me occupied for that long, with one ten-minute break. Round about the fourth hour, I start hating that gray little room with some kind of vent that makes a loud, annoying noise every twenty minutes, and the hard plastic chair that starts eating into my butt after half an hour.

The other problem, though I'm not minding it so much, is that we're doing a lot of stuff I've already done in class at Auburn. For example, we're doing a short story unit, not unlike Ms. Floming's "short story carnival." About half the stories in this unit are from that carnival; they're straight out of DiYanni, our literature book at Auburn. I guess there's a certain canon of short stories that everyone reads. Oh, and guess what one of those stories is? "Araby," by James Joyce. If you go to Auburn, you know exactly what that means. How many times have I read stinkin' "Araby" (and beaten it to death with a stick)? Every single year of high school! And even though we haven't had our class discussion on it yet, I already know exactly what we're going to do with it, because (surprise, surprise) we're doing all these stories in terms of the quest pattern. In other words, the hero's journey. Joseph Campbell and everything. Which we spent all of freshman English on. It's okay, though, because now we're actually applying it to works of fiction.

Now, I like Mrs. Heisel (I like her a lot better when I'm not in her class), but I hated freshman English, which is unusual for me; most years, English is my hour of peace and joy and screaming at Ross Makulec. Maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention; much of what I recall of freshman English has to do with setting up and fiercely defending my own corner of the room, and having arguments with various male classmates. But I remember having the hero's journey beaten into our heads...and did we ever learn that the hero's journey is the pattern for almost every work of literature in the Western world? Maybe it was mentioned in passing... Did we apply it to Great Expectations? We spent an entire quarter on stupid Great Expectations, and all I remember (besides Chris Vanmanivong giggling at Ryan Salberg going "Pip, sir") is that Pip had some neighbor whose name started with a W who went into acting. That's what we focused on, random characters and facts. I never got the impression, from freshman English, that stories and novels have a larger context, that they have archetypes and symbols and timeless messages. Without that, what the hell is the point? Dangling participles?