Themes

I have now read several of my classmates' blogs about our fabulous/horrendous substitute teacher on Friday, henceforth to be known as "Mr. English Sub."  In particular, I laughed at the fact that he asked both of our classes about "themes" from the book, and how we honestly didn't know how to respond to questions like this because they were just so... simple.

Back in 10th grade, when we had just begun to learn what literary terms were, finding the themes of a book would have sent many of us into a cold sweat.  We would have thrown out some general term like "conflict!" or "racism!" and then written a two page handwritten essay that would have taken us the entire class period and required thumbing through our books for half of the time looking for quotes.

Now, we write five to seven page essays (maybe more, if you write really fast or big), in forty minutes without books, using only our minds and a year and a half of intimidation and training.  And the essays we write today are exponentially better than our fumbling three-paragraph essays of yesteryear where we talked incessantly about metaphors and similes (I'm pretty sure those were the only two literary terms that we understood for most of the first two years of high school... that, and repetition).

So yes, Mr. English Sub, we know what the themes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are.  Furthermore, we know the difference between situational, verbal, and dramatic irony and understand symbols and indirect characterization.  And a lot more.

I guess you could say that one "theme" of Friday's class was that we all had an excuse to feel vastly superior.