In honor of the new school year, I made a cheeky little video on TikTok about required summer reading, what my local school district required of its high schoolers, and how it compared to my own summer reading back during my school years. It opened this very interesting little conversation in the comments about other people’s English class experience.
See, I was an English class phenome. I had some pretty decent preschool language education, so when I did properly pick up reading I was accelerated from the beginning. I was reading full, middle grade chapter books as early as second grade, and blasting through most school books. I was in the Advanced pullout reading group in Elementary, the dreaded gifted and talented in Middle School, and Pre-Ap and AP in High School. I was also just good at the academic structure of literature and language classes. Any required reading I didn’t like, I could successfully bullshit my way through via SparkNotes and skimming for high points. I made 5/5 on my Eng 3 AP test, which was all I needed to get two semester’s of Writing and Composition credit for college. So I didn’t bother trying too hard on the Eng 4 AP exam, and still scored 4/5. I basically walked through every English class into college level literature leaving A-pluses behind. I really can’t undersell how easy English class was for me, and I promise this is important later.
Because I have to compare this to another friend who we will call Christine for the sake of the story. Christine was a fellow, honors-all-the-way, band geek, musical theater nerd, so we shared most of our academic classes and a couple of extracurriculars. She’s intelligent, salutatorian of our year, a couple of full-ride scholarships, and has at least one Ph.D. stacked up, at this point in our mid-thirties. She was also clinically obsessive about her grades in high school. I was obviously very grade-oriented myself, but when I couldn’t get above a mid-B in pre-calc junior year, I just sort of let that go. Christine simply couldn’t let go of 100%, and there was something about English that stumped her. There was one day, 11th or 12th grade, where we had a string of short answer assignments where she couldn’t seem to get above a ninety. For her this was a Problem. I was clipping through them with 98s and 100s and 110s for “excellent observations!” And she asked me how? How did I come to the answers I did. And I felt terrible that I had no idea how to help her. I just Knew stuff about language and literature and what I didn’t I could Intuit and what I couldn’t intuit I Faked. It was the most useless form of super genius that had very little actual impact on my ability to write novels as an adult.
Years would go by and I’d meet my husband, also an avid reader. A kindred spirit! Fun fact: he hated English class. He hated the restriction of the five paragraph essay on uninteresting topics. He hated the required reading. He would much rather spend class-time reading his cyberpunk paperbacks. So he did. To the point where he legit just failed Freshman year general English and had to make it up later.
When I took these stories to TikTok, similar ones started filling up the comments. Other people who hated being stuck in the five-paragraph writing loop. Those who hated being forced to verbalize their analysis in specific terms while also being told that there was only one acceptable version of this analysis, who are frustrated by the expectation that a question of theme only has one answer, according to the curriculum. A select few who simply didn’t like fiction books and failed to connect with any of the material. A handful who didn’t find a language arts and literature class they enjoyed until college.
When we’re looking at they typical ways in which a student might struggle in an English class, we know the obvious ones. The teacher and parents who don’t recognize a child has dyslexia. The child who didn’t get a good pre-school reading base, so they have to play catch up. The student who has a bad relationship with reading for a number of different complicated factors. We know how to fix a lot of these when we realize what they are. What do we do for the above, though?
What do we do for the person who clearly knows the material but struggles to put those thoughts to paper in a cohesive fashion? What alternatives do we give them? What about the person who clearly loves reading but simply can’t or won’t function in the academic structure that’s so often dictated by standardized testing? How do we meet them half-way? What about the high-achiever who so desperately wants to do better but feels this weird resistance to a subject that, by its design, doesn’t always have hard answers? How do we help them balance between “not everyone is going to be good at everything” and “but you do kind of need to know this particular thing?”
And what about me?
Because I had no problems in the English classroom. I blitzed them.
But I was also so bored, sometimes.
Because English was so easy, it was often my intellectual blow-off. Because I had a natural aptitude, I could skate through without really needing to exert myself mentally even in the most advanced classes my school had to offer.
When you have kids who can’t read at all, you don’t worry about the kid reading Kafka at eleven. But that kid still needs academic attention, and there’s just not enough to go around.
Pixels and Pins Studio 