Embracing the Dragon Lady:
My Apology for Being an English Teaching Major
Even though I have been asked the questions “Why English” and “Why teaching” many times, I am happy to say that only a few of them have been in the cynical approach accompanied by comments about being not so well off financially and avoiding the “real world” of science, math and technology. I cannot say that my experience as an English education major is different from everyone but perhaps it differs from most English majors thanks in part to my parents’ opinions about an “appropriate” major. As much as my father would have liked for me to exercise my math skills and follow him in engineering, the most important thing to both him and my mother was that I choose something that I was passionate about and would have fun doing. However, there was one stipulation; I had to be able to defend my decision in more than a tautological “I like it because I like it.” So I responded with “I want to be the dragon lady.”
So many of my friends in other majors do still have to write papers and they struggle because they never had an adequate English teacher in high school that really got down to the nitty-gritty of writing. I had the privilege of being influenced by my own dragon lady who was extremely harsh went it came to her expectations let’s just say that I received my fair share of less than favorable grades from her before I can say I really got the hang of it. Her teaching style of both writing and literature itself was perhaps my second biggest push towards teaching English. Her approach to teaching Shakespeare in more than just read and quiz and instead, read, perform, divulge dirty humor, enticed me into wanting to almost emulate her in my own future teaching. Therefore my desire to be the dragon lady is to say that I want to prepare students for college in terms of writing in any choice of degree and I want to introduce them to a Shakespeare and a Beowulf and a Gatsby that they may not have seen before. I want them to realize that as practical as they may feel their papers are, an element of fantasy still resides in the paper they wanted to turn in to astound their professor. And that fantasy is not a bad thing. I think it is the best thing.
As much as I would like to say that the majority of my defense stems from the ideas and theories of various literary critics, the truth is that some of the most influential literature that led to my decision to embrace my passion was introduced to me well before I would even be able to understand anything any critics had to say. Dr. Seuss and his nonsense talks of green eggs and wockets and whos made me realize even at four years of age the beauty and necessity in fantasy as opposed to the harsh reality that was the “real world.” Why dwell in numbers and dissections when your passion lies with Frodo and Puck and Alice? I have to borrow perhaps some of my favorite lines from Dr. Seuss as he expresses this in a way that I feel almost cannot be surpasses as he says “ I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” My ultimate defense is that reading is a portal into fantasy where you can be, like Don Quixote, anything you want to, be it a knight, a scientist, or a mathematician. So why pick just one? Even Dr. Seuss asserts this in his book I Can Read with my Eyes Shut with
The more that you read,
The more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
The more places you’ll go.
Although literary critics are not my favorite source of inspiration, the passage read from page 350 of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism on the first day of class definitely left me with some new ammunition for the next time I am asked one of the trivial questions about majors. As the passage states “that all structures in words are partly rhetorical, and hence literary, and that the notion of a scientific or philosophical verbal structure free of rhetorical elements is and illusion”, the laymen’s version asserts that everything is literature therefore every major, even math, uses literature. Once again, why would you want to be the followers when you can be the leaders?
Also, after reading and memorizing “The Idea of Order at Key West” and hearing the notion that life changes after reading something, I decided to embrace this idea that is almost one of the central themes in Steven’s poem. Jast as how reading allows you to see new things in this world, hearing the song in “The Idea of Order at Key West” changes the way the people of the town see the town. Why keep looking through the same eye glasses when you can put on those that let you see the world through poetry seeing eyes?
I am an English Teaching major and I would not change it for the world. I love what I do and I love the idea of what I will be capable to do later on in my life. Therefore, why should I have to be defending doing something that I love? I would say to those who answer the question pertaining to the reasoning behind their choice in major with “because it will make me rich or because it is practical” that they are the ones whose life will be poorer than mine. In my mind, I am far richer than any who drag on day in and day out to make ends meet. I love to be the idealist to their realistic notions of a “successful” life. I, like Alice, love to remain in the dream world.
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