English 2: My first attempt
As I recounted in my very first post I passed English 1 in the fall of 1988 with an A but I didn’t do well enough in my final essay to be exempt from English 2. I thought, with my very good writing skills I would do as well (get an A) or almost as well (get a B) in English 2 as I did in English 1. Unfortunately that didn’t turn out to be the case. My taking English 2 at Brooklyn College in the spring of 1989 was the first of three attempts in what turned out to be a futile effort.
The class was taught at Boylan Hall by a lecturer, Edward Paolella. The goals of English 2 composition were to refine and sharpen the writing skills learned in English 1. Lecturer Paolella wasn’t as inspiring in English 2 as Professor Lee Haring was in English 1. He assigned us a number of works of literature instead of a composition handbook such as The Little, Brown Handbook. The works of literature assigned included three plays, Inherit the Wind, Bent and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and one short novel, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I believe we had to do six essays; we weren’t assigned a research paper that included such things as footnotes and a bibliography.
One time Lecturer Paolella posed a question to me as part of a class discussion. He asked me what I thought about the acceptability of homosexuality. I replied that my church, the Catholic Church, teaches to hate the sin but not the sinner. Another time Lecturer Paolella assigned me a track from an album. The album, he said, was American Pie (1971) and the track was named “Vincent.” American Pie was Don McLean’s album. At the Gideonse Library I listened to the album using a Sony studio headphones. “Starry, starry night,” McLean began “Vincent.” He was referring to one of Vincent Van Gogh’s works, The Starry Night. The song indeed was about Vincent Van Gogh, not me, as the song recounts the sad tale of his life that ended in his suicide. One track that I didn’t hear that day but only heard much later was the title track, “American Pie,” that reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1972 despite being over eight and a half minutes long. The song recounted “the day the music died.”
Near the end of the semester Lecturer Paolella told our class that the final English 2 exam would take place in Whitehead Hall. I wasn’t confident of my writing skills as I was the semester before, as my essays were marked C. On the exam day in May I went to the exam room at Whitehead Hall only to find the room empty. When I inquired what happened Lecturer Paolella gave me the option of submitting an essay on Julius Caesar over the summer but things didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. My lack of confidence in my writing skills and my depression caused me to miss the end-of-summer deadline for submitting my final English paper so I received a NC (no credit) just as he said he would when he gave me the option.
I went from the mountain peaks of success to the abyss of failure. I went from getting A and B essays in English 1 to C essays in English 2. This impotency in English 2 would continue when I took the course two more times, in the fall of 1989 and again in the fall of 1990 and it, along with my emotional problems caused me to drop out of Brooklyn College - twice.
