<p>Hi,</p>
<p>How much English do most people study in high school? I know everyone says "four years of “English”, but what does this actually involve? I mean, how many years do you spend on grammar, literature, writing essays etc.? And what books do you use?</p>
<p>Thanks :).</p>
<p>Probably a week or two on grammar, three years on literature, one year on essays
combined of course.</p>
<p>Absolutely nothing…of substance.</p>
<p>We use well-known pieces of literature, or sometimes we use less well-known pieces of literature.</p>
<p>We read stuff.</p>
<p>And analyze stuff.</p>
<p>And write stuff.</p>
<p>i barely study for English. I only study vocab. words for any vocab. quizzes. I should have studied grammar, stories, etc. English has always been the same. English does not change much.</p>
<p>We didn’t really study much this year in AP. My teacher’s not much into that. We kind of just did nothing.</p>
<p>But other than that, we studied grammar a lot in 9th grade. Spent a bit of time each day on it. Never again. Literature is the main focus, we do that all 4 years. Writing is all 4 years too.</p>
<p>I really think I am a slacker in English. I go online during that class and study for other classes, if I’m annoyed I will play N-game. Uhm… When have I done work.</p>
<p>Yet, I am the only A in that class, oddly, and although I don’t do anything in these classes I would like to say I think I am a decent writer.</p>
<p>I don’t study English. English just comes to me…</p>
<p>My freshman and sophomore years all we did were read books.</p>
<p>This year we’ve fit in grammar, essays, and books. I’ve learned so much this year.</p>
<p>I sometimes look over Sparknotes after finishing a book when getting ready to take a final reading test, and that’s about it.</p>
<p>I don’t think I’ve learned any English in like 10 years. I just read, write a first draft, turn it in, and am done</p>
<p>In school, we basically learn how to use commas, colons and semicolons, periods, and capitalization. That’s it for grammar.</p>
<p>On to reading skills. This year I learned nothing in school. The only critical reading skills I learned came from my Barron’s AP Lang & Comp study book…seriously. </p>
<p>I want an intensive English study course with a curriculum packed with writing, grammar, and reading. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, I get a boring English course filled with weekly vocabulary tests and a few books followed by their movies. </p>
<p>Oh, and a trite “review” that basically a complete repetition of information we learned in fourth grade around the time of the state standards.</p>
<p>I love languages, and I love the English language. If only I loved English class as well.</p>
<p>2 years of watching movies/sleeping and 2 years of busy work (I.E. one year of grammar worksheets which I failed miserably and then fixed by getting bonus on all the vocab and a year of the same but replace grammar worksheets with quizzes on early English literature I had better books of my own to be reading instead).</p>
<p>So how do you learn Writing? Do you use a book, or does your teacher just ask you to write an essay on any subject and hand it in by a certain date?</p>
<p>Take APEnglish Language and Comp if you want to learn writing</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is pretty much it. We didn’t learn writing in AP Eng Lang.</p>
<p>We have basically never done anything in English except read something and then write about it. But since we’ve never had formal grammar or even writing instruction, it’s basically like… read this, write this, hand it in. I have never written more than one draft for anything. English could be a useful class, but I think for most students, it’s not. Even in AP it was never like “this is how you could write this better” or “this is how you can set up a synthesis essay”, it was always - without fail - read this and write this. I don’t ever remember learning about grammar. Maybe in elementary school…</p>
<p>We pretty much read a book and have intense study guides that have like paragraph-length answers with quotes every week and then at the end of the book we write an essay (our teacher grades really hard) that is about half of the grade.
We have vocab tests every Friday but they are pretty easy.</p>
<p>Okay, let me break down what we did this entire year:</p>
<p>Read 3 (short) books, which I sparknoted the sparknotes (as in, skimmed the sparknotes which was made by a skim).</p>
<p>6 short stories. A couple discussions. A couple poems. </p>
<p>Literally, that’s it…I have an insane teacher where she goes off tangent daily and lectures (yells) about random stuff like sex all the time (there was this month where she just talked about sex daily, literally, and drew the male/female reproductive organs on the board, also literally).</p>