Acknowledgements

Foreword

        There’s an age-old aphorism that goes, “Hope for the best, plan for the worst”. Heading into 11AP English with my only history of “advanced” courses being a C in 6th grade honors math, I was either going to live or die by this aphorism. Having come out the other side, I think it’s safe to say I survived. After all, I now know what aphorism means. 

Initial Lessons

        While it's been over half a year since the beginning of this year, I will never forget the first ever writer who we read the work of in the form of Billy Collins. Reading the History Teacher was the beginning of this class opening my mind to far deeper and substantial analysis into the works we were covering. While I understand this might not have been much of an eye-opening experience for all of my classmates who had taken Honors English 10 a few months prior, for me, coming right off the basis of normal English 10 LC, it was very surprising. I had never seen a piece be so deeply analyzed, especially in such a short about of time. 

        The observation that has especially stuck with me - even months later - is how the teacher "gathered up his notes and walked home past flower beds and white picket fences" representing how he lives in a secure and overly protected world because white picket fences are a symbol of middle-class suburban safety and ignorance. It was a level of observation and deep analysis I had really never seen before, and certainly not from my own brain. It was partially scary and sobering, but it also illustrated to me just how much this class was going to explore language and the level of analysis I would eventually become capable of.

        Out of the innumerable writers we’ve covered in class this year, the ones who’ve influenced me the most are definitely Sherman Alexie, David Foster Wallace, and Sarah Vowell. Having always been a bit of a comedian, one of my concerns heading into 11AP English was the fear everyone in the class would be a bunch of stuck-up pretentious brainiacs who I wouldn’t be able to crack jokes with. As such, having one of the first pieces we covered in the year be explicitly funny and promote the use of comedy and humor as a stylistic choice was very reassuring to me.

        Not only did it convince me I could continue making all the annoying comments I wanted, not sorry about that, but it even convinced me to incorporate a lot of my snark into my writings. It helped me to change my essays from the signature sterile standard of a robotic-sounding student meeting the requirements of a rubric that I had in previous years, to a much more personal and conversational sounding essay that legitimately sounded like I was talking through the writing. 

        It not only reassured me and made me more comfortable in this class, but also improved my writing and helped to make all my work going forward far more personal. I feel this can be best exemplified through by looking at my writings before and after being exposed to these humorous writers' styles. Whereas my writings earlier in the year feel very plain and simple, "I think the memorial is rather ineffective at remembering people as it feels like a graveyard more than a memorial", my writings after reading these authors' works have a lot more snark and feature more of my own voice in them, "Truly, the pinnacle of ethics." Without these 3 writers, I don't think I could've succeeded in this class like I have, although 'success' might be a strong word. And without the History Teacher in particular, I don't think I would've been ready to deeply analyze the next works in class as deeply as I did, speaking of.

Novels

        One of my other major concerns with this class was the worry we would only cover short stories or novellas. This was mainly because during the first month or so, we only covered passages instead of entire stories. As such, getting to read and analyze a full novel when we started the Great Gatsby unit was so exciting for me. If the History Teacher introduced me to the far end of the pool of analysis, Gatsby made me do a full deep dive into the ocean of literary introspection. 

        The major thing I learned while we analyzed Gatsby was how to look very deep and introspectively into a novel, far more than the History Teacher did. Moments like the analysis of the scene where the clock falls out of Gatsby's hand and he tries to recover it, and how that represents Gatsby and Daisy’s relationship along with the larger message of the book of things being dead and moving on from the past was very impactful to me. 

        This was because when I was reading that scene the night beforehand, I never really saw it as a thematically rich scene. I mainly saw it as a way to simply progress the plot and have conflict between Daisy and Gatsby. The fact that it was so deep and featured so much content to analyze, and thematically rich content at that, really made me realize just how deeply a piece could be analyzed. It taught me as a reader to think about how any scene or line of dialogue or author’s choice could factor into the larger message of the story, and how the larger message of the story needs to be deeply analyzed to be discovered.

        As such, when it came time for our Gatsby essay, I decided to deeply and fully analyze the book for a theme and interpretation far more intricate and analytical than what was expected of me. Rather than doing what 10th grade Ryan would've done a few months prior, which would be talk about the typical lessons people learn from Gatsby about old money vs green money and moving on from the past, I decided to analyze how the book ties into the story of the Bible and illustrates the tragedy of Jesus Christ under a 1920's lens of capitalism and materialism. Now, while that idea is absolutely absurd and mentally deranged, it's also a very deep analysis and interpretation of the book, and it definitely met my goals of very deeply and substantially analyzing and examining the works we read.

        I also applied this stratagem of very deeply analyzing and looking into the novels of the year into the Sweat unit, where I think it can be most clearly seen, with my apparently infamous Sweat blog. Speaking of which, why people have hyped it up so much is beyond me. Like, I get the standard for a blog is just barely passing 250 words, but you would think I wrote an entire novel with the way people praise me for it. 

        That being said, that blog is the most definitive example of my complete and full analysis of the works we cover in class. Chronicling almost 2300 words, that essay very clearly highlights how I like to fully and utterly examine the works we covered in class with how I change focus from aspects as big as the headlines at the start of chapters to as parts as small as the characters' injuries. I very deeply analyzed Sweat in that blog, and I think it most clearly shows just how much I evolved to analyze and examine the stories we cover in class.

        One of the other things that I noticed in Sweat, although I didn't bother to include it in my blog, is the way classism, racism, and sexism seep into everyday parts of culture. Some characters in the book aren’t necessarily racist or sexist, but they still portray very racist or sexist characteristics at times.

        I wasn’t exactly unaware before reading Sweat of my status as Twitter’s worst enemy, a cisgender white straight male, but reading Sweat made me understand the influence that our basic positions in society can have on others. What are basic traits of himself to Oscar are massive defining characteristics to Jason, who views Oscar as worse due to his race and class. This same idea also works in vice versa. What are basic traits of myself like being white or male are massive defining characteristics to others, who might view me as worse because of it. 

        I understand the privilege being a white male gives me, but reading Sweat made me realize just how much people assume they know about a person just by looking at them, whether it'd be someone with privilege or someone without.

        Along with that, reading Sweat made me realize that as a straight white man, it's also a bit hard to relate to all the pieces we read focusing on the stories of minorities or immigrants or oppressed groups. This is weird to admit because, strange as it is, I'm actually maybe kinda semi-sorta the minority in our class?

        Considering just how many people in our class are a minority of some kind, be it female, Indian, Muslim, Jewish, etc. it means the amount of people who are in groups in positions of power in our class surprisingly low. While this was somewhat awkward for me, also helped to alleviate a sliver of the awkwardness I felt reading pieces about oppressed groups knowing I'll never actually get it. And this isn't to imply that I get it, but more that I get where it comes from. I now understand where every one of those authors, where every one of the characters in Sweat, and where every one of my classmates, come from when they talk about oppression in class. After being in this class the entire year, I now actually begin to understand just how much racism, sexism, and classism influence even the smallest daily occurrences in our lives, regardless of what race, sex, or class you're a part of.

Compare and Contrast

        One of the most fundamental ideas in English is the concept of compare and contrast. Finding a universal constant in anything is hard, but I've failed to see any English class after 6th grade not include compare and contrast somewhere in its curriculum. One of the other universal constants I've failed to not see happen in an English class is the progression and change of my writing style. So, I want to quickly highlight my growth and improvement over the year. especially because this is probably the most I've ever improved in a single year of English class considering the jump from normal English all the way to AP.

        Definitely the biggest jump in improvement I've made throughout the semester was how I improved my claims. While I don't think I've improved my claims themselves that much, I've definitely improved the introductions surrounding them to make my eventual thesis statements far more impactful and well-built up to.

           Going from no introductions at all with just pure claim statements, "Alexie's use of irony and forms of contrast like juxtaposition or paradoxes illuminates how messy and socially different the lives of Native Americans can be, putting it into perspective using humor."

        To eventually evolving to contain introductions before the claim statements, but ones that didn't necessarily tie into all the points I made in the essay or the larger topic at hand, like, "It asks the audience to legitimately question their sense of empathy and understanding by forcing the audience to focus on the unknown and unseen of society, questioning the audience and characters on how much they try to understand people in different social situations than them. Sweat builds to this core question with a specific creative blend of contrast, colloquialisms, and symbolism."

        Until finally managing to include introductions that blended unity with the claim statements and the arguments made for fully cohesive essays the entire way throughout, "The goal of an eulogy is to reflect and remember what a dead person has done. Eulogies are ideally able to encapsulate the life of a person, providing remembrance and closure. In this regard, Thatcher's eulogy for Ronald Reagan should be a gold standard. Thatcher masterfully pays respect to and reflects on Reagan's life, emphasizing and exaggerating his accomplishments through deliberate use of hyperbole and imagery."

        The entire progression of my claim statements and introductions is probably the improvement I'm most proud of throughout the year. This is because in the past, I would know my claim and points to prove and just write that right at the start with no further thought, whereas now in the present, I know exactly the topic of my essay, the tone I want to start off with, the core concept I want to dissect, the claim I have, the points I want to prove, and how they all connect together in unison. While my earlier method wasn't at all bad, my new claim-writing skills are so much more elevated and improved nowadays that I can't even remember the writer who wrote many of my earlier claim statements.

        Another one of the other biggest changes I've made in writing style during the year is my inclusion of evidence. In the past, I pretty much never heard or even considered the concept of naturally weaving in evidence without a "for example" beforehand. Implementing evidence straight into the current sentence like "this made-up quotation" was unfathomable to me. 

        As such, the change in my inclusion of evidence to feature a different method that's more convenient and fitting in some instances was very satisfying to me. I also learned how to not overcorrect and not exclusively use the naturally-included evidence, understanding not to get rid of the previous method of evidence inclusion I used, and instead realizing how to merge the two into one uniform writing style.

        The last major progression in writing I made this year was how I learned to have more varied and unique sentence structure. Not to say that there's anything wrong with the basic sentence structure I was using beforehand of just simple sentences with a few commas thrown in there for connecting points or interconnecting clauses. However, the new method I've learned during my time in class is so much more distinct and varied that I can't help but prefer it more.

        Discovering techniques like the dash-and-describe, the rhetorical question, the semi-colon clause conjunction, and the em-dash interrupting clause has massively expanded my plethora of sentence structural tools. With each of these new tricks I learned, I can make each sentence more unique and varied from one another, instead of just relying on the same old simple sentence with a period and comma I was used to. All of these new tricks really helped to make my essays less repetitive, cause any sentence with them stand out more, and allow my essays to have a more distinct style of author's voice due to the unique sentence structure, I, as the author, was including. Of course, none of these improvements would have been possible without the signature head of Room 214 who made it all possible.

Valentine’s Day

        I feel like it would be downright deplorable of me to go this entire writing talking about the writers and works and ideas that I've learned this year without mentioning the person who exposed me to all of them. On the one hand, Mrs. Valentino is easily one of the most insane and enflamed teachers I've ever had. On the other hand, it's that same passion that translates to such strong lessons and memorable education. 

        Some of the things said in class might have been a tad too far, i.e., "The librarian is the bastion of free speech". However, without that same passion being applied to lessons like clearly stating your claim or having the sources in a synthesis essay be in conversation with one another, I don't think I would've learned those lessons nearly as well as I did.

        Teaching isn't an easy job, especially with the current state the teachers’ union is in. As such, while I already respected and bonded with many of my teachers, I've never appreciated those connections as much as I have now. As such, having a teacher like Mrs. Valentino who's taught, influenced, and changed me so much is something I'm most thankful for at this time. 

        Also, this has been bugging me for months, so I'm just gonna say it right now. What happened to the unicorn on the shelf, Mrs. Valentino?

Classmates

        I also want to thank every single one of my classmates for making Room 214 as fun and welcoming a space as possible. I didn’t expect a group of people who take several AP courses and stay up till midnight every night to be genuinely social, let alone more social than my classes with kids who do actually have lives outside of school. And while I am grateful to every classmate, I want to give a special shout-out to a few classmates in particular:

Jessica - the most social anti-social person I’ve ever met, 2nd being myself

Aly - the most anti-social social person I’ve ever met 

Sarah - the person who carried me during our 10 Things of the Summer project while I had no clue what to do

Ana Sofia - the person with the best blog theme (even if Across the Spider-Verse was mid) 

Shayuri - the person with the 2nd best blog theme because who doesn't love ducks

Addy - the only person who wore a costume on Halloween (I still don’t know what you went as)

Pelon - the person who carried every seminar and saved me so much work in those group discussions

Aditya - the person who made every unnecessary and out-of-place group project even slightly bearable (I still don’t forgive you for the forgery) 

And last, but certainly least, I would like to give a particular ingratitude to one person in this class: 

Sukruta - WHO STOLE THE PINK FLAMINGO HAT FROM ME I CAN’T BELIEVE I DIDN’T GET IT HOW DARE YOU STEAL IT FROM ME WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU