Both quotes are good and insightful..thanks…(and I’ll come back to them on this post), but first:

While I am disgusted by a lot of the formal educational systems I’ve been exposed to, I will give this teacher a break. After all, she operates in it and in many ways is a product, like the rest of it. I will also say that I have had wonderful teachers. (In fact, when I realized what had happened in this class with me, the first person I called was one of my former professors to discuss it.)

Another problem, in this situation, is that this is an on-line class. In an in-person class,these comments would have been part of a discussion and most likely, it would have lead to a deeper discussion of the material.

Finally, another mistake that I made was failing to follow the instructions. After reading the posts in the class that had been posted to date, it appeared to me that something in the nature of a journal entry about a novel was acceptable. However, I returned to the syllabus and she wants the plot summary, why we like the novel, who are the main characters…so I probably should have paid more attention and avoided the class if I didn’t want to engage in a fill-in-the-box exercise.

On the quotes-it’s most interesting that you post the first one. There seem to be two schools of thought in art and literature. One is that the author communicates some type of absolute truth that a “good” reader will discover. The other (my view) is that each reader or viewer brings their own history and ideas to any literature or work art. The true art is created when the reader or viewer is engaged with the artwork or literature, which produces a unique work each time it is read or examined. When I discussed this issue in one of the first exams in this class, the teacher clearly fell in the first camp and wrote “interesting theory” beside the other notes.

Thank you very much for reading this rambling…this is the type of discussion I had hoped to have in the class. I could have saved a couple of dollars.