My High School Grad Class
Our next story is Joyce's "The Dead," which I stayed up reading until midnight. I will have to ask Padhraig what it all means, seeing as he's a Mick and all. Our teacher leads the class as though we are in AP 11th grade English. For one thing, you can find all of our books on any high school syllabus (Heart of Darkness, Daisy Miller, The Awakening) and our conversations in class (I would use the word "discourse" if this were a graduate class) are stilted, in part because the teacher doesn't really want us to talk, she wants us to listen to her dramatic pronouncement about vibrators and the sex life of Edith Wharton. I don't dislike her, but I am not learning anything (except how to pronouce the word "phlegm" correctly) and in our last class, she wrote words on the board to help our little talk. I can't remember what they were because I was refusing to take notes and instead doodling pictures of angry faces in the margins of my notebook ...