A Final Reflection of English in the 2016-2017 School Year

While having choices in Mrs. Black’s honors English class made the curriculum more flexible, it was somewhat discouraging toward an English based student more serious and ambitious toward reading and writing. An example of this can be seen in our final project for our book club books, wherein we were discouraged from writing a traditional essay. While project variety was definitely beneficial for a majority of the class, it is oftentimes more beneficial toward a student’s understanding of a novel to write a formal analysis of it -- whether it be in the form of an explication or a thematic paper. Rather, some students spent the week given to make a meaningful project creating a survey and researching meaningless statistics. I found that the project was too flexible, making it difficult to understand the purpose of creating a project at all.

In general, I enjoy reading. Mrs. Black’s English class did not influence this. The demographic of this assignment is clearly not directed at individuals who enjoy reading academically and for fun.

Coming from an AP Literature class, I read less in Mrs. Black’s class. While I could argue that we spent (or, rather, wasted) a lot of time analyzing the plays and novels read (but not analyzing enough for the time spent doing so), it is futile to compare the curriculum of a higher leveled class to one that is standardized. I found that having an assigned independent reading book forced me to pick up a new book after finishing one more quickly than I have done in the past. This was important in maintaining that I was always reading something.

I felt like my writing experiences were pretty genuine. While we didn’t have formal writing assignments frequently, the blog posts were a nice opportunity to reflect on a novel that I chose to read. Deciding which book I wanted to write about was also a good determiner of whether or not I actually took pleasure in reading it. Writing a reflection every Friday was also helpful in letting the novel sink in. While it’s something I do naturally while reading and felt unnecessary at times, it was beneficial.

In our book clubs, we were definitely given more control over what we were assigned to read. While I don’t necessarily regret reading 1984, as I know it was important for me to reading to better understand literary culture and be an active participant in it, there were definitely some book options that trumped others. For example, I read A Handmaid’s Tale outside of school after learning about it in Mrs. Black’s class and read it in two days. It was significantly more enjoyable and interesting than 1984, showing that our ability to choose the books thus impacted our experience.

In conclusion, I feel like any existing dissatisfaction with Mrs. Black’s class is incomparable to all of my other terrible course selection decisions this year. Somehow, it is the best taught class I’m taking (which could be a judgment toward the instructors of those classes or a compliment toward Mrs. Black). My largest moment of gratitude in Mrs. Black’s class was that, unlike some other honors English classes, we did not have to write a paper on All American Boys, a novel I had no intentions of reading. More importantly, any dissatisfaction I do hold toward the class, as mentioned here, was not problematic on Mrs. Black’s behalf, but a flaw in the school system for a failure to provide a more advanced English class. Overall, my A block experience this year has been positive.