So, a contextual note: There is a LOT of debate right now over whether summer work is a). effective and b). whether it is classist. The research suggests that giving students work to do before you, as the teacher, have had a chance to establish your expectations and norms for the class actually can make it harder to build relationships, because students are less likely to reach out with questions or concerns over the summer regarding the work, whereas they might be willing to do so in the context of a school year. I tried giving a simple 200 word vocabulary list of words that show up in AP history classes that are not content specific and I would give a quiz on the first Friday of the school year. It would end up tanking almost everyone's grade and I ended up having to answer a whole bunch of emails about it and decided it wasn't worth it. BUT in one of my professional learning communities, there's been an excellent idea that many of us have adopted in an effort to bring some sanity to the academic arms race: "No work on vacation days" which is to say "If I'm off work, you're off work." I don't want to be grading when I am on winter break, spring break, or over the summer, I should not ask students to do the same. And my results on the AP exam are no better or worse than they were before. So I don't begrudge anyone who gives summer homework, but I would ask them to elucidate their why.
This is fascinating perspective. I understand the desire to hit the ground running and avoid the summer slide, but the point about establishing expectations seems especially valid.
When kids ask me, I encourage them to read a couple of non-fiction history books that they think might be interesting, and I have a list of suggestions (Devil in the White City is always a personal favorite to suggest because true crime is a great hook for "oh, we're gonna talk about Gilded Age Society here.") But especially because my students are sophomores and they have never taken an AP class before, I need to build their trust that I am on their side and giving them work before we've really had a chance to build a relationship does not help that.
When I was teaching I was very much on the side of "no work on vacation days" - and I told students this. The tradeoff was that when we were in class, we would do work - there wouldn't be much slack time in class, but any homework I assigned could be done not on weekends or over breaks.
Seemed to work better for the AP Calc and Stats classes than for the lower-level (Algebra II, etc.) classes.
Yeah, that is the tradeoff (my wife's classroom motto is "If we're here, we're doing math" and that doesn't always land well with kids, because well, raptors testing fences.)
I'm a big fan of your wife's motto, and agreed on the fences.
I told the kids on day one, "While we're in this room, we're going to absolutely kick ass on math. But you'll never have more than about 15-20 minutes required work outside of class in a night, and absolutely nothing required over weekends/holidays."
I think that would work as a suggested prep work, especially for kids planning to take AP test. Introduce the material over the summer, expose them to the rigors early with a challenging test, then spend the year incorporating the material into the curriculum - then close with a re-test that you started with to see the progress made. First test shouldn't count toward the grade, though, since the prep is only suggested.
I figured out that I could divvy up the vocab assignment into three lists over the course of the first three marking periods, and made the lists line up with when they were likely to encounter them with the time periods we were covering, and I have got MUCH better results from it, including some of the kids actually looking forward to it (because it's a straight forward grade booster if you do it right.)
Wow, it's hard to pick just one teacher, but I will be forever grateful to my elementary teacher for her response to me dropping out of second grade. (No, seriously, I jumped out the second-floor classroom window into a bush and walked home because I was bored.) It would have been easier for her punish me or send me off for some sort of diagnosis, which wouldn't have been entirely unwarranted. Instead, she got the school's speech teacher to create a DIY enriched reading program for me and two other kids. I was going to school in a really small town with an underresourced school and no such thing as a "gifted program." But I spent the rest of elementary school doing reading in a converted office in the bus garage working my way through every Caldecott and Newbery awarded book ever written. It was great -- and most of my classmates never figured out what we were doing over there.
Hello, fellow Person Who Had to Read “Crime and Punishment” in High School! I had to read it for 10th-grade and 12th-grade English, then read it a third time my sophomore year of college for a course on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and it just didn’t click until that third go-round.
Still wasn’t as bad as “Billy Budd,” though. Melville can go to hell.
My biggest criticism of this book is and always will be that Hester is way too cool to have ever even considered fucking around with a whiny loser like Dimmesdale.
I've got two. Mr. Sartori, my 8th grade English teacher and Ms. Giorgetti, my freshman year Honors Bio teacher.
Mr. Sartori was the most enthusiastic teacher I'd ever had about reading books. He took a very unconventional route to becoming a teacher and was open about that with us all. He was a terrible student who was working a night shift security job at a factory when an older coworker gave him The Sun Also Rises to read on a slow shift. He was so mad at how all the characters behaved that it turned him into a reader and he became an English teacher. He was the first teacher to not take points off for my writings all being "too short". "You said what you needed to say. Why make it longer?"
Ms. G was the first teacher to actually get the "you need to try harder" thought to stick. We were playing review Jeopardy before a test and she just looked over at me and with no malice or snark said "It's scary what you could be if you applied yourself." I have thought about that at least once a week for 21 years.
Dick Perry was the vocal music teacher at my high school. I took voice class from him in 9th grade, as well as chorus for four years. He also directed the elite Madrigal Singers, which I auditioned for every year but didn't get selected for until my senior year. I still know the tenor and bass parts to way more baroque and renaissance songs than I'll ever have need for.
I could write here about how I'd actually met him when I was about six years old, at music camp. Or how my all-male cappella group, The Swinging Beef Quartet, had to disband due to an underground newspaper and unauthorized use of Mr. Perry's computer. I think of these connections nearly daily.
But what's mattered the most in the long run is how Mr. Perry developed me, and so many of us, as individual creative thinkers and performers. I remember a conversation with him where he compared vocal warmups to a baseball player being on deck swinging two bats. A few years later, I quoted this back at him, and he was surprised at my wisdom. "You're the one who taught me that," I said. "Oh. Well! Good job, me, I suppose." I'm also quite sure that his attention to phonetic detail when we sang contributed to my interest in linguistics, and I went on to professionally study vowels.
He also shaped us as ensemble members and lovers of music. He knew many of us had some talent and more importantly passion for making music together. He also knew few of us would become professional level artists, but that we could parlay our love into being good community members and arts supporters.
He's still around my hometown, active in his retirement twenty-odd years now. And of the dozens of teachers I've had over the years, he's the first one that comes to mind when I think of universally-beloved, influential mentors.
Oh gosh, so many teachers that were incredibly inspiring in my life - probably why I spent nearly fifteen years as a teacher. There was Mrs. Ward in 2nd grade and Mrs. Wharton in 3rd, who both allowed me to read ahead/different books after finishing the required reading, there was Ms. Ury, who was the mathematics "Extended Projects" leader throughout elementary school(what my school called the gifted program), who really fostered my love for mathematics.
In middle school, there was Tim Dove, who was such a great social studies teacher that I actually was interested in learning and writing about history. In high school, there was Brady A. Brady, who was incredibly intense and insane and absolutely had his guys' backs no matter what. He demanded excellence and went to the ends of the earth to make sure you got there.
In college there were at least three professors - Judy Holdener, Carol Schumacher, and Bob Milnikel, all of whom are incredibly brilliant and also delightful instructors.
I'm lucky enough to count Tim, Judy, Carol, and Bob as friends in my adult life, I got to teach Mrs. Ward's son twenty years after I was her student, and now-Dr. Brady is someone whose professional career now has some overlap with my post-teaching career. Sometimes it is funny how the orbits of those who were influential to us continue to intersect with our own.
Now, as for the other part: Mr. Rathbun was my 9th grade World History teacher first semester, but he was also my quiz bowl coach. As much as most people in knew in high school looked at my role as a student senator as the thing they knew about me, history has borne out that quiz bowl was the thing from high school I brought with me for the rest of my life. Almost all of my friends from college are from the quiz bowl community. I found something where I could be competitive but also excellent at it unlike any sport I had tried up to that point in my life (or after that point as well.) Mr. Rathbun was one of the first teachers I ever had who basically made it clear that knowing things was good and the more things you knew, the more connections you could make to other things. He retired after my sophomore year, but not before he called in a favor to get me to take his jr/sr Humanities elective, which was basically covering a huge amount of "things that come up in quiz bowl" every day. So yes, huge difference. It's also the reason I'm having a hard time walking away from coaching quiz bowl after 22 years of doing it. It's kind of a slog, but I worry that if I don't, who else would give the kids the opportunity, and that weighs on me.
This resonates. Our quiz bowl sponsors were the best, most approachable and most encouraging members of the faculty. I hope you encounter some encouragement from your kids to keep with it.
Third grade at my school was when the "academic excellence" kids were stripped out from the regular crop and it happened that all of my friends were chosen for that except for me. I contend this was entirely due to how multiplication was taught to us (place your pointer fingers on each number on a chart and find where they meet). I remember telling my assessor that "my fingers don't meet" because they didn't meet AT THE SAME TIME. Like it was not clear to me, nor was it ever clearly stated, they meant the INTERSECTION. Anyway, my third grade teacher was Mrs. White and she was absolutely sweet about it. She even invited me over to her house to rake her yard, and I was allowed to bring one of my friends with me. She paid us each $50 for raking her yard. $100 split between to two 8 year olds who I'm sure did a half-assed job at best, in 1992. I don't know why Mrs. White offered me the opportunity, or why she paid us so much, or if it had anything to do with the "academic excellence" thing, but it meant a lot to me that she did and that she was so nice.
One of the many that made an impact on my story was a band director my senior year of high school. I was a member of the music program since I could play in 5th grade but by the time I was as senior I had become jaded and bored. I didn't do the marching band because I was the school mascot (another story) and played at all the other sports and in the jazz band. The former band director basically drove my enjoyment of playing into the ground. When I went to drop the course that summer, the new band director who was about 26 (which was cool in small town where most teachers were in 50s) had me play a couple of pieces and basically said to stick with it because he "saw" something in me. I thought he was full of himself but I really didn't want to take any of the other electives (like household economy (home/ec)) at the time. Longer story short, he inspired me to keep playing and ultimately with his help and another former band director, I became a member of The Ohio State University Marching Band (another story).
I took a Russian Lit. course in college, I hear you with Crime and Punishment. At least the cultural side of the class was fun with how to eat caviar and drink vodka.
Tom Hudak. He was both Sophomore AP English teacher and Yearbook counselor (maybe all 4 years?). You know how kids generally find ways to poke fun at teachers for weird quirks, or their stern demeanor or flamboyant outfits? Mr. Hudak was never derided. He was down to earth, treated students like they were young adults, and provided real talk about any and all issues. That was very important for a class full of outcast kids trying to find their way in a jumbled world just before we had to start growing up and seriously worry about things like college, career, or serious relationships.
He drew a short straw when it came to curriculum - we did Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, Walden and more that year - but he taught them without exaggerating the importance of any of the books. Read to experience, gather some knowledge, but don't get fart-sniffy about the details. I wish more classes approached literature and reading this way.
I'm not sure this teacher is the single-most influential teacher I ever had, but I had a history teacher in high school who absolutely *hated* (not incorrectly) the Marquis de Lafayette. During the year I had him, we were assigned to pick on figure from the American Revolution and write a detailed account of their involvement and impact on the outcome (and history writ large). I (obviously) chose the Marquis de Lafayette just to mess with him and did as good a job as I did on any assignment in my entire high school career. Seriously, I got everything on the ol' Marquis and had his impact really well framed.
Dude still gave me a B and I called him on it in front of the whole class and he calmly told me that it just wasn't as good as I thought it was, only to tell me two years later as I was getting ready to graduate that "of course it was an A paper, but you were the idiot that picked my least favorite figure from the revolution so I docked you a letter grade for it."
Brave New World was the vacation reading assignment (I believe it was over a spring break) that I most mailed in. It was just not for me.
I had a similar experience in my last few English classes. My standout is my 10th grade English class where the teacher gave us the option of writing a story (with various parameters) or take the final, so I wrote a whole (short) book, I think it ended up being more than 70 pages in all and got a 100%.
The only two books I never finished for high school reading were Slaughterhouse Five (I think I'd like this book but it was a real similar summer reading situation and I just didn't feel like doing the assignment I guess) and Pride & Prejudice. I didn't finish P&P for all the regularly-cited reasons, and more specifically I didn't finish it because my book was a misprint and around page 130 it became The Jungle Book for about 38 pages and then picked back up on page 168 or so but with the middle 30-40 pages excised and changed to another book.
I actually loved A Separate Peace. We had that assigned the summer before my freshman year, which was the same year we read Ender’s Game. That was the last good year for in-class book assignments for me. I can’t remember that English teacher’s name, but I do remember she was a Tennessee fan.
Coach Barrentine was a rare one: he was a coach (golf) who not only had an academic background in his subject, but had a passion for the subject he was teaching and did it well. He taught 8th grade Pre-AP US History in my middle school, and then my class was fortunate enough to see him move to the high school with us, where he also taught 10th grade AP World History and the elective 12th grade AP European history. That AP Euro class was packed every year. He taught so well that I was even able to use my notes to help me in a European-focused 300-level history class I had in college.
The teacher who had the most personal impact on me was just referred to as Marsh. (Even now it feels weird to even contemplate writing out Mrs. Marsh.) She was the yearbook teacher and the journalism teacher, but she also taught photojournalism, which I ended up taking. I was half-assing everything, natch, but after I had turned in my final project, she called my mom and told her that I had the potential to be good at photography if I just applied myself. (These were perhaps words that I had heard before…over and over again.)
Something about her taking the time to call my mother and tell her that I was good at this motivated me to actually apply myself. I ended up being the editor of the yearbook my senior year and I still do photography to this day.
I read the Catcher in the Rye over a normal, non-rushed, period of time, and I would say that while it might be a groundbreaking book, I wouldn't say it was good.
So, a contextual note: There is a LOT of debate right now over whether summer work is a). effective and b). whether it is classist. The research suggests that giving students work to do before you, as the teacher, have had a chance to establish your expectations and norms for the class actually can make it harder to build relationships, because students are less likely to reach out with questions or concerns over the summer regarding the work, whereas they might be willing to do so in the context of a school year. I tried giving a simple 200 word vocabulary list of words that show up in AP history classes that are not content specific and I would give a quiz on the first Friday of the school year. It would end up tanking almost everyone's grade and I ended up having to answer a whole bunch of emails about it and decided it wasn't worth it. BUT in one of my professional learning communities, there's been an excellent idea that many of us have adopted in an effort to bring some sanity to the academic arms race: "No work on vacation days" which is to say "If I'm off work, you're off work." I don't want to be grading when I am on winter break, spring break, or over the summer, I should not ask students to do the same. And my results on the AP exam are no better or worse than they were before. So I don't begrudge anyone who gives summer homework, but I would ask them to elucidate their why.
This is fascinating perspective. I understand the desire to hit the ground running and avoid the summer slide, but the point about establishing expectations seems especially valid.
When kids ask me, I encourage them to read a couple of non-fiction history books that they think might be interesting, and I have a list of suggestions (Devil in the White City is always a personal favorite to suggest because true crime is a great hook for "oh, we're gonna talk about Gilded Age Society here.") But especially because my students are sophomores and they have never taken an AP class before, I need to build their trust that I am on their side and giving them work before we've really had a chance to build a relationship does not help that.
When I was teaching I was very much on the side of "no work on vacation days" - and I told students this. The tradeoff was that when we were in class, we would do work - there wouldn't be much slack time in class, but any homework I assigned could be done not on weekends or over breaks.
Seemed to work better for the AP Calc and Stats classes than for the lower-level (Algebra II, etc.) classes.
Yeah, that is the tradeoff (my wife's classroom motto is "If we're here, we're doing math" and that doesn't always land well with kids, because well, raptors testing fences.)
I'm a big fan of your wife's motto, and agreed on the fences.
I told the kids on day one, "While we're in this room, we're going to absolutely kick ass on math. But you'll never have more than about 15-20 minutes required work outside of class in a night, and absolutely nothing required over weekends/holidays."
I think that would work as a suggested prep work, especially for kids planning to take AP test. Introduce the material over the summer, expose them to the rigors early with a challenging test, then spend the year incorporating the material into the curriculum - then close with a re-test that you started with to see the progress made. First test shouldn't count toward the grade, though, since the prep is only suggested.
I figured out that I could divvy up the vocab assignment into three lists over the course of the first three marking periods, and made the lists line up with when they were likely to encounter them with the time periods we were covering, and I have got MUCH better results from it, including some of the kids actually looking forward to it (because it's a straight forward grade booster if you do it right.)
Wow, it's hard to pick just one teacher, but I will be forever grateful to my elementary teacher for her response to me dropping out of second grade. (No, seriously, I jumped out the second-floor classroom window into a bush and walked home because I was bored.) It would have been easier for her punish me or send me off for some sort of diagnosis, which wouldn't have been entirely unwarranted. Instead, she got the school's speech teacher to create a DIY enriched reading program for me and two other kids. I was going to school in a really small town with an underresourced school and no such thing as a "gifted program." But I spent the rest of elementary school doing reading in a converted office in the bus garage working my way through every Caldecott and Newbery awarded book ever written. It was great -- and most of my classmates never figured out what we were doing over there.
Hello, fellow Person Who Had to Read “Crime and Punishment” in High School! I had to read it for 10th-grade and 12th-grade English, then read it a third time my sophomore year of college for a course on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and it just didn’t click until that third go-round.
Still wasn’t as bad as “Billy Budd,” though. Melville can go to hell.
My real high-school reading axe to grind (though it wasn't summertime, IIRC) was The Scarlet Letter. I can't stand Hawthorne.
📢 HESTER PRYNNE DID NOTHING WRONG 📢
My biggest criticism of this book is and always will be that Hester is way too cool to have ever even considered fucking around with a whiny loser like Dimmesdale.
I never read A Separate Peace- apparently that's what's been holding me back professionally.
I've got two. Mr. Sartori, my 8th grade English teacher and Ms. Giorgetti, my freshman year Honors Bio teacher.
Mr. Sartori was the most enthusiastic teacher I'd ever had about reading books. He took a very unconventional route to becoming a teacher and was open about that with us all. He was a terrible student who was working a night shift security job at a factory when an older coworker gave him The Sun Also Rises to read on a slow shift. He was so mad at how all the characters behaved that it turned him into a reader and he became an English teacher. He was the first teacher to not take points off for my writings all being "too short". "You said what you needed to say. Why make it longer?"
Ms. G was the first teacher to actually get the "you need to try harder" thought to stick. We were playing review Jeopardy before a test and she just looked over at me and with no malice or snark said "It's scary what you could be if you applied yourself." I have thought about that at least once a week for 21 years.
Dick Perry was the vocal music teacher at my high school. I took voice class from him in 9th grade, as well as chorus for four years. He also directed the elite Madrigal Singers, which I auditioned for every year but didn't get selected for until my senior year. I still know the tenor and bass parts to way more baroque and renaissance songs than I'll ever have need for.
I could write here about how I'd actually met him when I was about six years old, at music camp. Or how my all-male cappella group, The Swinging Beef Quartet, had to disband due to an underground newspaper and unauthorized use of Mr. Perry's computer. I think of these connections nearly daily.
But what's mattered the most in the long run is how Mr. Perry developed me, and so many of us, as individual creative thinkers and performers. I remember a conversation with him where he compared vocal warmups to a baseball player being on deck swinging two bats. A few years later, I quoted this back at him, and he was surprised at my wisdom. "You're the one who taught me that," I said. "Oh. Well! Good job, me, I suppose." I'm also quite sure that his attention to phonetic detail when we sang contributed to my interest in linguistics, and I went on to professionally study vowels.
He also shaped us as ensemble members and lovers of music. He knew many of us had some talent and more importantly passion for making music together. He also knew few of us would become professional level artists, but that we could parlay our love into being good community members and arts supporters.
He's still around my hometown, active in his retirement twenty-odd years now. And of the dozens of teachers I've had over the years, he's the first one that comes to mind when I think of universally-beloved, influential mentors.
Oh gosh, so many teachers that were incredibly inspiring in my life - probably why I spent nearly fifteen years as a teacher. There was Mrs. Ward in 2nd grade and Mrs. Wharton in 3rd, who both allowed me to read ahead/different books after finishing the required reading, there was Ms. Ury, who was the mathematics "Extended Projects" leader throughout elementary school(what my school called the gifted program), who really fostered my love for mathematics.
In middle school, there was Tim Dove, who was such a great social studies teacher that I actually was interested in learning and writing about history. In high school, there was Brady A. Brady, who was incredibly intense and insane and absolutely had his guys' backs no matter what. He demanded excellence and went to the ends of the earth to make sure you got there.
In college there were at least three professors - Judy Holdener, Carol Schumacher, and Bob Milnikel, all of whom are incredibly brilliant and also delightful instructors.
I'm lucky enough to count Tim, Judy, Carol, and Bob as friends in my adult life, I got to teach Mrs. Ward's son twenty years after I was her student, and now-Dr. Brady is someone whose professional career now has some overlap with my post-teaching career. Sometimes it is funny how the orbits of those who were influential to us continue to intersect with our own.
Now, as for the other part: Mr. Rathbun was my 9th grade World History teacher first semester, but he was also my quiz bowl coach. As much as most people in knew in high school looked at my role as a student senator as the thing they knew about me, history has borne out that quiz bowl was the thing from high school I brought with me for the rest of my life. Almost all of my friends from college are from the quiz bowl community. I found something where I could be competitive but also excellent at it unlike any sport I had tried up to that point in my life (or after that point as well.) Mr. Rathbun was one of the first teachers I ever had who basically made it clear that knowing things was good and the more things you knew, the more connections you could make to other things. He retired after my sophomore year, but not before he called in a favor to get me to take his jr/sr Humanities elective, which was basically covering a huge amount of "things that come up in quiz bowl" every day. So yes, huge difference. It's also the reason I'm having a hard time walking away from coaching quiz bowl after 22 years of doing it. It's kind of a slog, but I worry that if I don't, who else would give the kids the opportunity, and that weighs on me.
This resonates. Our quiz bowl sponsors were the best, most approachable and most encouraging members of the faculty. I hope you encounter some encouragement from your kids to keep with it.
Third grade at my school was when the "academic excellence" kids were stripped out from the regular crop and it happened that all of my friends were chosen for that except for me. I contend this was entirely due to how multiplication was taught to us (place your pointer fingers on each number on a chart and find where they meet). I remember telling my assessor that "my fingers don't meet" because they didn't meet AT THE SAME TIME. Like it was not clear to me, nor was it ever clearly stated, they meant the INTERSECTION. Anyway, my third grade teacher was Mrs. White and she was absolutely sweet about it. She even invited me over to her house to rake her yard, and I was allowed to bring one of my friends with me. She paid us each $50 for raking her yard. $100 split between to two 8 year olds who I'm sure did a half-assed job at best, in 1992. I don't know why Mrs. White offered me the opportunity, or why she paid us so much, or if it had anything to do with the "academic excellence" thing, but it meant a lot to me that she did and that she was so nice.
One of the many that made an impact on my story was a band director my senior year of high school. I was a member of the music program since I could play in 5th grade but by the time I was as senior I had become jaded and bored. I didn't do the marching band because I was the school mascot (another story) and played at all the other sports and in the jazz band. The former band director basically drove my enjoyment of playing into the ground. When I went to drop the course that summer, the new band director who was about 26 (which was cool in small town where most teachers were in 50s) had me play a couple of pieces and basically said to stick with it because he "saw" something in me. I thought he was full of himself but I really didn't want to take any of the other electives (like household economy (home/ec)) at the time. Longer story short, he inspired me to keep playing and ultimately with his help and another former band director, I became a member of The Ohio State University Marching Band (another story).
I took a Russian Lit. course in college, I hear you with Crime and Punishment. At least the cultural side of the class was fun with how to eat caviar and drink vodka.
Tom Hudak. He was both Sophomore AP English teacher and Yearbook counselor (maybe all 4 years?). You know how kids generally find ways to poke fun at teachers for weird quirks, or their stern demeanor or flamboyant outfits? Mr. Hudak was never derided. He was down to earth, treated students like they were young adults, and provided real talk about any and all issues. That was very important for a class full of outcast kids trying to find their way in a jumbled world just before we had to start growing up and seriously worry about things like college, career, or serious relationships.
He drew a short straw when it came to curriculum - we did Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, Walden and more that year - but he taught them without exaggerating the importance of any of the books. Read to experience, gather some knowledge, but don't get fart-sniffy about the details. I wish more classes approached literature and reading this way.
I'm not sure this teacher is the single-most influential teacher I ever had, but I had a history teacher in high school who absolutely *hated* (not incorrectly) the Marquis de Lafayette. During the year I had him, we were assigned to pick on figure from the American Revolution and write a detailed account of their involvement and impact on the outcome (and history writ large). I (obviously) chose the Marquis de Lafayette just to mess with him and did as good a job as I did on any assignment in my entire high school career. Seriously, I got everything on the ol' Marquis and had his impact really well framed.
Dude still gave me a B and I called him on it in front of the whole class and he calmly told me that it just wasn't as good as I thought it was, only to tell me two years later as I was getting ready to graduate that "of course it was an A paper, but you were the idiot that picked my least favorite figure from the revolution so I docked you a letter grade for it."
Brave New World was the vacation reading assignment (I believe it was over a spring break) that I most mailed in. It was just not for me.
I had a similar experience in my last few English classes. My standout is my 10th grade English class where the teacher gave us the option of writing a story (with various parameters) or take the final, so I wrote a whole (short) book, I think it ended up being more than 70 pages in all and got a 100%.
The only two books I never finished for high school reading were Slaughterhouse Five (I think I'd like this book but it was a real similar summer reading situation and I just didn't feel like doing the assignment I guess) and Pride & Prejudice. I didn't finish P&P for all the regularly-cited reasons, and more specifically I didn't finish it because my book was a misprint and around page 130 it became The Jungle Book for about 38 pages and then picked back up on page 168 or so but with the middle 30-40 pages excised and changed to another book.
My teacher gave me a pass on that one.
I would watch a movie adaptation of that particular copy of Pride and Prejudice though
I actually loved A Separate Peace. We had that assigned the summer before my freshman year, which was the same year we read Ender’s Game. That was the last good year for in-class book assignments for me. I can’t remember that English teacher’s name, but I do remember she was a Tennessee fan.
Coach Barrentine was a rare one: he was a coach (golf) who not only had an academic background in his subject, but had a passion for the subject he was teaching and did it well. He taught 8th grade Pre-AP US History in my middle school, and then my class was fortunate enough to see him move to the high school with us, where he also taught 10th grade AP World History and the elective 12th grade AP European history. That AP Euro class was packed every year. He taught so well that I was even able to use my notes to help me in a European-focused 300-level history class I had in college.
The teacher who had the most personal impact on me was just referred to as Marsh. (Even now it feels weird to even contemplate writing out Mrs. Marsh.) She was the yearbook teacher and the journalism teacher, but she also taught photojournalism, which I ended up taking. I was half-assing everything, natch, but after I had turned in my final project, she called my mom and told her that I had the potential to be good at photography if I just applied myself. (These were perhaps words that I had heard before…over and over again.)
Something about her taking the time to call my mother and tell her that I was good at this motivated me to actually apply myself. I ended up being the editor of the yearbook my senior year and I still do photography to this day.
Wait, I think the Tennessee fan teacher’s name was Mrs. Cooley.
I read the Catcher in the Rye over a normal, non-rushed, period of time, and I would say that while it might be a groundbreaking book, I wouldn't say it was good.