English 99 - Frank Gannon

Once again I would like to thank you for assigning a very short reading. And surprisingly I enjoyed this one! I think it's because I relate.

What I liked about this essay was when Gannon was listing the different types of groups in his English 99 class. I found that factor so true, even in our own English 100 class I notice we all have our own groups we associate with. And it was interesting reading the different styles of their writing, like the bored girls wrote about boys and clothes. The jocks wrote about partying and hot girls, and the Refugees wrote about their home town and the hardships. Even the writing topics between me and my best friend vary drastically. Last year in AP English 4 we had to write a practice essay for the UC's application free response essay. I wrote closely to the bored girls' and jocks' topics. On the other hand my best friend wrote about moving to the U.S.from Vietnam. And I realize that we have this barrier of different lifestyles, I was born here on U.S. soil and my best friend immigrated to the U.S. when she was seven. My life is nothing like hers, mine even might seem boring and I think Gannon thought the same about the bored girls' and jocks' essays.
I felt that Gannon was trying too hard to put up the image of a Professor. He had the look of a professor down but he didn't have the motive to teach this class. Gannon was expecting to teach the smarter bunch, he wanted to read amazing quality papers not papers written in "see spot run" form. English 99 as Gannon described it "was there so that the college could get some money from these kids before they flunked out or quit." -page 215
The college already has a bad image of this class and Gannon didn't do anything to turn it around. On page 217 Gannon stated how you learn how to write well, "You don't learn it, you learn how to do it." I do agree with it, but I thought that Gannon was being hypocritical in that he failed to help correct his students grammatical errors. Is Gannon teaching his students like Mori's Japanese teachers? Tough love? At the end of this essay I was very disappointed in Gannon, he just gave up and he was biased to the Refugees. The Refugees' papers really struck Gannon hard and he passed most of them. But he failed to teach them the basic grammatical skills they need to succeed in English 101. The basic concept of English 99 was to get the students ready for English 101. -Page 217
That part really upset me and I was glad in the end that he was fired. A teacher is there to help students to succeed in anyway possible.