10 Things I Hate About My Minor

My minor is English Education, and today I decided that I have the DUMBEST minor in the history of the world. And this is why.

1. The Ray B. West Building - This is where the English department is located. It is so old and there are box elder bugs crawling over everything. Sometimes they attack me. Gross! And the pipes clank, and I am pretty sure someone died there. And, Ray B. West was an engineer, it makes no sense!
2. It makes no sense - English doesn't make any sense. Please read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and tell me what it means. Why do I have to read it?
3. There really aren't all the connections there that English majors insist are there - no one puts all that crap into it. I don't understand how literature majors can write dissertations on one line of a book.
4. T.S. Eliot - he was in my American authors anthology and now he is in my British anthology. I don't know where he belongs. He was born in St. Louis and then he moved to England. He wrote "The Waste Land" and that poem is awful! People should write things that are happy and understandable and put those into anthologies.
5. The Art of B.S.ing - I B.S. so much on every English test and paper. And then I get A's on them! I feel like I should have to study to get A's on those things, but no. Then I do way better on the people who are serious about English. There has got to be something wrong with this system.
6. Krapp's Last Tape - Actually, just the paper that I had to write about Samuel Beckett's play. This play is about an old man who listens to old recordings of himself, and then he makes new records about his response to his old tapes, which were his past responses. And then, I have to compare him to Wordsworth and then prove that Krapp fails at being a Romantic poet.
7. I am brilliant without even trying - So the paper about Krapp's Last Tape was supposed to be 2 pages. I am so brilliant that my paper ended up being four pages. Cutting out brilliance is even harder than making stuff up to fill up a page limit.
8. The heavy books - Three days a week, I have to lug around a monstrous anthology so we can study one poem in class.
9. I won't even be able to teach English - why does the secondary ed program require a teaching minor when you can't teach it? I would rather get an anthropology minor or something like that, but there isn't an anthropology ed minor, so I am out of luck there. I could still get one, but I would have to do that in addition to a teaching minor.
10. I like facts - English is not based in fact. Every English class (except one exception) is totally based in theory and interpretation. History has facts, and then you use those to figure out what people are saying in their documents. Math is full of facts. English concepts are totally intangible. Check this out: "One final paradox: even though this is a poem about Nature not inspiring Wordsworth, he has of course still been inspired to write it, which means that Nature has in fact inspired him. This poem expresses the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings induced by the experience of Nature not inducing a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . ! Going back to the river has worked after all to impress and inspire his poetic imagination! Nature was in fact inspiring him, after all!" This is about Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and it makes sense but when you think about it, how do you really know that? Seriously.

Basically, I really do like English, but sometimes, it is a little bit ridiculous.