There is a certain experience that is absolutely necessary for all students to go through at some point in their lives _ an experience that, like falling in love or being turned into an apple, is an essential part of growing up.
It's an hour to midnight, and the student in question has a paper due in the morning; the paper is almost invariably for an English class, but the situation may be applied to any subject in which the teacher has been assaulted by so many years of boring arguments that a grand deviation from the thousands of identically unoriginal papers lurking beneath the teacher's files and hidden flask is sure to win the student an A.
Teachers need to relax too _ don't judge. As we learned in biology, a flask is a vital component of the Russian anatomy.
In this experience, the student in question _ let's call him Student A, for no reason other than if I continue to type out "question" repeatedly, its status as a legitimate noun will seem to crumble _ will have absolutely no thoughts at all about the topic he is asked to write about. He probably has not read the book or article in question. He probably has not been conscious in class in the last month or so.
He probably, in fact, set up a BYODD¢ (Build-Your-Own-Drooling-Decoy) at his desk on the third day of class and left for Bolivia to cut down jungle plant branches and sleep with women in a crystal cave, or whatever it is that Indiana Jones does. He doesn't know, because he didn't read the movie's Wikipedia entry.
Somehow, while taming the bush life and sampling the native cuisine of Bolivia, Student A received the message that his teacher had assigned an essay that must be handed in the next day, and would Student A please control his salivary glands because the school doesn't have flood insurance.
It does, however, have Smart Boards, because if our children are going to learn anything standing knee-deep in stagnant E. coli waters, they darn well won't get their knowledge from a board where the teacher's got to actually write on it. This isn't the 17th century _ except for the E. coli.
Reluctantly, Student A put away his deep love of Bolivian culture and did what any responsible student does when asked to write an essay: he surfed the Internet for about 20 hours and delved into the possibilities of an intriguing allegorical comparison of the book in question to a radical alternative film. This film is becoming rather well-known in the public sector; it features kittens, and it was inspired by kittens.
After the 20 hours of surfing the Internet necessary to get his essay-writing license from the DMV, Student A realized that it was 10:30 and the night before the morning that his paper was due.
He exchanged a knowing look with the unopened novel lying beside his computer _ the book had at that point lost quite a bit of its mass to the larvae of the notorious Bolivian bookworms, known as Bolivius bookworumus in the scientific community, but here and there among its shreds a sentence or two could still be distinguished.
Student A realized that it was time to pull up his pants and buckle down to write that essay, and he immediately fell asleep.
His alarm at 6 o'clock the next morning was gravely concerned. It didn't even make the ringing noise that high school students are evolutionarily adapted to simply incorporate into their dreams for a half hour or so; instead it hunched at his ear and whispered repeatedly, "Oh no. Oh no."
This is when the student finally chose to do what he should have paid someone else in his class to do long ago when the essay was first assigned; he looked up the assigned work on Sparknotes and wrote down the most ridiculous interpretations that he could muster.
He injected profound symbolism into the teacup that a minor character held for one sentence; he paused at points to drain great troughs of coffee as he explained how the shirt worn by the main character was actually a symbol of female oppression, particularly when the character spilled some ketchup on it in Chapter 12.
He gushed about how Moby Dick actually describes the relationship between the Irish Republic (represented by the captain's hat) and potatoes (represented by the whale's hat).
He made mountains out of molehills and was sure to periodically throw in the words "nevertheless" and "hitherto" to give his work some authority.
And do you know what Student A did, ladies and gentlemen?
He got that A.
The best way to pass an English class is to write with complete insanity. When composing an essay on themes in a piece of literature, one must always put one's self in the place of a mad man and write down whatever lunatic interpretations of the assigned topic he would come up with.
Your goal when writing an English essay is never to discuss what the work in question was actually about; your teacher knows bloody well what the work was about.
She studied the work in graduate school, where she learned precisely the sort of food the author was eating when he wrote Page 119 of the work, as well as what strain of E. coli he contracted from it.
She has read thousands of essays about what that piece of literature was actually about, and it is a wonder that she can even write the title on the board without taking her chalk and chasing the other staff around the school while explaining to them that the chalk represents white supremacy and romance.
Students, you must have mercy on your poor English teachers, who spent years learning subtle nuances and graces of great literary works and, instead of being able to talk with other knowledgeable people about the stanzas of Latin epics, are forced to read hundreds of badly-written Wikipedia rip-offs every year. Have mercy _ give them variety.
Give them entertainment. Interpret the assignments they give you in the strangest ways possible. Brighten their lives with analyses of Jane Eyre's prediction of the nuclear arms race; expand their realms of thinking by debating with them the literary manifestations of Shakespeare's desire to exterminate the human race and repopulate the Earth with small rabbits.
Ladies and gentlemen, these kind teachers put up with mindless, poorly worded droning of identical themes for years _ the least you can do is provide them the enjoyment of having a genuine lunatic in one of their classes.
If you find that you're really good at conjuring up insane theories and supporting them with a logic that only you understand, perhaps you will look into majoring in English when you go to college.
Then again, perhaps you will become a Republican.
Jessie Matus is a senior at Oneonta High School.
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