Something awful happened this morning. It might have been the doubleshotsugarfreenonfatextrafoamsoyvanillalatte that I had for breakfast, but for some reason I found myself flashing back to the English classes I took in High School. I can’t remember reading much that was actually good, and when we did read something good, it was ruined by the curriculum imposed by the state and district. The vision was painful — I could see myself, body parts arriving out of order and in the wrong sizes, worrying that my GPA might slip below 4.0, my fingers aching as I struggled to force myself to keep turning the pages of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” . . . I was subjected to a lot of literary turds in my day, but these are the especially stinky nuggets that just keep bobbing back up in my memory no matter how many times I try to flush them.

Ninth Grade: Freshman English. This is a magical time in young people’s lives, when they can finally put Junior High behind them and ascend into a whole new kind of angst-ridden, hormonal psychosis. So naturally, English teachers present one of the crown jewels of the English language — Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare is like a fine cut of steak — thick, juicy, nicely marbled. Delicately flame broiled to a plump and tender medium rare, it’s a real treat. So it’s easy to understand why most people say they don’t understand or appreciate Shakespeare when all they’ve been exposed to is High School English Shakespeare, because nobody wants to eat tri tip if it’s been cooked with a flame thrower.

For some reason, High School teachers have gotten it in their heads that you must READ a play before being allowed to see it performed. Watching the play as it was intended to be experienced is, for some reason, “cheating,” and watching a movie version is completely out of the question. Why? There’s a reason why Shakespeare wrote plays and not novels. A script is just a skeleton. The play’s the thing. The words are meant to be spoken, to come alive in the moment. This is a play stuffed with teen sex, street brawls, getting grounded by mom and dad, running away from home, weapons, poison, dead bodies . . . why would teenagers NOT be interested in Romeo and Juliet? Yet I was subjected to silent reading in class, and the only bone we had tossed to us at the end of the agony was Zeffirelli’s film version. I remember thinking “this is as good as it gets?” That film sucks, but the guys in the class didn’t mind so much because of the split-second glimpse you get of Olivia Hussey’s nipple. It’s sad that that was the only positive experience they were able to take away from their first taste of Shakespeare.

Tenth Grade Sophomore Honors English. I don’t actually remember very much about this class. It’s a weeder course, intended to sift through potential AP students and separate Over Achievers from This Isn’t Worth Its. It’s all very fuzzy now, but I have vague memories of being very pissed off during group projects in which I did all the work because I wasn’t content with a C minus, unlike my classmates. If there are any teachers out there reading this, just know that there is a special place in hell for teachers to burn if they ever assign group projects in which there is no way to determine who actually did the work, and all members of the group are given the same grade. I know you’re lazy and your government salary sucks. Should have thought about that before majoring in education. Please do not take it out on your students by lumping them together in order to reduce the number of papers you have to grade. Most of the acne I experienced in tenth grade was caused by people like you.

Eleventh Grade: AP American Literature. For some reason this course is inevitably crammed with the narcissistic wanking of Jazz Age writers who were rich, bored, and hated everything. We started off with “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. First off, this book doesn’t really belong in American Literature. Fitzgerald might have been born an American, but he didn’t like America and lived there as little as possible. On top of that, medical experts everywhere agree that reading F. Scott Fitzgerald causes irritable bowel syndrome, genital warts, and spontaneous cerebral implosion. There is a reason why Andy Kaufman punished unruly audiences in comedy clubs by reading this book at them. It’s the Lost Generation equivalent of Vogon poetry. I believe that the continued inclusion of this book on high school syllabi is evidence that the government is trying to reduce the surplus population by any means possible, including cruel and unusual reading material.

Twelfth Grade: AP English Literature. Supposedly the creme de la creme of public education. In reality: IT BURNS US, IT BURNS! This class involved assigning books the size of cinder blocks that had no business being written, let alone read. It was in this class that my undying hatred for Charles Dickens was kindled. It’s not that the man was a terrible writer. It’s that he never bothered to go back and edit his work so that they actually made good novels. His books were originally published serially in newspapers. He was paid by the word, and the longer he could make the tale last, the better he could feed his ten children. I get needing to write to pay the bills. But do we have to read it? How long is it going to take for Little Nell to just DIE? How much more abuse can poor Nicholas Nickleby take? Every single Dickens novel ever should just be retitled “Ten Thousand Pages of Agony and Then Somebody Finally Dies.”

In my dream world, High School English would be filled with staging plays and reading books that are read for a better reason than “They’ve been on the Syllabus for fifty years.” Why don’t we read Kurt Vonnegut? Douglas Adams? Jane Austen? Virginia Woolf? J.K. Rowling? J.R.R. Tolkien? Ray Bradbury? Why don’t we read because lots of books rock our socks off and give us new ideas? Why do we approach perfectly good works of genius like “Huckleberry Finn” and treat it like medicine instead of a treat?

High School students, I tip my hat to you in your noble battle against literary idiocy. I wouldn’t ever trade places with you. I already did my time. But don’t worry. You’ll make it.