I don’t agree with her morals but her writing is pretty excellent.
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I’ll definitely agree there, which makes it all the more tragic. She had so much potential.
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My man.
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I read LOTF a few months ago
That’s a good book
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@MataNuiNuva
Are you thinking about University/College, and if so, how do you intend to get in?
Most of Homeschooled people I know (including myself), are going to take wacky pathways into University or skip it entirely.
I personally don’t want to go to University (not exceedingly smart), but there’s a chance it’ll help me in the future, so I’ll be forced to go in a few years. My sister should be there quite soon, and it’ll be easier since she started Uni courses when she was 14, but man there’s still a big workload.
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I do plan to go to university, if for nothing else but as a launchpad into my life. I’m not sure what I want to do yet, but I studied for ACT for several months and took it this last Saturday. I believe my scores will be high enough for me to get a full ride somewhere. One thing I won’t do is go into debt for a college degree.
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Good to hear someone that has initiative. If you don’t mind me asking, what grade are you in? I’m assuming Grade 12, but some Homeschooled people go ahead an all.
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I’m a Junior (grade 11.)
This could maybe be considered a bit off-topic, so if that’s the case, feel free to either remove or move this reply.
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of horrible books from school isn’t literature in the way as it is fiction. What I’m thinking of is a “educational” book with very biased opinions and non-grounded so called facts from the author. It was the kind of book you have in school where every 5 pages or so there is a assignment based on the pages you had just read.
We worked with this book in my second year in high school, so I was between 17 and 18 years old I think. I studied culinary arts in high school, and this book was about the different ways people run restaurants and described situations and events you can expect to encounter while working as a chef, waiter or bartender. In short, it was a quite important and interesting course, that would have been good if it wasn’t for this book and our oblivious and uninterested teacher.
First example: The book described and compared the ways restaurants is run to different ways a country is run, for example democracies, dictatorships and fascism. Many of these comparisons were valid, and the similarities could be understood. The problem was that when describing democracy and dictatorships they were described as polar opposites, and not in the way that you would expect. The book described democracy as a guaranteed paradise that honored the residents/employees rights and opinions. Nothing could ever be bad in a democracy, because the people are respected and they can live/work freely. While describing a dictatorship, the author’s opinions and unresearched facts started showing up. According to the book, the wording was something along the lines of: “Dictatorships is ruled by a singular person, the dictator. Dictatorships will suppress the people and will not shy away from using force and violence to keep the people in line.” Now, I will be the first to admit that this might be the case in a number of demoracies and dictatorships, and that the ladder may not be an optimal way to run a country. It is however, very biased and uninformed to say that dictatorships use violence as a way to control the country/workplace, without exceptions. When a country/workplace ends up using violence, it is not an effect of the way it is ruled, it is an effect of how the person ruling is. When i asked my teacher about it, my answer was something along the lines of “Don’t read into it too much.” Teaching yaay
Second example: This was one of the assignments that came up every so often in the book. It started by painting up a scenario, and I will do my best to recreate it for you:
You are working as a head waiter at a popular restaurant, and it is friday afternoon, so you are expecting a busy evening. However, one of your employees has been taking 8 reservations from people calling in, even though you only have 5 empty tables. The problem is, your employee has not been keeping notes of in which order the calls has been made, and it is therefore impossible to tell who called in first.
The book then lists the 8 companies that have booked a table. The companies varies in size, age, living situation and ethnicity. So for example one of the companies is Mr. Brown, CEO at a succesful accounting firm, he’s bringing his wife and 17 year old son. Another company is The Gray family, immigrants from another country, where the father works at a local car wash, and one of the sons has a criminal record.
The assignment asks us to decide which 3 companies that we will exclude from the restaurant, and give arguments as to why you have decided to exclude these.
This assignment was given to us as homework for the week. The assignment has nothing to do with learning, it was a way to detect the prejudices and opinions the people solving it has. When I worked on it, I showed it to parents and friends and they would all say the same thing: “This is stupid.” So when I came back next week when we were to demonstrate our answers, I simply said what I thought: “The first 5 people to show up will get a table. The fact that we even have this as our homework is — stupid, and the fact that you (the teacher) don’t realize that it is nothing to learn from this other than which of our classmates has different opinions about other ethnicities is honestly shocking.”
The answer I got?
“That’s not an answer. Come back next week with a proper answer.”
I came back next week, even angrier with the same answer. And my techer just dropped it and said we are moving on to the next chapter, even though not all of us seemed to “care about the homework”. Great teacher
So yeah, even now, around 5-6 years later, this still upsets me. It was a truly terrible book, and a truly terrible teacher. Angry rant concluded.
And yes, if you think that I’m wrong and that I’m being the bad guy, please let me know, cause I think we all know that we don’t really think straight when we are angry.
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A̶l̶l̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶
If I were to give my honest opinion, though, it would have to be Shakespeare. Just everything that was written by Shakespeare. It’s not that I don’t like the guy’s stories themselves.(Although they are very weird and and irrational)
No, it’s the fact that I dont even understand what’s being written half the time! There too many old-timey words and phrases that Not even my great grandmother would use. And our teacher pretty much just says “Figure it out yourself” when we ask what is happening.
Earlier, I read a scene where a guy called a woman a “strumpet”(which sounds likes thre name of a fancy Italian pastry)
Come to find out, it was actually an offensive term towards woman, which in today’s time would be a word that shares its definition with a particular gardening tool.
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Yeah, I’m gonna bet that Shakespeare is a bit older than your grandmother…
I mean, this is like saying that Don Quixote or Journey to the West are bad because how dare they not be written in English. They were written in a different time by a different culture. They’re gonna take a bit more time and effort to read than your average YA novel.
Wait… so you don’t like the story because there are outdated insults?
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My point is that the words make NO SENSE AT ALL! Nobody uses that vocabulary anymore.
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Well yeah; Shakespeare was alive over 400 years ago. I’m sure 400 years from now people will have no idea what we’re saying. It’s just how language works.
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I actually use strumpet on occasion. I first discovered it in Brave New World, where John the Savage is apalled by the promiscuity of Linda, and the rest of society. It’s repeated quite a few times in the last chapter, prior to my favourite ending that I’ve ever read in a book.
But uh, the worst books I did in English were the Woman in Black and Great Expectations. The Woman in Black felt like it was written for an English exam, and Great Expectations is such a slog. The worst part was, my class was the only one that did those two. The other classes got to do Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm.
Of Mice and Men is good though.
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Shakespeare’s works are usually to be done as a play and are often satires of the genre for the time.
Honestly as a play they pace really well and Imo are just boring without some sort of acting. It looses a core part of it.
Probably because the internet exists now and you could probably reread for context to get the general jist of what it means.
Can guarantee people still use the word
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That could be it. Sometimes, my class has to read the scripts out loud and reenact some of the scenes. It may just be my giant ego, but I feel like I am the best and fastest reader in the class. Every other person reads in a monotone voice and take. One. Second. Pauses between. Each. Of. They’re words.
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Pity me. I read at a rate of something like a thousand words a minute. Me three years ago (last time I was in an English class) was much slower, and yet I would still read a book four or five times in the time it took the rest of the class to read the book.
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Uggh, I forgot about that one. Doesn’t technically count for me, since I chose to read it of my own free will; couldn’t tell you why. I remember some vaguely interesting things happen at the end, though it wasn’t worth reading through the rest of the book to get there.
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It took me like three weeks to read. It’s like five hundred pages of nothing, 40 pages of content. I don’t understand it. I’ve never been too big on contemporary settings though. Normal world is usually a bit too… mundane for me. Obviously, there’s some stuff with 0 fantastical elements that I love… nothing is coming to mind, but I’m sure there is. But fiction isn’t about some sad sop’s life story and failings in romance for me. It’s about, y’know, exploring what can’t be real. Telling human stories in an alien setting. Telling alien stories in human settings. Exploring the possibilities of the future, exploring the failings of the past.
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