So go on and bury me, I'll find mine underneath

[occultatio]

I am SO F*CKING DONE WITH GULAG! YEAH! GO ME!

For all those reading this that aren't Rae:
The very worst part of summer for next year's AP English students was reading a little book called The Gulag Archipelago. This book was nearly 500 pages long, torturous, and we had to write 25 flipping essays on it.

And I just finished the 25th one.

A major annoyance and topic of communal kvetching was the fact that, despite 23 of the 25 essays prompting us to respond to and explain quotes from the book, exactly 4 of them had page numbers attached.

That's right. We got to go treasure hunting through a 476-page book for one-sentence quotes.

And this was not a fun long book, like Lonesome Dove. That one was 940 pages, but it was actually readable. No, Gulag tells the "story" of how millions of people in Stalinist Russia were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, sent to hard labor camps, tortured some more, degenerated morally, and killed. Yay!

But it's all OVER now.


I worked out a little theory. Every summer, we get one ridiculously long book, one heavily moralistic book, one easily enjoyable book, and one torturous-to-read book. Last year, we had American Pastoral(torturous), The Grapes of Wrath (moralistic) and Lonesome Dove (long and enjoyable). This year, we had The Gulag Archipelago (long and torturous), 1984 (moralistic) and The God of Small Things (enjoyable).

I think I'm on to something here. . .

Comments

[wolfspider.livejournal.com]

Twenty-five essays on The Gulag Archipelago?!? Twenty-five essays on just ONE novel?

What class is this? Torture 101?

I think the teacher of this class took the subject matter of the novel too much to heart when designing the syllabus....

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

"Oh, don't worry, these aren't all essays. You don't have to write that much, only about a page. You don't need thesis statements or anything, just make a point. And don't worry too much about them, they're mainly for yourself. Just make sure you put thought into them so that, when you turn them in, I can see how your mind works. Have fun this summer!"

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

The one bone they did throw us, incidentally, was that all the questions were in order. So if you knew that #20 was on p.346 and #23 was on p.389, then you "only" had a forty-page window for #'s 21 and 22.

Of course, when the entire quote for #21 is "the main problem of the twentieth century," you got a pretty big search ahead of you. It took me literally about THREE HOURS to find those last couple questions. Eventually, I found both of them, thank god. The problem was that #21 turned out to be only four pages in front of #23, despite the huge gap between it and #20.

And do you know where #22 was? Do you know? I'll tell you: #22 was ONE SENTENCE before #23.

So every time I looked at the page, I would see one or the other, look at my question sheet, and figure it was the one I already had. It took me three hours to realize that there were two of them right next to each other.

Yes, I did in fact run out of my room screaming and banging my head on random walls. Thank you for your concern.

[craezy.livejournal.com]

i'm *so* jealous that you've washed your hands of Gulag. i don't have a page worth of stuff to say for all the prompts. especially the question where we had to summarize the treatment of the prisoners. gaaa! i feel like i can sufficiently answer many of the questions in two or three sentences.

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

um. . . eh heh. . .
I didn't actually write full pages for most of them either. I could have answered all of them in a sentence or two, but I bullshitted my way to at least half a page. The average length is probably about 2/3 a page per essay.

And let's not get into how I _combined_ 22 and 23 into a single, full-page write. . .

::rubs back of neck::