This semester, I'm taking the strangest class I've ever had--and it's an honors English class. Our attendance consists of drawing self portraits, we're required to keep a daily journal of strange things we see, and our writing assignments always result in incomprehensible, stream-of-consciousness mumbo jumbo. The point of all this is to explore what it means to be creative, and to help us tap into our individual creativity. Every time I go to this class, my notions about what "good writing" means are warped a little further. I've started thinking of this class as the best English class I've ever taken, but it lies in direct competition with its polar opposite: AP English Literature.
AP Lit was the most challenging and structured class you could imagine. The whole point was to prepare us for one of the most challenging AP exams, so it made sense. We wrote constantly and under strict time constraints. We had to read four AP-level books and connect themes from all of them in a final project that was nearly the death of me. I was constantly struggling with some deadline or another for that class, but there's no doubt I came out of the experience a better writer.
I often find myself trying to compare the two, wondering how they could both be the best English class ever. They present two completely different arguments about the purpose of writing and form it should take. In AP Lit, we wrote to make sense of celebrated literature. Our goal was to understand the writings of others and to pinpoint the devices they used to create their desired effect. In English 200H, we write to make no sense at all. Anything we think of goes directly on the paper, and I get the feeling we're supposed to gain an understanding of ourselves in the process.
One perfect example of the differences between the two is how we handled Shakespeare. In AP Lit, we spent weeks reading Macbeth, analyzing it, gaining a clear understanding of why it was a celebrated classic. In English 200H, we read an excerpt from Macbeth and discussed its effect on the reader. We then proceeded to re-write it as the worst possible poem we could imagine. The point was to help us understand what Shakespeare would have sounded like to the people of his day; to convince us that Shakespeare's work was not 'high art' while he was alive.
Although both classes seem wildly different, I like them both because they have the same goal: to understand what makes writing good. In AP Lit, we tried to find the answer by looking to celebrated writers and studying their methods. We used the resources we already had to determine what we should do to create quality work. In English 200H, we're starting from the beginning and, instead of studying other works, we're studying ourselves. Both classes are rooted in exploration and seeking to understand. That's why, despite their many differences, they're both my favorite English classes of all time.
