FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for May 15, 2020

She has a Cleopatra haircut.

you never read the authors’ pieces, did you, Peter?

Ode to a Nightingale is about a bird wheras Don Juan is about a player. Done. Ode to the West Wind is about wind wheras Ozymandias is about an ancient king. Bam!

Looks like Peter will repeat his grade again! (-:

I don’t think I will ever see.

A poem as good as my TV.

Oxymandias is much shorter than Ode to the West Wind, and makes better memes and inspirational posters.

Don Juan is really long and hideously misogynistic; Ode to a Nightingale can be read in one sitting. Don Juan can be mined for impressive-sounding literary quotes to dazzle incels.

Songs of Experience includes the “tyger tyger, burning bright” poem, which many people have at least heard of. Nobody has heard of anything from Wordsworth’s Prelude, which is about the length of a big fat novel.

There.

I’ve never heard of those books.

Any interest I might have had in reading for pleasure was snuffed out by my HS english literature class. Looks like this teacher is striving for the same result in her students.

Peter has not yet discovered “Cliff Notes.”

I didn’t learn about poetry in high school. Just wasn’t part of the curriculum.

At least he and his parents didn’t have to pay for this ridiculous class, except taxes. Thank God our high school English classes were more useful, i.e. sentence structure. And for cultural enrichment we had Shakespeare and current books like Kon-Tiki. Poetry is nice if you’re into it.

I have most of a doctorate in literature, and it would take several hundred pages to answer any of those questions, simply. And they really make no sense from a public school teaching level. I did that, too.

I don’t think I would have been able to do that either.

“ Compare and contrast”, for all three questions: Compare- all of them are written in English. Contrast- they were written by different people. There…done. Next time, make the test harder!

Keep going, Peter. One of these days, your mouth will look normal.

The only one of those poems I actually read in high school English was Ozymandias. It was half my life ago, but as I recall it is about the ruins of an ancient statue that consists of nothing but the feet (though given their size it is implied the statue must have been quite massive) and a plaque that says “I am Ozymandias, king of kings, look upon my work, ye mighty, and despair.” But all around the statue is nothing but featureless wasteland, any signs of this great king’s empire long lost to time. When I was a kid I interpreted it as the hubris of a man who thought he was a big deal, but once he was gone nobody remembered him and nothing he did meant anything. He also didn’t seem like a very nice guy, since the only thing we know about him is that he chose his final quote to be “compare my life to yours and then kill yourself.”

I always hated essay questions that asked, “How are they alike? How are they different?”

I took an Art Appreciation course, the Teacher didn’t appreciate my take on Art.

If this is the kind of thing being taught in high school English classes it’s no wonder so many people graduate stupid.