This will be the last of my class breakdowns for my junior year. As I explained in my sophomore year, fifth and sixth periods were the same for all three years of high school: Chorus and Drama, although the latter was referred to as "Masquers" to indicate an activity credit as opposed to a solid credit.
My sophomore year, my Physical Education requirement was split between two separate classes, PE in the fall semester and Tennis in the spring. This was true for my English class my junior year. For the fall, I had American Literature. In the spring, it was English Composition. As it turned out, these would be the last English classes I was required to take in high school. (I'd always complained that one of the problems with the public education system was that everyone was required to take lessons for their own native language for 12 straight years. Here, I only had to do it in 11 years, although I had two English credit classes my sophomore year, because Drama was considered an English class. Come to think of it, in the ninth grade, I took English I and Public Speaking, which also made for two English credits. That meant that I took my native language for the equivalent of 13 years.)
American Literature was a relatively easy class. We just read the short stories and novels that were assigned to us and answer a few questions. However, it got challenging when we got to the tall tales portion of the class. The teacher (who was the same faculty member named to be in charge of the Student Council that year) had these audio recordings of the stories being read. However, we didn't have the books for those, so we just listened. After the first story, the teacher gave us a quiz on the material. We weren't expecting that. Most of us had zoned out while the recording was being played and did very poorly. The next few days after that, we made sure to take notes during the stories. The only story I didn't have to take notes for was the one about Joe Magarac because the version I had read years before was word for word the one on the recording. I was very familiar with that story, except that I learned that I had been mispronouncing the name for years.
English Composition was the strangest class I had in high school. This was due to a couple of factors: For one, it was in one of the few classrooms at the school that had a carpeted floor. This made everything sound very quiet. The normal roar of students in the other classes was relatively silenced in that room. It was so quiet, I fell asleep a few times (due to outside influences, which I'll go into detail in a future post). The other strange thing is that I didn't feel like I had to work very hard in the class to get my A's. Basically, we had to do an outline first. Then, we would write the compositions. When I write, I never have to use outlines, so this was very restrictive to me. Virtually every composition I wrote was exactly what I wrote in the outline and rarely contained more material than that.
There was only one composition that I got a C on. The topic was "The Composition I've Always Wanted to Write." I decided to plagarize Steve Martin from the last chapter of his book "Cruel Shoes." The chapter was titled "The Last Thing on My Mind." In it, Martin ends by saying something like, "I guess the last thing on my mind is the last thing on my mind." After a bunch of rambling about compositions that I thought about writing, I ended with, "I guess the composition I've always wanted to write is the composition I've always wanted to write." That C was not enough to lower my grade. It practically didn't count.
A few years after high school, I looked back at the classes I took. At the time, I barely remembered this class to the point that the entire semester was very fuzzy during that period directly after lunch, almost like it didn't happen, but I remembered everything else that year so well.
There is a strange thing about my English Composition teacher that is worth revealing. After my Grandfather Bend died in 1954 (10 years before I was born), to the best of my knowledge, Grandma Bend never dated anyone. However, around 1979, she was dating a particular gentleman whom I had never met. I never knew this was going on. He died late that year. He was my English Composition teacher's father. I remember Mom, Loyd and myself going to eat with the teacher and her two daughters. (This was a year before I was in her class.) The older daughter was a year ahead of me in school and would go on to be the Student Council President my junior year. The younger daughter was a year ahead of Loyd. I don't remember the conversation during the lunch and wasn't aware that we were meeting for any specific reason.
Afterward, Loyd told me that Grandma Bend had been dating the grandfather of those girls and they were likely going to get married before he died. That would have made all of us somehow related. That would have made things really awkward because I developed a crush on the younger girl two years later when she was a sophomore. It was a crush that didn't really go anywhere. Years later, I saw the teacher and her daughters at my parents' 25th wedding anniversary. I saw the teacher and the younger daughter again seven years later when they attended my Mom's wedding with Dend.
I never told the teacher how I felt about that class.
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