What I Don’t Like About This Class

Here is your chance. Try to think of all the things you don’t like about Honors High School English 2 class. Try putting them in order by what you like least. Then, explain why you don’t like it. Try to be specific and give advice on how things could be better.

So I am supposed to write 200 words concerning my negative thoughts surrounding my English class? Easier said than done. However I guess there are a few points that I would like to address...

First off, I would like to refer to the English class that I had last year (just for the sake of this assignment, I'm not comparing it to the English Honors class here). We not only analyzed novels and short stories, but we also watched video clips, listened to audio tracks, and studied artworks that were pertaining to the theme at hand. This wide range of media that we analyzed contributed greatly to my knowledge of literary analysis, finding themes, and observing symbolism, meaning, motivation, and truths (just to name a few). I think that in our class we have only studied short stories and novels so far, and it would be nice if we had a video clip or two sometime to analyze accordingly to the topic at hand.

Also branching from my first point, I hope that we will soon be able to study dramas and myths, because they are at the heart of understanding themes, symbolism, and literary analysis in general. I think we could read some harder forms of literature in this class as well - Shakespeare, maybe; Poe, or Charles Dickens. I loved reading classical literature not only because of the challenges in reading the text, but because these classical writings included many deep themes and symbols that we often discussed openly during class last year, which I realize we haven't been doing, at least, not yet.

I also feel as if we are using technology very often for almost all of our assignments. While this is not a bad thing, I think that there might be a slight overuse of technology for schoolwork. Journal assignments, essays, presentations - these can be done on a computer, no problem. However I feel as if we should do a little more writing for our assignments as well, you know, with pen and paper. I think that an excess use of technology not only hinders our thinking progress, but it also, well, kills my eyes.

Man, I hope Mr. McCool won't kill us after reading our critiques tomorrow...