English Class

English had always been a fairly bland subject for me up until high school. I had always

found it funny that despite our fluency and poise with the language by the time we were in

middle school, that we still had to have such a language class. I saw it as a burdensome class that

simply existed to pile on needlessly time consuming homework that involved hours of reading,

writing and hair-tearing. That was until I got into my honors English class my junior year.

In the class, I was introduced to a new side of literature that had always been there but I

had never been shown. Of course everyone has to look at the rhetoric behind pieces of literature,

after all that is a huge part of an English class. However, beyond the basic copy and paste style of

an English teacher, this woman sought to make us discover these important literary elements.

She allowed us to figure these things out on our own and doing this made all the difference. She

would have us read through a text all by ourselves, asking us not to discuss what we had done

with anyone else, even going as far as to ask her prior classes to refrain from informing later

classes what they would talk about. The result was a sense of mystery that faced us every day

that we had the class. We would often find ourselves walking into a classroom with random

seating planned for discussion groups, circular reading and other interesting class activities. The

discussions that ensued were always eye-opening.

She would often seat herself within the circle, choosing a moderator and having them do

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the bulk of the administrative responsibilities. From the inside of the group, she listened

respectfully, adding just about as much as the average student and while she may have had a

world to say about texts like The Invisible Man and Man's Search for Meaning, she restrained

herself so as to promote the idea of discovery. And discover, we did. We would all have our eyes

opened to messages and themes that we hadn't noticed on our own. Everyone seemed to have

noticed something different, been inspired by a different line, or had noticed