High School: Part 4

Junior year rolled around.  I went to a new school and had the best English class of my whole high school career (second best overall--my college Children's Literature class is a really tough one to beat.)

Part of it was the unique situation this school was in.  One thing this school tried out was combining classes together, so instead of one-hour periods of individual classes we would have two-hour blocks of molded subjects.  In this case, History and English were taught in the same two hours in whatever fashion the teachers saw fit.

This was a really cool decision as I saw it.  Part of the reason why so many dislike classics is that they just don't get what's going on.  And it can be the smallest things that drive you nuts.  When I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was a senior, Jane Austen kept talking about how they'd travel in all these different carriages.  Every time she'd bring up a post chaise or chaise lounge, I'd be gritting my teeth and wondering what these stupid things were.  It wasn't until the end of the book when I realized that naming these different carriages is similar to what we do with automobiles.  They're not just vehicles, they're vans, trucks, cars, semis, etc.  Once I could wrap my mind around the concept, I managed to enjoy the rest of the story.

Sometimes it's the prose that bothers them (why do those old blowhards take three pages to say something you could cover in one paragraph?)  Other times it's not being able to wrap your mind around the customs or societal expectations.  And then there are important events that were well-known to the authors and their audiences at the time but we today have no clue about.

Combining History and English was a great way to alleviate some of those issues that we didn't understand (except for the longwinded prose.  There's no cure for that.)

So we'd read "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" while studying up on Colonial Times, The Great Gatsby for the Roarin' Twenties, segments of The Grapes of Wrath for the Great Depression (and was I ever happy that it was only segments!), and The Crucible for the Cold War and McCarthyism portion.

There a couple times our teacher challenged us heavily with nonfiction: Founding Brothers while studying up on the Founding Fathers and Wings of Morning for World War II nearly brought me to tears at the time.  But boy, did I ever learn stuff that had never been covered in any class before or since!

My favorite, though, was when we got around to the Civil War.  This is not my favorite time of American History; I am a much bigger fan of the Revolutionary War.  However, it was while studying this portion that we were given Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  This was by far the best reading experience I had the whole time I was in high school.  It's funny, it's adventurous, and it has a whole lot more heart than I ever would have imagined.  (I'd read Tom Sawyer when I was young.  I liked it but it was also very forgettable; I still don't understand why it has more adaptations than Huckleberry Finn.  Sawyer is brain candy; Finn is a saga.)

This way of learning worked.  Even though I didn't like all of these books, I found more meaning in even the worst stories we read than in all the other books combined in all my prior years before then.