Yesterday, I wrote about my favorite teachers, and why they were my favorite. They knew when I was not doing my best and demanded more from me. As a result in school, my favorite subjects were taught by my favorite teachers.
As a freshman in high school, my favorite subjects were History, English, and Classical Literature. For my freshman History class, we studied ancient civilizations through the Reformation, and I could not get enough. But when I went to a different school the following year, the History teacher had been teaching there at least 10+ years, and was not enthusiastic about the subject matter. He stood up at the podium, reading the outline, and expected us to jot it down word for word. He also went over the test the day before we took it, so it was your own fault if you did not get an A.
For 9th grade English, we read a wide variety of books as a class, including
To Kill a Mockingbird,
Julius Caesar,
Much Ado About Nothing,
Silas Marner, plus many more. We also had to turn in at least two book reports that year on books of our choosing, for me it was
The Secret Garden and
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Miss Otto HATED readers because they only had excerpts of books and dumbed books down, so I'm thankful the
A Beka reader was not used that year. Miss Otto also taught us how to write thesis papers; she stressed that a thesis is an "
Arguable Point" {it's a point-not points}. Unfortunately the next year, I had a new English teacher in a new school who though too highly of herself and mistakenly believed she was
THE teacher who prepared students for college; she was definitely wrong. There were so many papers I turned in and expected to get a C, instead of an A. Ultimately, I started thinking, "Why bother trying to do my best when my best is not expected?" As a class, we started reading
The Merchant of Venice {which we had read the year before in Classic Literature at my old school}, but my classmates started complaining, "It's too hard? I don't understand it. Why do we have to read this?" What do you know, she gave in to my classmates, and we stopped reading it. My class-the supposedly smart class-was "not able to understand Shakespeare".
Needless to say, History and English became some of my most hated class, not because of the subject matter, but because of the teachers. Please, if you are a teacher, expect your students to do their best, and if they don't, try pushing them. I know my attitude was not always good, I blamed the teachers, but looking back, I still should have striven to give my all.
What were your favorite subjects in school?
