Life’s A Bitch, Now So Am I

The further I get from high school the more surreal English class seems. Deeply strange part of our culture. Literary analysis is fun and interesting to read but like. You shouldnt make people who don't want to do it do it. It's insane

@tanadrin said:

I don't think it does! Calculus and history are fundamentally about...understanding the world. Like. They're practical. Literature is fundamental recreational! It'd be like if you...idk, made kids Play DOOM for a grade

I could understand it if it was explicitly like "you need to read the classics to understand context, references, whatever" but it's not! It's often modern literature that wasn't particularly important!

It’s about cultural context and understanding culture. Which is important both for the same reason that a lot of not-otherwise-obviously-applicable education is important, i.e., context for new information, general background information on cultural discourse, and (not a little bit) self-conscious prestige culture formation—this last bit is something the culture has moved away from a little bit in recent decades, but only a little bit. But having a decently broad exposure to culture (even prestige culture—especially prestige culture) is undeniably useful.

The reason why you write essays on books in English class is even more basic than that: at the secondary education level, we have folded the “practice writing long-form persuasive essays” and “develop cultural context by reading books” activities into one class, so it makes sense to combine those activities by having you read books then write essays about them. Sometimes these separate functions are explicitly delineated, sometimes they’re not, but they’re usually combined because it is logistically convenient—it helps that in order to check that students are actually engaging with what they read, you need them to produce some gradeable work, and writing essays is a good way to do that.

Armand’s backstory mentioned oh it’s over

Not that it's above criticism, it's not, but I feel your Met Gala take should at least acknowledge it's a fundraiser for an art museum with pay-what-you-want admission instead of vaguely presenting it as as if it's an event where everyone goes to dump their money in Scrooge McDuck pits and jump around in it

"They put on the Met Gala as a distraction from-"

You cannot distract the general public with the Met Gala because the general public does not watch the Met Gala. It's a fashion slideshow on the morning news to them. It's disproportionately popular on social media but the number of people following it live is, while it's a number I can't quantify, I have to wager not very large

See also the Oscars, which are "around twenty million viewers" popular, not Super Bowl popular, nothing that's all-consuming but the Super Bowl so the idea that any event but that could be a "distraction" from anything in a modern media environment just doesn't work

Banger of a clickbait headline, banger of grim, accurate essay.