English 10-

Today's post will conclude my retrospective tour of the English classes I took in high school.

10^th grade

For the September-to-January ("fall") semester I took an English Composition 10A course
and for the February-to-June ("spring") semester I took a Literature Appreciation 10A course,
both of which were run by Mr. Jeffrey Paul Jones.

Mr. Jones made a serious effort in the fall semester to teach us the basic mechanics of writing - how to construct various types of sentences and how to put those sentences together so as to create a coherent unit of content - and I'd say he did a pretty good job of it.
(I've saved a number of sentence tests from this period as they display my maladjusted teenage self in all its glory. A 1 December 1977 test asked for three sentences having an introductory present participial phrase so I wrote:
1. Running down the street, Billy got hit by a car and his guts were splattered on the Jones' driveway.
2. Blowing his nose, Tom broke his Kleenex and a large glob of snot fell on his homework.
3. Coughing very loudly, the class thoroughly shattered the teacher's concentration.
Ah, those were the days...)

We read one class novel in the fall semester and one in the spring semester -
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, respectively -
excellent choices if I do say myself.

Twice during the fall semester we played a game in class that I'll call "N-Dimensional Story Creation". Here's how it went:
Mr. Jones handed blank sheets of paper out separately to several random students, each of whom
wrote down a sentence that started a story and
then passed the sheet to an adjacent student, who
wrote a sentence that continued the story in some way and
then passed the sheet to a third student, who wrote another sentence for the story and passed the sheet to a fourth student, etc.
Toward the end of class Mr. Jones collected our stories-in-progress and read them back to us. This was great fun, and I encourage all English teachers everywhere to try it in their own classes.

Two more points:
• I wrote a report and gave an oral presentation on Rosy Is My Relative by Gerald Durrell (a choice stemming from a Durrell short story that I read in the 8^th grade) in the fall semester.
• À la Mr. Hunter and The Propaganda Game, Mr. Jones had us play Diplomacy in the spring semester. Wikipedia notes that Diplomacy is Henry Kissinger's favorite game - we don't need to say any more about this, do we?

Lagniappe: 9^th grade

Back in the 1970s Vista High School encompassed grades 10-12. For grades 7-9 I attended a Lincoln Junior High School that in 2006 moved to a new location and is now called Rancho Minerva Middle School. Meanwhile, a Vista Magnet Middle School has opened at the previous Lincoln Junior High School site.

At Vista High School it was up to us to work out a schoolday schedule; at Lincoln Junior High School our schedules were determined for us. For the 9^th grade I was assigned to an English 9G course that was run by Mrs. Barbara Ross. I still have for this class a written notebook (content-wise, it was very light on grammar and heavy on dreams and imagery, I'll spare you the details) that grew into a traditional, long-form journal, of which both of my blogs are outgrowths. We read one class novel during the year, that being The Pearl by John Steinbeck.

Not related to coursework:
Mrs. Ross was a Neil Young fan. One day she brought in her copy of Harvest and played some of its songs for us and gave us her take on their lyrics.

Loose ends

• The "G" of English 9G refers to a "gifted" program in which I had been placed several years earlier by the Vista Unified School District's 'powers that be'. I don't have anything nice to say about that program so I won't say anything at all.

• Barbara Ross was Barbara Christiansen when I was a 7^th-grader; she was my English teacher that year too.

• My 8^th-grade English teacher was Miss Martha Lindey. Miss Lindey moved from Lincoln Junior High School to Vista High School in 1979; I could have and perhaps should have taken a journalism course from her when I was a senior.

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We'll get behind the wheel in our next episode.