Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1915529-20150523192506/@comment-3547390-20150604075354

Too bad Commander Keen was a platform series (early 90s platformers give me nightmares).

Yep, each essay was based on a question based on teacher interpretation. I tolerated it as best as I could, though I disliked the idea of not having free thinking. I never really liked the idea of symbols, feeling that they were reading into the book when they were most likely just intended to be literal objects. A spear that stabs a man is not a representation of isolation due to the man that is behind the spear being far away from the other man, it is just a guy killing another man with a spear! The more I was in that class, the more I realized I could make quotes attribute to basically anything and say it basically meant anything. This Wikia is a representation of motherhood. This leaf I just picked up is a representation of the fragility of life.

Of course, almost every essay, no matter what it was about, was about theme at the forefront. Theme is like the extreme version of a symbol, an arbitrary symbol applied to the entire story! Hansel and Gretel? Bet there is a way to prove that there is a theme of political corruption! Well, we can first examine the witch, saying that in a normal country that she would not have been allowed to cook children. She represents underhandedness, operating under the law. The children represent innocence, as children always do, meaning that the innocent country is being threatened by the witch of underhandedness. The witch made Gretel her slave, a common position for undermining a female and therefore is an example of a sexist country whereby all children can not be eaten equally. Sexism, being an immoral thing to have, is a further example of political corruption due to the leader allowing it to continue in their country. Note also that at the end of the story the children slam an old woman in an oven, committing murder just because she wanted to eat one of the children, and then proceeding to stealing her treasure. Okay, you could accept the oven bit as self defense, but that last part is blatant theft. These children have already learned how to use an oven to kill people and how to steal treasure. This means the children, seen as innocent at the beginning of the story, are revealed to be as corrupt as the witch. Though they "killed" underhandedness, they used underhandedness, meaning the witch was inside themselves all along. The entire country is proven to be corrupt, meaning there must be corruption politically for all these actions to be permitted with no enforcement. Hansel and Gretel is a story that speaks to us all, a story of why we must elect our officials carefully to ensure we do not end up with stealing children and sexist witches.

My second least favorite class had to be Art though. I was given free thinking, but also given immediate acceptance. As long as I did the assignment, it was accepted, with no real efforts to improve my abilities or offer criticism. I felt like the teacher was apathetic, that I wasn't gaining anything by being there.

My least favorite? Spanish. I think my teacher killed any hope or enjoyment of me ever really wishing to learn another language. My first two years, I had great grades (different teacher that didn't teach Spanish my third and last year). My third year I struggled pretty heavily, though it was apparently due to the stuff I already learned in the earlier classes. When I would stay after, the teacher would shoo me off saying that I would have to come on a day when they weren't explaining things to the earlier classes, the stuff I was coming for and needed to learn. When I would finally get to talk to the teacher, they would do something quick and then tell me not to worry about it. I was told that everybody is terrible at something and that I should just learn to accept getting bad grades. I went insane trying to get Spanish down, of course with absolutely no direction from the teacher, meaning I was learning stuff pointlessly. I got plenty of Spanish learning programs, blasted through them quickly, and saw absolutely no improvement. We would have a speaking presentation where I would work with other people, yet I would end up doing most of the work (this is why I hate group projects, it can be a pain if only one person cares about their grades) and be somehow getting a lower grade than anybody else in the class. I stayed up memorizing my lines during a presentation, ensuring my pronunciation was perfect and that my speaking was fluid (I refused to stutter to ensure perfection) and yet people that would spend ten minutes trying to remember one line or refused to do the thing entirely would manage to get a better grade than me. Since those days I have basically forgotten almost all my Spanish teachings, I have learned to hate Spanish, and I hate that teacher.