True Learning

Just an essay about my English class, and what I believe to be a role model as far as English classes go.

   True Learning

Everyday walking into the same room with the same people at the same time may seem monotonous to some. But no matter how circumstances might make it seem, that will never be the case for this class. From the first second of arrival you are bombarded with a cascade of colours, sounds or even a pressing silence. It starts off everyday with the same trickle of imaginative and intellectual students entering the room and abandoning any concerns, queries, or problems at the door.

    Your eyes adjust to the light and natural aura of brightness the room maintains, and your ears adjust to the clatter of chairs and laughter. We all begrudgingly take our seats and after a moment or two of preparatory planning for the distraction of our ever benevolent teacher; we decide we are ready for class to begin. Instantly we are confronted with a sudden onset of a students least favorite concept, work. Nobel laureates could write entire epics about the work we are confronted with. And yet, somehow day after endless day we swim through these vast oceans of work.

    With mercy being taken on our poor pitiful souls; we usually commence the class with a lighter assignment. Perhaps a quiz on your reading assignment that you forgot to do the night before? Thats light right? Pushing through the misery that engulfs our very being after taking those assessments, which we all somehow usually pass (well except that time I got a 30..), we start the “real” learning. Handing out a piece of delicate prose and bouncing with every step our teacher makes it seem as if she takes physical joy in this “learning.” All goes well for a paragraph or two; we annotate where the situation rings up and calls for it and maybe even ask an insightful question or two. And then the real learning begins.

    All of a sudden we are on tangent road on the way to the town of digression. I never know how it may start or even when it may end. Occasionally our discussions, really stretching the meaning of discussion, get started by the most uninspiring things thinkable; perhaps the seductive arts of banana eating or tickle wars in the corner? No matter the immediate cause of these transgressions they all stem from one common idea. We are all lunatics.

    Finally after a few minutes of incessant talking, we begin to regain focus and continue our tedious, meticulous and thorough  analysis of a seemingly irrelevant passage. At its conclusion we are faced with a paper laced with poison. Multiple choice questions; with five choices to boot! Our vivacious conversations slowly dim down to a piercing silence. A silence either started by concentration, naps, or the realization we have no idea what any of the answers are. Silence in our class is an unwanted jem. Its a foreign idea but a true testament to our standards of learning. Despite our raucous laughter we can still manage to face our work with a sense of gravitas that is usually absent from our conscience.

    We then begin to go over these multiple choice questions. If you hadn’t felt as if satan was performing a sloppy lobotomy on you yet, this act of reviewing the answers will soon send you to this imaginative place. Sporadically throughout our torture, we hear gasps of cheering and occasionally, probably more occasionally than the cheering, are sighs not of sadness but of utter despair. Finally, after grading these papers, with grades ranging from an 8 to a 95, and our bodies aching with the dull throbbing pain of intellectual torture; we go on to discussing our newest assigned work of literature.

    Our policy for discussing literature is simple, speak when the spirit moves you. Our class discussions move much in the style of free form jazz. Each of us blaring our own opinions down each others throats and engulfing their ears with our usually incoherent thoughts. After a few minutes of literary “discussion” we find our way to the mystical fairytale land called, our lives. Coming from a classroom where diversity is essential, we all seem to bring to the table, or desk rather, a set of personal experiences in which no two are alike.  Rather than procuring a coherent analysis of the characters; we analyze our own stories. Illustrating our personal experiences with poetic words and getting to know the little details about everyone and anyone in our class..

    Eventually we get back onto relevant conversation about whatever proclaimed great literature we may be learning about. We transition from the zany back to a scholastic atmosphere that resembles that of Aristotle’s thinkatorium. We may only read one paragraph in ten minutes but that paragraph becomes more than a simple reading. We analyze every choice of word and the relevance in a placement of a punctuation mark. We debate over meaning, differing meaning, and even the effect of having differing meetings.The class begins to shine in our light of academic success. Our minds begin to fold into one another; and we become more than 18 students in a stuffy room. We become a class ; an intelligent,dynamic, and thoughtful class.

    All of a sudden everything we had worked for comes to a screeching halt. The reason for our halt being the all powerful sound of the bell. We all hustle and bustle gathering books, papers and thoughts as we pack up our teacher shouting out the homework even she knows none of us are really listening. We begin to gather in clumps and push our way out the door as we go onto the next class. Wave of hands and shouts of goodbye to our teacher slowly fade out and the class is over. All over.

    But as we leave that classroom we take with us something that can never be taken away. An experience. An experience comprised of every emotion under the sun. We begin to intimately know every aspect of everyones life whilst still know the definition of juxtaposition. It became a class of self discovery and appreciation. We are class of creative freedom. We are a class of dynamic intelligence. We are a class of academics scholars. We are a class that knows I just used parallelism. And most importantly we are a class of students. Students who will day in and day out never forget what we learned and experienced in our little utopian classroom full of laughter, learning and life.  

Author's Note

Thanks for reviews! Please tell me what you think of the use of language and general interest appeal!