Hadlock's Journal: english

Blah. English is an old art form, but doesn't exactly mean it is one that should be learned or practiced for more than 2 years in high school. I'd much rather have an option to take two years of art appreciation instead of my last two years of english. As I understand it, we're learning about t the process of how one reads a book, and then goes out and reads other's views and opinions of that book,, and then eventually decide to write their own review of the book, for others to read. From my (probably) skewed view, reading slashdot isn't too horribly different from this. Someone/some company creates a new techonology or does something extremely creative, that took a lot of combined effort and talent, and shows it off to the world on the internet through pictures and words. On slashdot, this is reported, and many people are allowed to read about this wonderous new techonology or obscure and cheap hobby, then read and write their own reviews (post) about it. It's a community that is constantly feeding itself with new content, providing an outlet for idle thought and time. As with writing, only a small given percentage at any one point is idly working on their "next big project", while fewer are producing a finished product to the community each day. This example is almost mirrored on slashdot, which has a community approaching half a million users (although my guess would be that there are only about 100k active users), where 10 to 12 things per day are posted, and usually about a hundred or so comments are given to each post, while many more people simply read the comments, or "Review/critisisms". There are even two users who regularly do literary things in their comments; one writes haikus, while the other has the user name "grammar nazi". You can guess what he does. I'm already actively parparticipating in a large group that critisizes and compliments eachother's works. Why must another established group's thoughts and beliefs be foreced upon me, especially when I have already been exposed to the culture and clearly don't like it? Taking humanaties 1& 2 in my freshman and sophmore years was far more interesting, and covered far more information of interest. Not suprisingly, english was the least covered in depth. Of course, that's offset by the fact that we already have an ingraied and indeph english progam in most, if not all high school programs around the nation. Still, it's good to not be seeing more literature than I want, and the little you do see, is the eccentric kind and might actually be enjoyed at it's face value, without the complex need to dissect and analyze every small bit. Satire is a favorite of mine: easily recognizable and gets I's point across easily.