Dear Junior,
I just want you to know that I feel your pain. I decided to write you this letter about my AP English 11 class so you can have the much deserved sympathy, and also know that you are not alone. Similar to you, I often felt that the world was coming to an end in Ms. Serensky’s class (which it was not…that is the only main difference). But I do understand your feeling of impending doom as we often dealt with nervously awaiting discussions, in-class essays, and encounters with our new teacher. AP English 11 soon became our own personal “Destroyer of Worlds” as it started to take over our homework time, conversations, and lives. At least this was how our scared eleventh-grader minds saw it. “Paralyzed by the fear that [we’ll] screw it up” depicted a constant feeling in this class. The fear of messing up anything weighed down on everyone, whether they want to admit it or not. Some classic situations we feared; pronouncing a word or character name wrong, getting lower than a 5 on an essay, disappointing Ms. Serensky, being a bummer of a writing partner, writing an essay on the wrong section, talking too much or too little in class, not annotating a book correctly, not bringing exact change to the give-Ms. Serensky-cash day, or screwing up in any other way. All these pressures we placed on ourselves in AP English 11. Maybe Ms. Serensky held “responsibility for a portion of [our] despair”, but I think most was self-inflicted an unnesecary. I can not deny that some of these fears most definitely carried through to AP 12, but just in a lesser amount. Similar to how your despair in the first universe was majorly your own fault as you focused too much on the inevitable…we did the same. For example, the inevitability that no matter how much time we worried over essays, they came anyway. Or the inevitability of feeling nervous and slighty nauseas before getting a paper returned. Looking back at AP English 11, I think we “spent too much time trying to hide from the inevitable”, just like you also discovered. The best times in AP English 11 definitely happened when we decided to live in the moment and not worry about the essay next week, the pages we have for reading, or anything else. But let’s be real…my frightened eleventh grade self lacked the ability to see this. So basically, if you want to hear that other people suffer through similar situations as you (just on a slightly different level), just have a conversation about AP English 11 with any of my classmates.Sincerely,
Carolyn
Carolyn, I think comparing AP English 11 to the Destroyer of the Worlds is a great idea. It may seem obvious, but I actually did not make that connection! I often remember the feeling, as a timid junior, of constant terror, worrying that I might mess up the discussion, forget turnitin.com (this is still true today), or forgetting my money on book days (ditto). I feel like its very difficult to try to live in the moment and not worry about the weeks ahead when you have the next two months written out for you, sitting there in your binder, everyday. The things typed in bold send a chill down my spine, and I can't help but try to think of a way to avoid it (as I was telling you today, about my broken right wrist/AP test idea).
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