The Bottom Shelf Review

When I was in high school, I spent three semesters with Mrs. Smith. She was my English teacher for my first semester of Honors English 10, and she was my AP Literature teacher. I think she chose to be a teacher because she loved books and literature, without much consideration for the fact that the job would also require spending a lot of time with teenagers.

It is a universally accepted truth that teenagers are, objectively, assholes. I can barely even remember the names of most of the boys in my AP Lit class, but I do remember that I hated them. They were always loud, obnoxious, obsessed with the sounds of their own voices, and convinced that they were the funniest people in our high school (they weren’t, I was, and as a bonus, I wasn’t annoying about it). But as much as I hated them, I hated her more. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but she hated me too, so I felt justified. How dare I dislike The Great Gatsby or genuinely enjoy sci-fi novels? How dare I not have any friends in the class?

(For the record, I had friends in high school, but whoever was making my schedule must have also hated me, because I never saw any of them.)

(I hated a lot of people in high school. I was, objectively, an asshole teenager.)

So, as much as I hated it in AP Stats or AP Gov when what’s-his-face-1 (hereby referred to as WHF1) or what’s-his-face-2 (hereby referred to as WHF2) opened their mouths to curse us all with the inner workings of their minds, I relished in it during AP Lit. When she was lecturing us about what books we should or shouldn’t use for our essays on the exam in May, and WHF2 asked if he could use Percy Jackson, I am unashamed to say I laughed. When WHF1 came in late every single morning and you could see the patience draining from her a little faster every day, I smiled to myself.

Of course, AP Lit was about a lot more than watching WHF1 and WHF2 drive Mrs. Smith crazier and crazier every single day. And unfortunately, I think she might have been better suited to being a math teacher or a chemistry teacher. The first electron shell in an atom always has two electrons in it: that is an objective, inarguable fact (unless, I think, it’s a hydrogen atom. Don’t quote me on that, it’s been a few years.) Seven plus eight is always fifteen. Those are yes/no questions, and she could always be right in a math or a science class.

But literature is not always objective. I see the literary value in Beloved, yeah, and I still think about what I learned from that book in my classes, but that doesn’t mean I had to like it. When we read Macbeth, and WHF1 and WHF2 complained about how boring it is, I kept quiet about the fact that I really enjoyed Shakespeare for the sake of watching her head explode a little bit. And yeah, it’s frustrating when people don’t like what you like exactly how you like it (if I see one more person on Instagram make fun of Taylor Swift for the line “there’s escape in escaping”, I’m headed straight to the block button). But you also have to know your audience. She was given the great burden of trying to teach 17-year-old boys who were just months from graduating and leaving to major in business while they played football and joined frats about Toni Morrison, which must have been a unique form of hell. And yet, I am still firm in the belief that the essays I gave her were not deserving of a C grade, over and over and over.

She wasn’t a bad teacher. She was one of the only teachers I had who must have actually read my 504 plan, because all her seating charts had me in the front row and I always got extra time on the in-class essays. But I dreaded her classes, I fought to keep a C+ in her class, and by the time the AP exam rolled around, I’d kind of silently accepted that based on my performance in her class, I’d probably be lucky to get a 3. My friends had all warned me against using a book I’d read for fun on the exam, and Mrs. Smith made it sound like if we did that, it would be an automatic fail, but then on the day of, I was sitting in the auxiliary gym, already worn out from the double exam day I’d had the day before and the multiple choice questions I’d already answered (which, for the record, the AP Lit exam had just about the gayest poem I have ever read in my life, but all the multiple choice questions referred to the author’s lover as her “friend” and it still makes me so angry).

The AP Lit exam had two sections: multiple choice and free response questions, or FRQs. We started with the multiple choice questions, then moved onto the FRQs: the first one would ask you to analyze a poem, the second an excerpt from a book, and the third would be an open ended question that you could answer using any book of your choice—as long as it had “literary merit”. But “literary merit” never seemed to have a clear definition. The most basic version of the definition is that a book with literary merit is one that has complexity. It has symbols, a deeper meaning, something that goes beyond “John went to the store and bought some apples”. The third FRQ would have a list of books that would fit the prompt, but as long as you could prove that your book had that theme, AP claimed that you could use any book you chose. Our teachers urged us to use books we had read in class, to use the classics. My friends used Of Mice and Men or Beloved or The Great Gatsby.

But as I was sitting in my seat in the auxiliary gym, the only thing between me and never seeing my English teacher again this cardstock exam, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’d read some of the books on the suggested list—Fences, The Color Purple—and I could see them fitting the prompt, but I had also spent the year quietly wondering why all the “literary merit” only seemed to apply to the classics written fifty years ago, when the sci-fi or young adult books in the library that I’d been steadily working my way through during high school all had symbols and deeper meanings I could point to. I could’ve happily written an essay about how Sona’s Pilot eye symbolized her connection to her own humanity in Gearbreakers, or how the Left Hand’s lack of identity parallels the erasure of the nation of Nacea in Mask of Shadows. And when the AP Lit exam asked about characters who rebelled against societal expectations, I could have written about 1984 or The Round House, but a book that I knew inside and out was Last Night at the Telegraph Club, and Lily fit that prompt to a T.

For the next two months after that exam, I chose not to think about it. I managed to pass the class, I graduated, and then I was on my way to moving halfway across the country. I never had to see WHF1 or WHF2, or Mrs. Smith, or any of the other hundreds of people from my high school that I hated. Only weeks after graduation, I had my summer orientation at Wilson, and now I had a roommate, a schedule for the fall semester, and I was moving on now. Whatever scores I got on my AP exams were the scores I got, and worrying myself sick wouldn’t change anything. Still, the night before scores were released, I had trouble sleeping.

When I woke up, I checked my other scores first. I was pleased to find that I’d gotten a 4 in chemistry and statistics, but was disappointed in my 3 in government. It took me a moment to get up the nerve to check my English score, expecting it to be a 3 or even a 2, but it wasn’t—it was a 5.

It was a sort of justification to myself. I knew that I was smart, that I was good at literary analysis and at reading between the lines of a story. I had those skills, and I knew how to apply them, and to me, my score was proof of the fact that my teacher wasn’t always right. There’s nothing wrong with the classics, but those aren’t the books that most people read by choice in real life, so while my English classes in high school graded us on how well we knew the books we hated, my score to me is proof that I learned the skills that should have been the end goal of my classes.