The first class on my schedule in the second trimester was also my first ever English class. If you may recall, I didn’t write anything about English last trimester since there was no English class. Instead, we got the 3D Animation course in which I actually felt somewhat okay about the horrible art I was making.
I guess we’ll start again by ranting about the course paths for English. The freshmen in our high school only have two English paths that they can really take.
Regular English: A normal, two tri commitment English class
Honors English: Also a two tri commitment class. It’s almost an exact copy of the Regular English class. They have (to my knowledge) a very similar curriculum and a lot of the same assignments. The novel we read in Honors English called Fahrenheit 451 (More on that later) is also read in the regular English class. The only blatant difference is that Honors is a little more fast paced than the Regular path.
The overall course was divided into two overall units: Short Stories and a novel. The first one we did was Short Stories, which lasted the course of the first six weeks. The first part of this unit mostly consisted of reading short stories, which usually were followed with annotations and brief analysis questions about those short stories. In total, we read four of these stories in about two weeks, which I’d say is pretty good speed, considering we also spent time on essays and in depth discussions.
The first story we read was called The Sniper. Set in Ireland (in a state of civil war) during the 1920s, the story focuses on an unnamed soldier who is cornered and isolated in enemy territory— it navigates the journey of the soldier as he attempts to escape. The soldier ends up getting caught in a vicious firefight and is cleverly able to win the firefight.
The second story we read is called The Cranes. This story is also set in a war, this time around the Korean War. It narrates the story of a South Korean soldier as he debates internally over whether to arrest or rescue his longtime friend who was fighting on the North Korean side.
Next is possibly the most famous of the four stories we read: The Masque of the Red Death by the famous Edgar Allan Poe. The story talks about a prince who hides in a palace of comfort from the outside world, sealing himself from a terrible plague that is devastating his country.
The fourth and last story we did is a fairly new one called The Wretched and the Beautiful. This one is part of the science fiction group and talks about a story where different groups of aliens come to Earth, causing different reactions from the people living on Earth.
The last story we read ended up being this novel which took up roughly half the trimester. This novel is called Fahrenheit 451 and is set in this dystopian world where everyone’s lives revolve around TV and they burn books as well as discriminate against those that use books (so basically the same thing as our timeline). Most of these were pretty enjoyable.
Now onto the assignments of the class. These assignments… I’ll be honest… these assignments were pain. Of course it’s not that I don’t like writing— if I didn’t enjoy writing, this blog wouldn’t be here. But the standards of writing were pretty high and it wasn’t easy to get As on just about anything. Most people generally agree that this class is hard, but it wasn’t impossible. So here’s a quick run through of everything I had to face.
The first few assignments of the tri were mostly on demand analysis essays about the first four stories we had to write on the spot. I didn’t do horrible on those, getting mostly As and Bs. We eventually got a huge assignment a few weeks in which basically required us to make another one of those analysis paragraphs, only longer and far more demanding. I procrastinated that particular assignment for a few days before finally forcing myself to get work done on that. This actually didn’t go very well and many of my earlier essays actually lacked A grades.
The second big assignment was the short story— where we had to write a… you guessed it, short story. These stories were relatively short— the longest ones were about 10 pages– and we were given free reign to go absolutely nuts with our creativity. We were even allowed to push ourselves to the extremes and write about some more violent topics. People took this opportunity pretty well— one of my friends wrote about a kid whose family was killed by a rogue government. The kid vows to avenge his parents and basically goes on a killing spree the whole book (And he somehow still got a decent grade, wow). Many stories were also continuations of those that left on a cliffhanger, such as one of my other friends who continued to write about the “Sniper” story.
My project ended up being based off a previous story I wrote back in 7th grade. It’s a fantasy story about a guy who is trying to defend his kingdom from invasion (Yeah, I know, pretty generic). I won’t post too many details because I might post that here soon… maybe? And it’s part of this huge worldbuilding project I did back then (It’s canon). I got an 88% on that particular project, which doesn’t sound amazing but the grading from these English teachers can be hard sometimes, so I say that’s a pretty good accomplishment (I put a lot of time into that, seriously)
The next big project ended up being this analysis essay about Fahrenheit 451. I’m not going to bore you with the details of that one because there’s too much to talk about in a short article blog, but in general I had to go on and off again with my English teacher and check again and again, but in the end it was all worth it because I managed to get an A. It would be the first large assignment I got an A on, and it was barely enough to pull my overall grade back to an A.
A few days came and went and then right after that we had another large assignment: The dreaded finals. The English final was divided into two parts: The Reflection and the Presentation. For the most part, all eyes were on the Presentation, as the reflection was simply a minor essay about how we improved this tri (I got a 9/10 on that one). The presentation ended up being about common lit techniques used in short stories. I stayed all the way up till midnight in order to finish that presentation and come ready, and I only managed to score a 35/40 on it. I was one of the first to present and spent most of finals day just listening through other presentations which honestly got boring fast.
English was, without a doubt, the hardest class I’ve ever taken in High School. Even harder than math, and you’ve already heard a lot about my math class— about how hellish that is. My overall summary? Don’t take this if you don’t like reading and writing. It’s better to take the easy one if you don’t enjoy it. Because if you dread essays and reading… this class is gonna eat you alive.