friday, february 25, 2005
More stupid school things
In AP English today, my teacher had us write a timed short essay. This is the only kind of essay we write. But hey, it was cool — we hardly ever write at all. The prompt, from memory:
“When one has no one, nowhere else one can go.” Who said this? Discuss the context of the quote and how it affects/relates to Raskolnikov’s life.
(The homework was to have finished Crime and Punishment by today.)
Two problems. The quote is on page 24 of the novel. The books is 542 pages long and I finished it last week. Am I going to remember a short piece of dialogue from page 24? No, especially because that quote does not appear in our book. We have a different translation and instead Marmeladov says, “‘Yet if you do not go to him, you have nowhere else to go!’”
That is not nearly as poetic or important-sounding as the teacher’s quote.
rawr. So I pretended it was in another part of the book and wrote about that. After class, I conferred with a few of the other students and none of them remembered it, either — not even the one who had only read up to page 95 by yesterday. But I didn’t think twice because the only thing I have learned from this class is that I do not read carefully enough.
The 35-minute essay was all we did during an 80-minute class period.
Update 2/25/05 21:52: I asked him about it later and he said “It’s so I can see your thought process. You could pretty much put the quote anywhere in the novel.” And I got a good grade. Indignation for nothing!
comments (2)
hooked on my phonixs monkey
– kyle on 2/18/2005 23:17:06
comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.
