Over at the Horror Drive-In, a boy in AP English reports that he had to write a paper on a book of "literary merit." He chose Peter Straub's Pork Pie Hat and received a solid F...[the teacher] didn't even grade my report--she just looked at the book/author name, did some quick scanning of it, and just dismissed it. What did I get for my efforts? A 50 percent score.
Of course, kids often make things up, but teachers are, generally speaking, exactly as awful as described above. "Brownie" didn't select an author or book from the AP recommended reading list, but he says that students were allowed to choose off-list.
I suppose I'm curious about the paper itself; twenty pages on the subject of a single novel's literary merit doesn't strike me as a useful exercise for high schoolers, honestly. Perhaps it was hand-written, but I thought high-schoolers typed like everyone else these days. The paper smacks of pseudo-college prep, with the theory being that in college you'll have to write long papers, so you should get some practice on filling pages with nonsense now.
It is odd for someone in an AP class to bomb so spectacularly, since tracking weeds out the dumber students in the first place, so I tend to believe that kid when he says that he was failed for writing about that awful Peter Straub and all his blood and guts and guest editorialships of Conjunctions and those two Library of America editions he worked on and all those other nasty non-literary things the creepy weirdo keeps doing.
Of course, kids often make things up, but teachers are, generally speaking, exactly as awful as described above. "Brownie" didn't select an author or book from the AP recommended reading list, but he says that students were allowed to choose off-list.
I suppose I'm curious about the paper itself; twenty pages on the subject of a single novel's literary merit doesn't strike me as a useful exercise for high schoolers, honestly. Perhaps it was hand-written, but I thought high-schoolers typed like everyone else these days. The paper smacks of pseudo-college prep, with the theory being that in college you'll have to write long papers, so you should get some practice on filling pages with nonsense now.
It is odd for someone in an AP class to bomb so spectacularly, since tracking weeds out the dumber students in the first place, so I tend to believe that kid when he says that he was failed for writing about that awful Peter Straub and all his blood and guts and guest editorialships of Conjunctions and those two Library of America editions he worked on and all those other nasty non-literary things the creepy weirdo keeps doing.