Blog 26 Enjoy JDH

Mr. Logsdon

I have no past experience with your profession. At times, you may have found difficulty in directing our spastic attention to your lessons and/or, at other times you may have found relative ease at molding our minds to attack any necessary test. I have no realistic way of grading you due to my lack of experience in what being Mr. Logsdon: The English Teacher, entails. That being said I do have some critiques and compliments to dole out.

First off is what you did well. English writing is a very hard class to teach because it isn’t so much English as logic. I could spell every word A to Z, or quote from Shakespeare and give the modern translation of ancient pros, or even write a 100-page research paper with relative ease. This is because these are basic things that we do every day; we spell out our words as we write them, we draw upon previously read texts, and we manufacture print like machines. Ask me how or why questions and the degree of difficulty is raised significantly. Answering what, who, and when questions can be answered in a sentence at most: The plane, Me, and 5 o’clock last Sunday are basic examples. Answering why anybody does anything, or how anybody does anything are near impossible to answer definitively. Too often though, it is the how and why questions that English writing students face. We require logic to digest and regurgitate texts and sources on to the AP Exam. If we lack the critical thinking required to “get the job done” there is very little you can do to aid us. Over the past school year though, I feel that you have aided us in many ways. Although the trek of an AP English student is a solitary one, you provided us with a base camp of knowledge (Writing with Style) and gifted us the experience needed to bridge any perilous gaps in our logical facilities. I can only empathize with your struggles as an English teacher and thank you for what help you provided me over the last year.

Now comes the tongue-lashing of sorts. Well not so much a lashing as some advice from a pupil. First and foremost, keep your focus. You act as an author, while we, your students, act as the audience, the readers. Your primary focus must be on the end goal of the class just as an author’s focus is to inform and entertain the audience. Your lessons must be entertaining to keep us, you should think of us as easily distractible monkeys in this case, engaged. At the slightest provocation we will descend into anarchy and ignorance. You already know this basic fact though, which is why I am only reminding you of it. (In my opinion, videos on broneys, robots, and cannibalism, no matter how entertaining and philosophically stimulating, should be retooled into more focused lessons.) Secondly, and I should follow this advise as well, assess yourself constantly. The ordinary are content with their current condition, the extraordinary strive to be better in everything they do. If you wish to be an extraordinary teacher, father, or person in general, never be happy for longer than an instant and never stop striving. Evaluate the effect of every word you say and every action you do. It may be a Herculean task, but too often today people are stagnantly all right with the way things are. As was once said (Maybe by Gandhi I don’t really know) “Be the change you wish to see in the world”. Finally, don’t let us highschoolers get you down. We may think we all deserve A’s and know everything, but we don’t. Some day every bratty, slightly gifted kid will have to face the piper. We will all be off to senior year and then to college soon enough where the professors won’t yield to the rabid helicopter mom or the rogue psychotic father. Sadly you will still be left in the excessively caddy and annoying halls of high school, having to duke it out with a bunch of ignorant snot nosed idiots with identity crisises. I guess what I’m trying to convey, in essence, is the message stated in first paragraph; I have no possible way of accurately gauging your job other than from my seat in your class every 9:30-10:30 most Mondays through Fridays. I wish you the best of luck either as a continuing English teacher or as the new Academy Councilor/Coordinator (I fail to recall the correct title). I hope my final blog post has helped give you feed back on how you can improve future classes, and how I view you.

Jack H.