Confessions of a Former English Teacher

            >Insert introduction here<

I hate diagramming sentences.

            Don’t ask me an obscure grammar question.  I will have to look up the answer.

            I never actually took any of the courses I taught, and I taught a pretty impressive number of courses never to have taken:  Writing Lab, Fundamentals of Writing, Fundamentals of Writing I, Fundamentals of Writing II, English Composition I, English Composition II, Introduction to Literature, American Literature I, American Literature II, The American Short Story, and Creative Writing.  Blame it on a 1970s liberal arts education that had loose divisional requirements instead of the more stringent general educational requirements.  However, I did learn how to write by writing and, later, learn how to teach writing by teaching.

            I never took any education courses, either.

            So what did I take?  At Grinnell, intending to go into social work and majoring in German, I unintentionally bypassed the English department altogether except for my freshman tutorial in James Joyce, where I discovered that I did not know how to write a critical essay on symbolism in “Araby.”  How was I supposed to understand symbolism when I didn’t even understand the story?  Later, believing for a short time that I wanted to major in history, I took American Civilization I under the history department instead of the English department.  However, I took lots of German literature courses (reading in German) and a really fantastic Russian literature course (reading in English).  Eventually, I learned how to write literary essays by writing them (in English and in German) and by reading the elaborate comments of my professors.

            For my master’s degree at Central Missouri State University, I took the required literary research class, a linguistics class, and lots of literature classes.  I wanted to take advanced composition, but it was only offered at eight in the morning, and there was no way I could get my two-year-old to daycare, my five-year-old to kindergarten, and myself to campus (fifty miles away) that early on any morning.  

            So there you have it.  I am basically unqualified to do anything that I’ve done, but somehow I got into graduate school and afterward got my first teaching job, which lasted for the nineteen years until I quit.

            Let me assure you that by the time I quit, I pretty well knew what I was doing.

            But I still can’t stand diagramming sentences.