If you want to see a problem, you'll find it.

Yesterday, when I was proudly showing my blog to my friend, my mouth twitched as I realised that what had looked like a luscious sandy Sahara-background on my MacBook, looked like an acidulous lime green om her pc. Omigod! Is this another one of those some-firms-are-trying-to-bully-Mac-users-to-break-down-and-cry-
"ok-Mac-isn't-the-best-thing-that-happened-to-me-since-my-mobile"?
So please let me know what associations my background colour gives you.

Before the colour-incident, we talked about my thesis. My primary idiosyncrasy is the theme- and plot-reading many a secondary school student has been forced to do. No, not even forced - they don't really know that there's another way to go round the bush, do they? But my argument is rather weak, as I am not entirely sure they still do the tedious plot-reading out there. By what I can tell form the other English teachers at the secondary school I'm teaching at, they do it! But then our conversation yesterday made me wonder whether I'm just imaging the problem, because it want it (so bad) to be there.

I gave the examples of two themes: growing up and love. My nightmare is a class reading different texts that deal with youth and growing up, and then having the class discuss their own feelings about growing up. Awk! As much as it is important that secondary schools secures the general education of the kids, it is by no means their primary goal! What I think they should learn (and the UVM agrees with this) is first and foremost to understand and use the English language. (OK, now I have to be careful not to say something I'll regret later!) And in my opinion, they cannot get the proper understanding of the language, if the language isn't the primary focus in the reading of texts. In other words, I want them to look at how The Streets' Sharp Darts and Thomas Hardy's The Walk have tons of similarities. This way, they will learn to understand how metaphors is not only being used my men in tights (poets from yesteryear - think Robin Hood and you're there), what it does to the language to be broken up in stanzas and what a repetition does to our memory.

Then my friend asks: "Well, can't they do that with the growing-up-theme as well? I mean, they can look at how different texts talk about growing up - how youngsters' language is different from adults', and thus how form and content co-work. Plus, they can see how youth has been perceived through the 20th century - showing what a central topos youth is."

Hmm, she was right... Themes are what you make of them. Of course, I still have a case - it should be pretty easy to find teachers doing it the plot-way, but now I'll hold back the little pit bull inside me and ask myself if the problem is there only because I want it to be.

And another positive thing: If themes are what you make of them, I'll still be able to practice my rhetorical agenda in spite of the theme-demand from the Board of Education.

Swamp-o-metre: 20 .