Text 12379, 104 rader
Skriven 2005-09-19 11:15:11 av Roy Witt (1:1/22)
  Kommentar till text 12310 av Carol Shenkenberger (6:757/1)
Ärende: Thurber
===============
19 Sep 05 19:00, Carol Shenkenberger wrote to Roy Witt:

 CS> *** Quoting Roy Witt from a message to Carol Shenkenberger ***

 RW>> I got a C- (C for the effort) for a book-report I gave on Flash
 RW>> Gordon junior high. I thought it was much better than the other's,
 RW>> who gave reports on Valley of the Dolls, etc..

 CS> Ever read 'Lucky Starr'?

No, I'm not into reading anything that isn't of a technical nature. I
enjoyed comic books back then, but SF wasn't in my league then. I read
Flash Gordon only because I had to give a fictional book report for a
final to pass the class. Besides, most anything of a technical nature (at
least that which I was interested in at the time) was over her head, and
so she would have had to actually read the material to know if I was
reporting it as it was printed. She actually did that too, but not this
time.

 CS>   That was a psedonym of Asimov <g>.

I know. The only works of his that I'm familiar with is 'Fantastic Voyage'
and that is only because I saw the movie. Not that I don't like Science
Fiction, just that I prefer it in movie or TV programming. Reading it is
very boring to me.

 CS> Either way, had a few book reports get bad grades myself from one
 CS> teacher. While she taught me a great deal about proper grammer, she
 CS> was otherwise a horrid experience.  A big Melville fan, that I upset
 CS> with one of the summer book reports required before school (AP
 CS> placement english class, had homework over the summer).

I don't think she's the only one out there who has a pet author or theme.
I've run into a few just like her. One was in Junior High whose favorite
was poetry and prose. If you learned anything in her English class, you
learned how to rhyme. Another was an English Speech teacher who liked to
make you look like a fool in front of your classmates. He and I went round
and round a few times and I eventually failed the class because he kicked
me out for talking back and embarrassing him him in front of my
classmates. I learned more from the English teacher in charge of Study
Hall after that, anyway.

He was a trip. He'd take the roster of everyone in the SH and make up a
poem using everyone's last name by the end of the hour. I thought he was
pretty amazing at the time.

 CS> I said that Melville coould dream up a good tale but wrote badly and
 CS> covered it by using 5 syllable words when a shorter one would have
 CS> done actually better, then I matched him to Stephen R Donaldson who
 CS> uses 'big words' but to proper effect to pack more meaning into a
 CS> sentance.  Melville's level of meaning is postively anorexic in
 CS> comparison. She didnt like this at all and she was on my case for the
 CS> rest of the year.

Been there.

 CS> It's funny later as she dated when she graded each paper and I was
 CS> almost all straight A til that paper then everything went to D/F for
 CS> the rest of the summer work turned in that first day of school.
 CS> Grades in class (took her a bit to catch up all those reports) were
 CS> the same.  The *day* she read that paper, my grades devolved from A
 CS> to D/F.

Too bad she couldn't see the potential behind that report. The very idea
that someone had expressed a different opinion than hers blinded her to
who and what you were; an independant thinker and not afraid to tell it
like it looked to you. You should have gotten an A for that.

 CS> The only saving grace is she never hit me too hard for spelling.  My
 CS> school records showed i had dyslexia identified grade 2 and was
 CS> 'unlikely to learn to read' and had overcome it.

Teaching the dyslexic to use and read English is Nancy's forte'. When all
else failed in her school, those people were assigned to her. She still
gets letters from her students who were grateful that someone helped them,
rather than pass them off as un-teachable.

 CS> (My mother put a lock on that report and i was most emphatically NOT
 CS> to be told. I only found out in college about it).  She'd circle the
 CS> spelling errors but not take off points.  Anything repetitively
 CS> mis-spelled, she'd jot a note to me about and learned that that error
 CS> just didnt happen oft again once i'd had it pointed out).

Just the opposite here. I excelled to the point that it all became so
boring, I wanted nothing to do with it. Failed English once in jr high
because of it. I felt like a jerk when I had to go back to jr high to take
9th grade English again.

 CS> She left a legacy of 2 things.  Better grammer and the knowledge that
 CS> you can sometimes upset an opinionated person and never be able to
 CS> make it 'right' so to just go on ahead and ignore it after a
 CS> reasonable number of tries.  The second lesson she didnt intend and
 CS> would be *shocked* if she knew she taught it along with her english
 CS> class.
 CS>                                        xxcarol

As she sits in her easy chair, now retired, she often recalls those times
in her class that she wasn't exactly the shining star of English teachers.
She now realizes that what she did was wrong.

Roy

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