English 11

In today's entry I'll say a few things about the 11^th-grade English classes that I took at Vista High School in the 1978-1979 academic year, per the More English to come section at the beginning of my "Sods and Odds" post.

Fall

For the September-to-January semester I took an Advanced Composition 11A course that was initially run by Mr. James Hunter. At some point in the latter half of the semester (shortly after Thanksgiving, if memory serves) Mr. Hunter announced to the class that he would be leaving Vista High School for a position "in the computer field". He declined to specify exactly why he was leaving: "It's not you," he assured us. A Mr. Johnston* ran the remainder of the course.

*Per the Edward Johnston obituary at this page, I think Mr. Johnston's first name was Warren - he was the husband of my History 7 teacher at Lincoln Junior High School and took over for her shortly into the year as she was ill - but he wasn't in the La Revista 1979 yearbook and I don't know for certain.

I wrote my first five-paragraph essays and first term paper for Mr. Hunter's class.
• Regarding the former, Mr. Hunter handed out a photocopy of a five-paragraph essay that a previous-year student had written on Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land as a model for us to follow. I read it over and thought, "Man, this is really contrived, does anyone actually write like this in the real world?" With 20/20 hindsight and from my current vantage point as a technical writer, I now recognize that such essays, and term papers, are meant to serve as introductory prototypes for formal reports that one may create in, say, the business world or a STEM-related profession.
• My term paper was on electronic keyboard instruments.

Literature-wise my 11^th-grade English classes kept to an American authors theme, and for Mr. Hunter's class I and my fellow classmates accordingly read the following class novels:
Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life by Sherwood Anderson,
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, and
A Separate Peace by John Knowles.
I relatedly wrote separate book reports on
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck and
R Is for Rocket by Ray Bradbury
but bucking the theme I also wrote reports on
Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne and
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by Antonia Fraser.
(Yes, I was listening to this guy at the time.)

One last point in the name of completeness before moving on:
For a while at the beginning of the semester Mr. Hunter had us play The Propaganda Game in class; perhaps this was meant to be a sort of critical thinking exercise but I thought it was a waste of time.

Spring

For the February-to-June semester I took an English Literature 11A course that from start to finish was run by Mrs. Laurene Tweed.

Mrs. Tweed's class was highlighted by a vocabulary-building unit that was designed to prepare us for the verbal section of the SAT, which we were to take the following year. (I confess I am 'not a fan' of standardized tests: they are useful to some extent but IMO they and their scores are taken much more seriously than should be the case.)

We read one class novel for Mrs. Tweed's class: The Scarlet Letter: A Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I relatedly wrote separate book reports on
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and
Dandelion Wine and
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.

Toward the end of the semester each student also presented an oral book report in front of the class: my presentation was on The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand as I was going through a (thankfully brief, hey, it happens to the best of us) Objectivist phase at the time.

Our coursework culminated in a term paper on an American author. I appropriately wrote my paper on Ray Bradbury: it discussed Bradbury's literary influences, his approach to the craft of writing, his advice for would-be authors, and his view of the future.

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I'll cover my 10^th-grade English classes in the following entry.