/lit/ - Literature

I'm Dutch so I have a Dutch teacher
He helps expressing myself and realize my own potential.
He's also very funny.

Norwegian here.

I didn't have English education throughout high school. The English teacher just gave me a copy of The New York Times and let me be in peace. I was much better than her, or any other teacher.

My History was amazing though. English teachers in Puerto Rico are unispiring. History teachers have always been more lively. Especially my 11th grade history teacher.

my english teacher was just arrested for having over 1000 pics and vids of child porn
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-13/high-school-teacher-sentenced-over-child-pornography/5258038?section=wa

>>4571219
>mfw my history teacher referred to a testudo as a phalanx

>>4571226
>mfw my history teacher told me that Canae was a huge roman victory

>>4571262
*Cannae of course

My English teacher was pretty cool, always straight with us about the arbitrary boxes we had to tick in our work in order to get good marks. She inspired actual thought at the same time, just taught us to translate it in a way that high school markers would eat up. Didn't try to fool us into thinking the stupid cherry picked 'techniques' and thesaurus abuse actually had any merit, even if it was required. Funnily enough, got me to care about and succeed in my schoolwork more than any other teacher ever did. Probably because she allowed me to compartmentalise the arbitrary bullshit from the stuff I was actually passionate about.

The other English teacher was her polar opposite, super passionate about high school English and trying to teach us to be good at writing shitty high school essays. Trying to teach us how to improvise totally unique essays under pressure, while the former teacher groomed us towards perfecting one top-mark essay, memorising it, and then learning to regurgitate and modify it on the fly to suit a specific question.

The former teacher's class got much better marks. The latter's students were a lot more pretentious about high school English's ability to teach you anything.
They were both cool people though. They should get an apartment together and make a sitcom or something.

>tfw no teacher is as good as robin williams

>>4571275
Apart from the kiddy fiddler in History Boys.

>>4571186

I really liked my English teachers. One of them always had little chats with me and she always asked me questions in class.

"'Golf is a good walk spoiled,' was it Oscar Wilde who said that?" she'd say looking at me. "No, I think it was Mark Twain." She would smile and say "yes you're right anon."

When I left school she gave me her copy of Atonement, after we were talking about McEwan. It was quite obvious I was one of her favourites. It's a nice feel indeed, almost makes you want to be a teacher or get in contact with your school, have a catch up.

But my other English teacher was crazy. I can't remember if I confused two critics or something and she was absolutely disgusted. She walked up behind me and poured water all over my head.

But it was my Drama teacher who convinced me to study English. Her appraisal of my review of the Little Fockers still makes me glow today

It's the simple things, anons.

We had a classy, posh, 10/10 looks English teacher who was way too tough on us when it came to grading. While partly the fault of the system, practically all we did in literature lessons was live sparknotes.

>>4571186
mine has this confidence that would make you think he had something going for him, but basically he is just pointing out minor contradictions in your papers. i dont think he has the confidence to critique my prose or theme

They tried, but I was a snotty shithead and frequently high.

>>4571262
> mfw my history teacher made rape jokes in a 85% girl group, applied his elementary level psychoanalysis on "proving" several figures gay and showing us videos of Stalin talking his favorite cocktails and anger when her daughter got a BF during WW2

I had one classicist who was an old fat white guy and he'd drink these little bottles of ginseng beer or something in class and get slightly drunk and go off on random tangents and then justify them by saying he was teaching a la Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man style.

>>4571429

What is it with history teachers? We had a history teacher who, no matter what, would try and link everything to the Lord of the Rings.

>"Do does everyone remember the Battle of the Morannon? Already we can see some similarities between this and the Battle of Hastings."

My Eng teacher is chill~I think she's one of the more interesting 'I know I'm not perfect person'

>>4571514
I used to have a history teacher who an ex-lawyer, and, for one reason or another, had entered the teaching field quite late in his mid-fifties. He would always crack these jokes related to the topic being discussed, but they were off, too dry, like something you'd hear on a golf course or from a doctor. Even though he was a "starch-collar", he was still a likable guy.

I've, for the most part, had amazing English teachers.

There's always one though, and she was just awful. She was always acting arrogant in a room full of high school juniors, belittled anyone who tried, but gave a wrong answer, and thought her way of thinking was the only right way.

I don't know why she felt the need to feel superior to the students she was teaching, but it was painfully obvious everyday. She even went as far as to expose a student's rough domestic life, and make fun of him for being unable to graduate high school. I was just disgusted.

>>4571547
What you described isn't a teacher. I believe that kinda person's called a cunt.

>tfw all bullshit english teachers in highschool
>never forced to read a single "classic"
>instead, we read Bean Trees, Secret Life of Bees, Book Thief, The Uglies Trilogy etc etc
>hate it all, am convinced I dislike reading and literature
>bored as shit with video games, so decide to pick up few entry level lit for the lulz
>actually like it
>"wtf? books are good sometimes?"
>slowly realize that literature is actually good
>english teachers actually disuaded from books
>they did their opposite job
>whhyyyyy_keenan.mp3

Mr Williams, he never once set homework for the class. We did everything we needed to know in class or voluntarily. Royal Hunt of the Sun by Peter Schaffer was the main last piece of work to study i think and it was excellent, took those who wanted to go to see Checkovs Seagulls too when we were 14 even though it was not curriculum or related to anything we were doing, he just thought it was good and we should see it.

>feminist english teacher
>read nothing but Jane Austen shit or whatever's popular among middle aged women at the moment

>>4571557

Man, we read classics and it had the same effect. Forcing school kids to read stuff they don't want to read just doesn't fucking work, it doesn't matter how good the book is. Every single solitary book a class has forced me to read since I was like 10, I have despised with the force of 1000 suns. For a while I tried reading things I wanted to read on the side, but after a while I just fucking gave up and grew to hate reading anything at all.
Just give the kids an optional book club on the side with a little incentive to check it out and then leave them the fuck alone.

>>4571557

I think it has more to do with the appropriation of variety and applying it to literature. The thinking that children and teenagers have to "start somewhere low", which frankly applies to most but not all.

I admit, I was curious about reading but didn't like it that much. Before Harry Potter, I only ever read books for little kids that were less than 40 pages thick. Tough for me, because I was from a public school of a third world nation, and most kids my age that time either watched stupid (i mean it) television or played counter strike.

But this also has a negative effect. Most of the people my age who were kids who grew to love reading here can't seem to move on from something like Harry Potter, and there's this air of distaste and condemnation for the word "classics". I don't get it, the English high school teacher gave us great choices (Invisible Man - Ellison, The Iliad and the Odyssey, Lord Arthur Saville's Crime, To Kill A Mocking Bird) and many of us agreed that Homer was pretty "divine" as the teacher liked to repeat. But when school ended, most of them stopped reading or started reading a lot of authors I didn't even know existed like Taheri Mafi or that Hunger Games author. They produce banal and embarrassing books, to be honest.

I say the English lit teachers for high school did great. Except for that one bitch in our first year who made us read A Diary of A Young Woman, which was pretty boring and traumatic.

Main language is Spanish.

Only thing we ever seemed to do in highschool is analyse sentences (finding objects, subjects, predicates and so on).
I can't shake off feeling it was the most wasteful, useless subject our teacher could've taught us.

>>4571557
>"wtf? books are good sometimes?"
I honestly don't understand how people read 4 books in their life (or read one passage from one book) and think all literature is exactly like that.

>chose to write about the Oedipus complex for an assignment
>teacher tells me she'll lend me a copy of Sophocles' Oedipus the King
>she tells me when she first read it in University she thought his name was pronounced Sah - fockles
>mfw

>>4571600
Well, for me, the only books I had ever read were children's books (like Harry Potter, Redwall) and the books we were given in school. I thought the world was either Harry Potter, a HP rip off, or some retarded shit about women problems and/or racism. I thought books were boring things for old people and that games were the medium for people like me.

And it was a constant barrage of shit books, not just 4. More like 20, which may not be a lot, but to someone who's young it starts to seem like they're made solely for teachers to assign as homework, because who could derive entertainment from this garbage? I even had to read books for history class (like Walk Across America). Literally every book I read except Harry Potter was bad.

>>4571633
dude, this makes me so sad.

>10th grade English
>class is reading some bullshit book that doesn't interest me in the slightest
>I, on the other hand, am reading A Clockwork Orange
>teacher: "Anon, I know I'm supposed to encourage reading, but could you put that away and read the book that we're all reading?"
>my face

>tfw every single english teacher i've had has been a weak willed, middle of the road liberal female

i know that makes me sound /pol/ as fuck, but it'd be nice if there were more masculine, cynical and knowledgeable professors of literature. i'm majoring in stem, but sometimes i think about becoming an english teacher just because i know i could pull that off.

>>4571600
you can apply that logic to everything

>>4571650
not minorities and women! all of my shitty experiences with them are totally representative of all of them.

>>4571650
You should.

My english teacher is awful. One day she made us stand up and make us throw around a ball of wool to each other while we rhymed off terms and their examples in the texts we're doing. She just buys all of the powerpoints off the internet and gives them to us. She doesn't teach us anything and makes us go in pairs to 'discuss' things while she surfs the internet. It's classed as active learning to appeal to all the people who learn differently. Fucking waste of time. I never get my essays I hand in back.

>>4571644
>not reading the same book that everyone else is reading
>while everyone else is reading that book
>in class
>decide you were in the right

jesus christ

Actually, it was one of my history teachers in high school that inspired me the most. The dude's mind is just FILLED with information. You could ask him about any topic and he would have so much intelligent stuff to say about it. He seemed like an ivy league professor amongst all my other plain old teachers in high school. We would have a 10 minute break in the middle of our class and I would just go out in the hall and talk about him about the most random shit.

I also think he might be a closet pedo. Thanks to him I learned some random facts, such as

-People have child sex slaves in the VR game "Second Life"
-The reason men are attracted to blondes is because it is a sign of youth. Many girls are blonde when they are little girls but then their hair turns brown as they age.
-The same goes for men liking women with shaved pubes

Well, thats just my evidence for labeling him as a pedo. Aside from that he was just this crazy, awesome, super-intelligent guy who always spoke like he just snorted a huge line of coke and often yelled during class. Not a domineering sort of yell, but a yell of excitement as he was really getting into telling about some story that happened in history. I remember during American Revultionary War, he told this story

>A British officer thought he and his family would enjoy some nice peace and quiet if he had their home built outside of the walls of his military fort.
>"No person would harm an officer. That is just improper!"
>Little did he know the Indians didn't care much for being proper. In the middle of the night, they broke into his home, slaughtered him, raped his wife.
>In the morning the fort awoke to seeing the bodies of the officer's two daughters impaled on sticks outside of his home!

>>4571830
Like, he could just tell a random, super detailed story that you never heard of like in that greentext during ANY point in history. The dude's a knowledge powerhouse.

>>4571576
That's really strange, we have a few female teachers who write on gender studies at University and they generally recommend really interesting books. It's more that your teacher is a pleb than that she is a feminist.

>>4571644
This is so embarrassing, do you have no idea how class works?

My English teacher wasn't my biggest fan.
In the end of the semester we had too read a book in English ( secondary language ) and write a long report on it. He told me that the report would decide my grade, I was in between of a good grade or a average one and I asked if I could just get the bad grade if I didn't have to read the book.

That seemed to have been the last strike before he gave up.

( In the end I wrote a report without having read the book, failed it and had to redo, looked up more shit on wikipedia and got the bad grade in the end. )

I only had one English teacher in high school that actually taught with Shakespeare and other classics. He didn't hold our hands and make us read out loud and follow along with the retarded kids that still sounded out their words.

I was too young to appreciate him.

>12th grade, teacher tries to teach the class a Freudian reading of Hamlet, completely butchers it
>do an essay comparing Lacanian and Freudian interpretations, her face when
>>4571223
Are you from Perth? M-me too.
http://au.ratemyteachers.com/rod-westacott/2486-t
>Duncraig
Hah, not surprised
>dem ratings

>>4571885
http://mrwsessayblog.wordpress.com/ Oh wow

>What are you reading?
>Oh that's much too advanced, here I'll return it to the library for you

Fuck you, you cunt. I was doing fine until you waltzed up to me and got into my business.

My senior English teacher was amazing. She is an old woman, and has been teaching her whole life.
Along with Literature and grammar she taught us pretty much the entire history of England, so that was cool.
She made us write papers all the time and back then I hated doing them. Now that I'm in college all my papers are far superior to everyone else in my class...all thanks to her. I hope she doesn't die soon ;_;

Even though I just finished my PhD in biochemistry, my favorite teachers in high school were English teachers. One is a co-owner of a bar downtown and the other recently went to prison for sexual misconduct with a minor (one of his students although I don't know the details). Interesting people to say the least.

I had just the sweetest, nicest, coolest older lady eng prof my first year of college. We read epics like Illiad, Canterbury Tales, and Beowulf. She made us write rhetorical precise and give like 10 sources when writing so that the reference material for the papers we wrote, alone, ended up being >15 pages, and she was still my favorite teacher.

The rest a shit

Not English teacher but I will never forget when a teacher of mine got mad about a book of Shakespeare's plays because it had sex in it.

>>4571600
Well I guess when you're a kid, you start out with some faith in the system or at least your English teacher, and you'd expect that they'd want to show off some of the "highest works of humanity", if only to show how much better adults are. And regardless of how souless government-sanctioned stuff tends to be, literature is art right? So it could be mildly interesting?

I think how schools read and analyze the works also contribute to the butchering. We did some Shakespeare in high school, I thought it was alright but the discussion that came after was painful and thoroughly embarassing.

My senior year english teacher inspired me, not really through encouraging me specifically, but just by being him. The first time I met him, I was a sophomore writing an essay about Hemingway and he was in charge of the "Language Lab" where teachers would proofread essays, give feedback, etc. I told him about my thesis and he started talking really excitedly about Hemingway as an ambulance driver in Italy, and even picked out a few quotes from memory from For Whom the Bell Tolls that he thought would work well in my essay. He was the first teacher that I remember thinking had a real genuine passion for what he was teaching. I wasn't a _bad_ student beforehand and it wasn't exactly a transformation experience, but it definitely helped put me on the path to loving literature

I couldnt even find an English teacher who loved literature. He or she could have been an arrogant idiot who loved swill or stupid political tracts, that would at least show students that a person could find interest and solace in literature. Instead all we had were hatchet faced teachers, probably as uninterested as we were, who only endlessly critiqued the grammar of our essays and grew awkward whenever they had to discuss a story, character perspectives or anything without a government-prescribed answer.

>>4571830
I don't really see the knowledge, but hey, he's interesting and cool that he told that sort of story in class. Do you remember any more stories?

>>4571557
Feel ya, man. I still shudder remembering the abortion that was having to read Secret Life of Bees...

>>4572488
Here ya go, anon; I made this for us

>>4571586
third world feelssss

>>4571186
What OP did your parents suck?

>>4571645
Oh, there's plenty of them (and some of them are women--some of my most ball-busting "masculine" teachers were women). But they teach primarily at the college level. There just are drastically fewer men teaching at the high school level.

>>4571644
Did this happen yesterday by any chance?

>>4571830
Yeah, same. I grew up in Philadelphia, and my history teacher was this big Italian guy who looks like he'd be breaking snitch's legs, not grading tests. But he was by far the most reasonable teacher at the school. Successfully encouraged a class full of shitty teenagers in the ghetto to challenge the things they grew up being told. I'm sure I was among a few other kids who left that class a little less ignorant every day. He gave us shit when we were lazy but didn't act like we were shitty people for it. Whenever I think of an ideal teacher I think of him, because he was one of the few who was genuinely trying to educate us, instead of reliving their high-school glory/making up for being a loser in high school by being the cool teacher.

>>4571186
My English teacher was a very good teacher and set up a good set of books for us to read. She was also dead convinced I was a literary genius from the second week in my freshman English class. She was a hard grader and I didn't get very good grades in her class, but I did excellent on anything written and she'd often as me my opinion on the curriculum/specifically about my writing. I admired her a great deal, but I honestly don't know if she helped me all that much. When I go through the papers I wrote for that class, I feel like the writing got worse and worse as the class went on, and remember the pressure of writing knowing she would be reading critically.

Regardless, she was an incredible teacher by the standards of that public school system, and pressured me to take AP classes and keep writing.

>10th grade english
>senile teacher a year away from retirement
>gave us only college counseling we would get in high school
>openly called other teachers shit, tried to get incompetent guidance counselor fired
>saw me reading camus and dostoevsky early in the year
>recd kierkegaard, nietzsche, and some other entry level philosophy b/c
>lent me copies of books the school library didn't have, gave me a copy of dubliners
>offered to take me out to lunch after i did really well on an act
>generally doesn't give a fuck about what happens in class as long as we learn something
that class was fun

>>4571186
>ITT: let's talk about our english teachers
One wrote the original script for American Beauty. But it was plagiarized. Stolen by a third person Ball lackey and united with the some of Ball's ideas. Poor guy was pissed.

>>4573390

That's so fitting in view of its supine, pre-9/11 consumer liberalism that I laughed reading this.

All my HS English teachers were pretty dope, but my AP Language teacher was by far the best. She was just a fun smartass.

I don't think she liked me though.

>>4573488
I like you :3

>>4571186
>inspirational teacher

A very rare occurrence. Not only do you need to have an inspirational teacher you need to be in the correct state of mind to be inspired.

Don't think I've had any english teachers worth mentioning.
First year of (Norwegian) high school we had some russian woman who had no idea how to teach a class. Ended up with a 6 (A) cause i spoke and wrote better english than her.
Second and third year was worse. Had another woman, this time from America. I was sitting next to this 11/10 girl in her classes, and though we had fun while doing it and maybe laughed a bit, we always did what we were told to. Those classes were the only thing i looked forward to in school. Then the bitch decided i could no longer sit next to my friend because, and i quote, we were having too much fun together.
Only teacher I've ever liked was my history teacher in junior high. Brilliant man, had an enourmous library in his basement (Yes i have been in my deeply religious history teacher's library)

I'm not going to talk about my English teacher.

I'm going to talk about my US History teacher.

I took an AP US History class, and it was amazing. I learned so much about the history of the United States, despite the fact that we had a shitty book. The lessons were intuitive, the class participation was top notch, I had a wonderful group of peers around me and my teacher was amazing.

But the reason I'm posting about this is that, since it was an AP class, we had to prepare to take the AP US History exam. And my teacher thought it was a good idea to prepare us for the exams through lots of tutoring, but also lots of examples.

We were DRILLED in essay writing. Week after week, month after month, we would have to write essays, especially these horrible things called Document Based Questions. We would have to hammer out a cogent argument from the sources provided to us, all within a time limit. And this happened over and over and over and over again.

It was a crucible of burning fire, and it forged me into the writer I am today. I hated it, but without it I wouldn't be as good a writer or as good a speaker as I am. And my aspirations of being a published author wouldn't be as acute.

So thank you, Mrs. Wells.

She was also incredibly attractive and helped awaken several fetishes in me.

>>4571644
i think the student, not the teacher, failed in this case

This man (his beard was much longer at one point). He was very much a disciple of Leo Strauss and he used "slow reading" in the class, which was almost completely discussion.

Another teacher looked like Hunter S. Thompson and had been reprimanded by the dean on several occasions for writing "I'm Going to Fucking Kill You" on his students' essays. He bragged about his Latina wife's ass and was a big Heidegger fan.

These two were the people who got me earnestly interested in literature.

>>4573619
Here is the pic of the other one.
Quote from his class:
"If you don't stop playing with that paper, I swear to God I will find a way to burn it."

He had us do jumping jacks to get us awake.

He gave a girl $1 one time for knowing what the Book of Revelations was.

Really funny guy.

I fell in love with my english teacher in high school. I don't feel that way about her anymore, but she is still easily the best person I have had the pleasure of meeting. I think it kick-started my misanthropy actually; everyone is shit in comparison.

>>4571925
Yeah, this never actually happened, right?

>tfw I'm an education major but I really just want to be a fucking English major
>there are so many state standards nowadays that you can't do much of anything unique without tenure
>forced to lock yourself into rigid lesson plans and present them to others who will approve it or find it "inappropriate for students"
Teaching is awful.

>>4573633
His smile looks like he's either trying to contain hearty laughter or about to burst into tears

I had pretty good English teachers in high school. Beginning of 9th grade I was in the level above standard, I can't remember what it's called right now, but I didn't do any work so I dropped down to standard in the middle of the year. Had a guy, he was pretty cool, didn't like him didn't dislike him.
10th grade though, Had the bossest teacher ever. That guy was fucking awesome. I got a lot of my interests because of him. Read some comics, some entry level fantasy, he said he wanted to be a UFC fighter when he was a teen and that sparked my interest in combat sports, and even got Dark Souls because he talked about Demon's Souls in class. He left a big impression on me.
11th grade I got another guy, he was a black belt in taekwondo, pretty enjoyable as well. Had a bad year in general though, so I didn't care about him that much.
Senior year I was able to pick the Scifi and Fantasy class and Film Criticism. Scifi and Fantasy was taught by my 10th grade teacher and I had several friends in there, so I joined that in a heartbeat. It was a lot of fun the entire semester. Teacher went into some entry philosophy, like the cave and Freud. Some hot girls in there too, surprisingly.
Film Crit was my only English class taught by a woman, but she didn't do much. It was mostly watching movies, Indiana Jones, Citizen Kane, Psycho. Had good friends in there too, so that was a nice semester as well.

The only inspiring teacher I had was the school's chorus teacher. Had her for all four years of high school, and it was great. She chose challenging pieces and made it lots of fun. She's the reason that I'm singing in college right now. The whole music program there was great, I think we had the #1 music program in NY state while I was there.

>>4571547
>She even went as far as to expose a student's rough domestic life, and make fun of him for being unable to graduate high school.

sounds like she's richly deserving of a back-handed slap across the face.

>>4571421
>i dont think he has the confidence to critique my prose or theme
Speaking as a university English instructor, I'd just like to say, Hey fuck you and your type, buddy! I'm teaching you to read critically, to think analytically about language, and to write in a clear academic way. Your "muh prose and muh theme" can keep themselves the hell out of your academic writing. Dipshit.

The shites who think of themselves as writers are the fucking worst for academic assignments. I have a folder where I keep the assignments that I'm in the process of grading. On the front I've written What the fuck? and Oh fuck off. When I encounter papers by the anon quoted above, I close the folder and mentally inscribe these comments on their shitty papers. God, the chip on your fucking shoulders you little twats.

>be in 5th year
>have super milf english teacher, red hair, curvy, glasses
>be failing english cos i'm depressed etc
>get 31% in the prelim
>lowest in the class
>she asks me if I want to drop down a class but says she knows I can do it if I try. Also asks if everything is okay at home
>fast forward to the real exam
>results after summer
>I get the highest mark in the whole year
>come back into school, she says she's so proud of me and my friend (she mainly means me as he was always going to pass)
>opens arms for a hug
>me and friend both hug her
>my arm is caught awkwardly, as it's a three person hug
>hand right against her boob
>hug goes on quite too long
>that awkward but hot eye contact as I know she knows
>another teacher with a scary voice came to the door to talk to her
>his voice scared me as he was behind me and too loud
>squeezed her boob accidentally when I jumped/ got a fright
>smoking after school, round the back of the school
>she gives me into trouble, but also sympathises with me because she also smokes. Spoke that long that I missed the bus home.
>It starts raining, she offers me a lift saying it was her fault
>she stops to make a phonecall in an empty car park (it's illegal to phone while driving)
>look at each other
>both lunge and kiss
>her top is off
>her tits are in her bra
>I take them out
>they are really saggy
>ohwell.jpg
>my dick is in her mouth
>my hand is up her skirt
>hairy
>I cum in her mouth
>she cums over my fingers
>she drives me home
>I get out
>Never speak of it again

>I now have a fetish for hairy pussy
>she now follows me on twitter
>I have a brilliant girlfriend now but I wish it was my old english teacher
>she was in hospital for a minor operation and I worried about it for days

>>4573668
do you feel the same about creative writing pieces?

>>4573633
>Revelations
kill yourself

>>4573683
fuckin liar

>>4573683
>that whole post
>"be in 5th year"

>>4573683

>>4573700
what's wrong with being in 5th year? 5th year= being 17 or 18

>>4573699
I knew it would get this reaction

>>4573691
I very very rarely teach or assign creative writing; mostly poetry and canon surveys, lit crit, and intro to literary theory stuff. When an assignment has a creative option, as in, rewrite the orpheus myth in x setting, I'm more interested in how you interpreted the source material. When it comes to academic writing, though, that kind of swagger almost always corresponds to shitty work.

I suppose, to sound like a dick about it, "muh prose and muh theme" isn't my concern. I'll tell you if you've misunderstood the text, if your grammar is shit, if there's holes in your logic, and how to improve your formal writing. I will challenge the way you've thought through your argument and, if your writing and thinking is strong, give you more resistance but also reward you for it.

I'm wasting my evening on 4chan because I have grading to do and here's "muh prose" fuckwit complaining about his English teacher. So much for that. I may as well get back to work.

>>4573683
i really wanna believe you anon, I really really do

too lazy to really teach us grammar.

wrote what i thought was a minimalist meaningles story about getting some change from my mom and going to the store and buying a snack and bringing it back - supposed to be in the style of Raymond Carver. Got a terrible grade, told it was not creative enough. Have been a Marxist ever since.

>>4573718
>I knew it would get this reaction

If it's true the last thing that matters is whether or not fags on 4chan believe it. But I still do not believe you.

I always loved books

Got read LotR as a bedtime story
Read the hobbit
Tried to read LotR myself at like age 11, didn't go well but I muscled through
Read tons of mythological stories, King Arthur and some old Irish ones
Read all kind of bits and pieces about periods of history that interested me, from ancient civs to vikings to napoleonic era (jk how gay are napoleonic army uniforms lolz)
Plenty of ghost/supernatural stories which has been something I love to this day
Got into more classics when I was in high school, started reading dystopian literature early and really got into it. These days I fucking love short stories though, I'm reading some Jorge Luis Borge atm. I can read one 10 page story and find enough in those short few pages to keep myself entertained for days. Fantastic stuff.

My English teacher was real cool. He got me into Orwell and let me borrow his Pynchon novels.

He's also a writer himself and I've gone to all of his book openings to support him.

>>4571223
>>4571885
perth here too.

>>4571862

Yeah, except for this one rad-fem adjunct the women studies teachers here are some weird mix of philosophy and sociology teachers.

>>4571186
One....she was my best friend. I especially enjoyed it when she would invite me over to her house, usually on Thursday and Saturday, because we kind of had this thing going on. We had talked about it for quite a while. I would say roughly a year or so did we wait until we really started engage each other. She was very unique. I would have to say I don't think anyone could ever be like her. No one. Ever. We would always get mildly drunk....very drunk on Saturday's especially. She would open up her door holding a bottle of cheap wine (sometimes a box) and in ...relaxing clothing....that sure enough showed off what she REALLY looked like. We would sit on the couch....feet and knees, thighs would touch ever so gracefully when we would feel like it was time to get started. We would then start....we would start something that nothing in my present or future could ever amount to. She would look at me with those emeralds and would say "So! Do you know which team you are on; Jacob or Edward!"
We would talk about Twilight all night long. She even helped me find my boyfriend. We are even going to be moving to a state that has legalized gay marriage so we can be together in matrimony.

My english teacher is a sack of shit that has the vocabulary of a janitor and knows so little the only thing she ever backs up anything she says with is mundane personal anecdotes.

>amazing woman
>i struggle with english
>i love reading
>reading lolita
>so far, wonderful

my high school English teacher gave me his copy of Paradise Lost when I graduated. He really helped me get into the classics. I still eat dinner at his house every now and then.

>>4573934
I told him that he should really be a professor.
> "I would Anon but once you're in college changing your mind about what you read becomes more difficult, I chose to teach here because I want to make people give a shit about things in an increasingly disposable world before they're too bitter."

then I went to uni.
first lit class I take and the professor has a twelve foot long lady boner for Stephen King...

We call it Literature here (not an amerifat, obviously). Had a great teacher that taught me how to appreciate poetry and make deeper interpretation on the subjects that cross-referenced classic works. Added her to facebook a few months ago when I created my account to tell her how much I appreciated now all the knowledge she imparted to me, and I still talk to her every now and then. Best part is that if you check her wall, it's filled with the messages of ex-alumni thanking her for being such a grear teach.

>>4571540

underage b& mods

my english teacher was a phony, and right before i left the school he wanted me to go visit him in his crumby room, and he was so goddamn sick, sitting there, with those hairless old man legs.

i had an english teacher like this in high school. i really felt like i could connect with the text in her class because of the way she taught and was so passionate about english. i realized later she was a feminist cunt who had impossibly high standards of me. i retook year 12 english to get up from a 76 (which she gave me) to a 93.

German here.
My German teacher tells me that I'm rebellious, but she is still happy to have me in her class. I'm not sure, if there is anyone else with an actual interest in literature, while I have already read most of the works we are going to work with and more.
And one of the few, which is actually able to write and speak English rather fluently.

>>4573958
Get the fuck out Holden. You didn't even write your goddamned history essay.

>>4573646

It happened in the 8th grade when I was reading the Green Mile.

My Enlgish teacher in college was really good...at the start of the 2 year course. Then we got onto Bronte and female authors in general. Suffragettes and the whole history of women. She got so on her high horse about it that if we did anything to do with being for or against she simply marked us down on anything we had against. One or two of the girls in my class lapped it up like honey and they unsurprisingly got straight A's (though that might be because they actually listened) on the whole thing.
She just totally changed when we were doing that module, I hated it.
Other than that she was very supportive and helpful, she loved the age of chivalry literature and courtly love and as I love the shit out of history we had loads of fun.

Would have bent her over the desk and handed her my papers though. Phwoar.

I had the best English teacher when I was a junior. She helped me improve my writing. I learned good shit from her, and she's also very inspiring. She gives me advice until now. She's fucking great and I love her.

pic related. She gave this to me.

>>4571270
i enjoyed reading this

One of my English teachers for the last year of 6th form gave so little of a shit that by the end of the year about 6 of us turned up. He was an odd guy, totally knowledgeable in his subject but reluctant to actually *teach* any of it unless you pinned him down. If you got him in a conversation about some poet or novel he would say the most interesting things, but when he was standing in front of the class he didn't even seem to care. I actually finished the course a few months early but kept going to his lessons because by the end it was just a small group of friends and him chatting about literature, film and tv, and occasionally doing a small amount of work. He was a great guy, but teaching just was not for him.

>Have English professor at college
>Inspiring, intelligent, passionate
>Develop massive crush on him
>Fail two classes that I took with him because I never did any of the assignments, fearful that he would dislike my writing
>MFW

>>4576536
He probably disliked the fact that you never did any of the assignments. Way to go.

I don't know why, but I don't think I've ever had an English teacher make 19th century literature interesting to me, It's really weird. Something about that period attracts the most dull and dreary profs. I'm taking a class on Victorian literature right now, and even though it's got sherlock holmes and tons of victorian sci-fi in the syllabus, the teach is just fucking boooooring.

>>4571186
I had one who didn't really give a shit about anything, my first lesson with him I was scraping my tongue against my teeth out of habit and he pulled me outside for chewing gum.

The other one didn't know words like obelisk, cyanide, etc. Any stupid fancy words, and she'd scribble all over my writing with "do you mean cannabis?" in relation to something like "It left taste in my mouth that may as well have been cyanide".
One time I couldn't be bothered to write some stupid gothic prose thing, so i ripped half the description from gary jules mad world. She made me stand up and read it to the whole class.

>>4576549

Yeah, no shit. I spent the last year of college peering around corners, praying to god that I wouldn't run into him in the hallway.

I think he was single...might of slept with me if only I wrote that essay on the inadequate news media...

>>4576837
Whore.

>>4576856

I would be his little whore any day.

>>4571186
>freshman year
brunette mom who everyone loved except me, made a point to passive aggressively criticize me in class
>sophomore year
ditzy blonde ballerina who somehow treated us interchangeably like elementary schoolers and college students
>junior year
short bald dude whose class i remember nothing about. at first i liked him, then i hated him, now i just think his existence is funny.
>senior year
slight bland man who lost track of time more often than not. inexplicably had a crush on him despite him having no apparently attractive qualities. probably hormones.

i have hated just about all of my english teachers my entire life. loved most of my math teachers (except for one year in high school) and science teachers.

A bit off topic, but through my experience I found that male teachers in general are better in every single way than female teachers, in any topic. Especially in literature.

Not even misogynistic. But it is what I came to realize throughout since the years elementary. Why is that?

>>457695
Cognitive bias? No idea. Could some (male) teacher enlighten us please?

>>4576980
I thought it was just me, but both my male and female friends all seem to agree. Granted, not all of their most beloved teachers were all male. Hell, most were not.

But all agreed with me that on average, male teachers are more effective at teaching than the female counterpart. Especially at a lower grade level, like in high school.

My english teacher was the absolute worst. Our class didn't know anything about poems or how to analyze them at that. But every class he would make us look at poetry and ask us what we thought the poem meant. Whenever anyone tried to offer an interpretation he would shit all over them and tell them they were wrong. He only praised his favorite students and didn't help the rest of us understand a thing. And its a shame because I've seen some of these poets talked about on /lit/ (john ashbery, but there were others like bei dao, czeslaw milosz, adrienne rich). But after two years, I never want to look at poetry again.
And we had to read a few novels for that class too. I read a lot before his class, but afterwards I was put off that too (at least for a little bit). We did read the Dubliners, the Unbearable Lightness of Being, Siddhartha, and Kitchen.

>>4576957
Because far more women want to be in teaching professions. Men who want to be pedagogs are likely to have natutal prowess for the job.

Generally men also have more authority which helps keeping the class in line.

You are probably male and can thus more easily be teached by a male teacher who can emphatize more effectively with you.

>>4577030
>We did read the Dubliners, the Unbearable Lightness of Being, Siddhartha, and Kitchen.
You have to admit that's a pretty fucking good list

>>4577079
True I am male. So i guess its just that.
Does the same apply to female and female teachers too?

>>4577079
Very valid points, this is more or less my thinking on the matter. Plus there are the selection effects. Even if you *want* to be a teacher as a male, the costs are higher in terms of the whole "risk being accused of pedophilia once and having that follow you around for the rest of your life" business.

>>4577117
I know, but thats why it was upsetting. I enjoyed reading those books on my own time. But when it came to him talking about them in class, he was so fucking smug and offered no insight the books.

>>4577131

>Plus there are the selection effects. Even if you *want* to be a teacher as a male, the costs are higher in terms of the whole "risk being accused of pedophilia once and having that follow you around for the rest of your life" business.

I doubt this has ever actually turned a man off from becoming a teacher...That's like not buying a car strictly because there's a chance you'll get into an accident.

>>4577158
I know, personally, several men that it has turned off teaching, particularly in primary school education. Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, and I'd welcome any stats you can offer on the matter.

People avoid flying because of the risk of plane crashes, even though it's safer than driving. I don't see why you're surprised that people make irrational decisions.

>9th grade
Ms. Mackenzie. Pretty shitty teacher, pretty jokes person. We locked her out of class once and she couldn't do anything since she was late anyways
>10th grade
Ms. McAdams. Pretty shitty teacher. Didn't learn anything in her class. All I remember is the fact that she always looked depressed and told us how her mom used to make her buy clothes at a place called Bargain Harold's growing up. I feel bad for her and for not taking her class more seriously, and hope that she's doing well.
>11th grade
Ms. Cousins
Hyperfeminist, half-Scottish half-Native chick. Also hyperpassionate. A lot of people appreciated her drive. She gave me a 40% on a paper since I tried to be really pretentious (I wrote about Aristotelian forms, wtf is that. In hindsight, I was a retard). Also the head of the English department. Taught the Canadian literary tradition quite well (post-colonial lit)
>grade 12
Ms. Hussey. beautiful woman with a Rubinesque figure. Good teacher too, but not extraordinary.

>>4571557
did people not like the book thief

was the GOAT when I was 15 or so, scared to revisit
same with curious incident dog night time

This thread explains why I don't have friends who read, I honestly thought this place had a more diverse user base.

I enjoy Dostoyevsky as mush as the next guy, but whatever happened to being young and doing stupid shit? Not having a wank-fest with your teacher.

>>4571186
I had French and English teachers because I live in France and went to an international school. I think most of my teachers, French and English, thought I was pretty shit. Hell, whenever I look back at those years all I see is idiocy on my part.

Or it might just be the depression talking.

>grade 9
An old guy who had bad knees. All I remember is how he spent most of his time talking about his childhood in Detroit. I don't remember him giving much insight on any of the books we read or anything. I don't remember much.

>grade 10
She was one of those young teachers who talked and looked like a teenager. She wasn't that insightful either. When we read To Kill a Mockingbird, she kept talking about how we might have trouble because the vocabulary was so advanced, and our final project for the book was to make a "To Kill a Mockingbird mixtape," in which we had to pick songs that reminded us of scenes from the novel.

>grade 11
She was pretty knowledgeable about writing because she actually did some professional projects of her own, but I don't know if she really cared about our education because even when the class average was at thirty-something percent, she didn't really give us a talk or anything. When we read Frankenstein, the students kept complaining that the book sucked, and then finally she said she didn't like it either but it's part of the curriculum so we just have to get through with it or something.

She was also my creative writing teacher in grade 12 but either I was a masterful storyteller or she wasn't that fond of giving us criticism because I think I did a little too well in that class.

>grade 12
She was actually very knowledgeable and passionate about reading, but most of the kids were too unused to teachers like this so they kept saying that she sucked even though she was actually pretty good. She gave quite a passionate speech when a student complained that Shakespeare was just "random words".

Always my Classics/Latin teachers who taught me most about English and generally creative thinking. Truly inspiring blokes.