Does School Really Suck?

Although everyone's experience with school differ, I HATED high school and would never wish to go back to that place of magnified emotions and social awkwardness. It is ironic that I now teach at a high school, but never mind that. As a teen, it wasn't that my classes sucked; I enjoyed the academic challenge, even if my writing was mercilessly picked apart, and I was never formally taught how to write. There was this baseless assumption that if you are in honors and AP, you knew how to write and knew grammar. So I learned through trial and error. I tried something, the teacher didnt like it, so I tried something else. What sucked in high school was the social aspect. In college, school never sucked. If I had a professor I didnt like, I would just shop around for one I did like (This was back in the day before budget cuts when you could choose between 10 sections of the same class). I could pick when I wanted to go to class, and it didnt matter who you were in high school because most people you encounter in college, you don't know anyway.

Of all the articles I have read in grad school (too many), Johnson's "School Sucks" is by far my favorite, even if toward the end things got a little freaky with the S&M masochistic talk. I enjoyed his prose, his anecdotes, and everything led to a broader point about composition and discourse. There is a lot to say here, so I will begin with the heading Pleasure, Process, Professionalization. Just as I mentioned in the previous writing, if a student hates to write, it shows in his/her writing and it will be difficult for him/her to get better. Johnson correlates Gorgias with this: "Before a student can learn to persuade an audience about anything, the student must first learn to enjoy composing, to generate a rigorous, positive excitement around the task of rhetorical action" (Johnson 626). Easier said than done. Motivating a student to write is so difficult. At the college level, its not much different, you just have a more willing participant in the "this is a bull shit paper" game. If writing assignments could be more practical and applicable, I think we could generate some excitment about writing.

Johnson expounds on "magical rhetoric", which I find interesting. He states "And herein lies the paradox that perhaps divides our field at its very heart: The enthusiasm and pleasure, the 'sensational rush' that colored our profession when it first began to form are, in a very real sense, unprofessional." I agree, and it sucks. Writing should be enjoyable. When it is enjoyable, it is real, and that authenticity in voice comes out. It is not stiff and fake.

"Renegade rhetorics offer us a shiny renewal, a transfusion of fresh vitality" (Johnson 631). Traditional versus non-traditional has been a long-standing battle for awhile. I have had to read traditional literary critics who, although informative, has the effect of popping a muscle relaxer: I just want to take a nap. I have to wade through the formal prose and discourse, and re-read several words that don't necessarily supply a 'better' connotation, if only to sound more pretentious. This is just want Johnson believes: We have 'demonized' the renogade, and "in doing so, we have not simply diminished the pleasures of awakening literacy but have linked the experience, perhaps indelibly, to pain" (JOhnson 632). Yes we have! Why do certain literary articles have to be so boring and painful to read? Please assume if I am an English major and well-read, I have read the same novels, poems, and stories as the critics, and perhaps enjoy and appreciate them. Scholars, please don't criticize them in a discourse that makes me wish I had never read the book in the first place if only to avoid having to read a certain criticism that probably contains important information, but is just so painful to read, I won't pay attention, and will dread having to incorporate it into an essay.

Lastly, Johnson writes that students avoid revision in their writing because "revision constitutes a kind of 'deathwork'--that is, the act of dismantling and reconsidering an essay runs perilously close to the act of dismantling that fragile scaffolding of experiences, identifications, and beliefs we conjure and sustain as self" (Johnson 643). While many of students do not revise because they are just lazy (the admit this themselves), many might not be revising because they think what they have turned in already constitutes a 'good' paper and they don't see the need to revise. By revising, they are invalidating their work. I'm not sure how to dissuade them of this belief.