To: The Graduation Committee of Noah Rooze
From: Noah Rooze
Re: Coherent Communications in English
Things Fall Apart, Catcher in the Rye, The Odyssey, Brave New World… to name a few of the books that I read as a student in Leo’s class. Speak, Into Thin Air, The Perfect Storm, Animal Farm… All these books that we read, analysis writings, class discussions, scene breakdowns, breakdowns from stress, hours spent working or spent wasted: These are the things that define my time in English class. Most of our time revolved around books with something called “Literary Merit,” a principle that can easily be applied to Leo’s class or an English major. For the benefit of the committee I have included my own definition of this somehow significant phrase:
Literary Merit (noun): Old smelly books written by dead people that no sane person would read.
Usage: “Leo won’t let me read Alien Weasel Lawyers from Space because it’s not of literary merit.”
Okay, okay… that’s not the actual definition of it, but in the early years of English classes, that’s how I felt. By this definition, my conjecture is that Leo is no sane person. Not only does he read these books, but he expects other people to read them as well. In my senior year, I’m not sure I’m a sane person either.
I didn’t always read books, as a kid I never read Magic Treehouse, Captain Underpants, nor The Boxcar Children and books never held my attention until about 5th grade when I realized that I was good at reading. We had something called AR points that year in Language Arts, my teacher Amanda said that we needed to read a total of twelve AR points during the first grading period. Books had various point values based on the difficulty and I picked a book called Watership Down to read; it was worth 35 AR points.
I continued from there, reading books like Frank Herbert’s Dune and The White Plague. I read The Island of Doctor Moreau, Animal Farm, and even dabbled in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, without knowing what I was getting into. I always had books to my nose after that, but I had difficulty sticking that nose in books that we were assigned in class. Then we started my first Poetry unit. Instead of studying poetry, we wrote it. I was only okay, but I kept writing in the full year between each of the units. When I joined a site called AllPoetry, the world opened.
Those early years of reading and writing poetry weren’t always easy. I would write only when inspiration struck, and it was rare that I was near a pen and paper when it did. I was fearful of showing anything I wrote to the world unless I believed that it was something great. I tossed out countless poems without revision because I didn’t think I could ‘fix’ them. AllPoetry became a home where I connected to the world and hoped to leave my mark on it as well. I began getting involved with the community there, interacting on forums, talking with the owner and joining groups. I was (and to some degree still am) influenced by the study of surrealism in art class. More recently I co-founded Forage Poetry Society, a sort of hippie poetry commune on the web; became an official new member greeter on Allpoetry, which was a job I had already taken upon myself yet not officially; and was published in In-Flight Literary Magazine.
When I entered Leo’s English class in 9th grade, I thought he was crazy. He talked about concepts that were foreign to me even though I had a large foundation in literature. Terms, merit, analytical writing... Starting with paragraphs in Pre-AP English in 9th grade and building up to practice AP Exams in 11th. His anecdotes, dry humor and instruction drove home concepts that first-day-of-ninth-grade me would have never thought I could comprehend. Yes, Leo was crazy and now I am too.
