Ramblings

On Wednesday afternoon of this week, I took off at 2:00 so I could come home and do some of my reading. I read for a while but was getting so sleepy that I took a 30-minute nap. It did wonders. I actually felt pretty decent in class that night. Mr. Y gave us our review for our test next week. He told us that if we can learn the stuff on the review sheet that we’ll do fine on the test, hint, hint. Then he said that we shouldn’t just try to memorize the order of the answers; so basically, he told us that we’ve got the test, just in a different order. How cool is that?!?

I went to the dreaded Literature class again last night. {sigh} It makes me so weary. I've got another 121+ pages to read and an essay to write this week. One plus is that our writing assignments don't necessarily have to be handed in on the due date. He just wants all of the Short Story assignments before we end the Poetry section and the Poetry assignments before we end the Drama section, etc.

I also have to read William Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust" and write a paper on that. Mr. K had given us four choices of books to read at the first class and said that we were supposed to research and decide which one we want to read and then we would have a "democratic process" and take a class vote to pick the novel. I looked them up and came up with "Absalom, Absalom" as my first choice and Intruder in the Dust as the second choice. I DID NOT want to read "Light in August" as it was 528 pages long versus 320 pages for Absalom, Absalom and 256 for Intruder in the Dust. The fourth choice was "The Sound and the Fury" and it had in the range of 300 pages but I didn't like the sounds of it and some of the reviews said it's extremely hard to read.

Mr. K started the democratic process and randomly asked each person which book and why did they want to read it. At first The Sound and the Fury got several votes with Intruder in the Dust getting about equally as many. Then someone gave their reason for wanting Light in August because it had some comedy and it suddenly seemed like everyone had a sense of humor. The Sound and the Fury was dropped with four votes and Intruder in the Dust was ahead of Light in August by one vote. He waited to ask me until next to the last person. "Sharon?" he said. "Well," said I, "I was going to vote for Absalom, Absalom but since it hasn't even gotten one vote, giving it no chance of winning, I will vote for Intruder in the Dust because Light in August has over 500 pages and I don't have time to read that much." (How was that for boldness??) "Aha!!" he said, "Trying to see just how little you can get by with, huh? I expected that to be more of a deciding factor for all of you. Well, at least she's honest about it."

So he erased the two titles with the least votes and started over with Intruder in the Dust & Light in August. Quite frankly, a lot of the class had never looked into the four titles at all (they'd said so before Mr. Kemp got there) and suddenly they seemed to be concerned at the number of pages in a book. Inwardly, I was laughing. One little girl questioned him out on how many more pages Light in August had and he blithely said, "Not many." Not many?!? That's a whole 272 pages difference which is more than all of Intruder in the Dust. Well, Intruder in the Dust prevailed by two votes. Whew!!

The literature class will consist of 6 quizzes, 8 short writing assignments, 3 tests, and 4 longer papers. {weep here} One small consolation is that he did say that he slacks off on the reading assignments further on in the semester. Praise God!! I can tell that he has got a dry sense of humor and I'm hoping that his performance of the past two classes was merely an intimidation tactic to try to weed out the riff-raff. (I could happily have fallen into that category. He sure did a good job at the intimidation part anyway.)

In reality, some of the short stories that I have to read aren't that bad, but others...well, they leave a lot to be desired. We had to have a "class discussion" on our favorite short story or least favorite after we finished our quiz. And guess who got called on as the second person to give an opinion?!? I threw in my disclaimer about not condoning the behavior and then admitted that I had enjoyed "Roman Fever" by Edith Wharton the best. So he went off on this tangent about us ladies liking revenge, yada, yada, yada. I would start explaining why I liked it and off he would go off some other tangent. I could only get my explanation out in spurts because of his running commentary. Oh, well. Read it sometime if you get a chance. If you can get past the awkward wording of stuff, it's actually pretty interesting.