my high school English teacher did not know Kafka

My sophomore, high school English teacher gave our class only a couple 'creative' writing assignments. I didn't go to a great high school. Each year, I took English, of course, four years of English was expected to get into college. Each year, we'd have just a few token writing assignments. Perfunctory assignments, as if each English teacher had been told they had to teach writing and not just talk about novels. Oh, no poetry in my h.s. education. None. We did read a play each year. My sophomore year, we read aloud, The Merchant of Venice. I read the role of Shylock and felt embarassed to have that role. That was my entire h.s. exposure to Shakespeare. Gosh, by the time my daughter finished grade school at her Waldorf School, she had memorized a couple Shakespeare plays by performing in them and read many of them.

Like I said, I did not go to a h.s. with high academic standards. Most of the girls I knew went to college but few of them seriously expected to finish college. College was what good girls did until they landed the husband.  No kidding.  My h.s. best friend doubted she would continue in college past her freshman year.  I lost touch with her and don't know if she graduated from college.

Anyway. Sophomore English. We were given the assignment of describing our bedrooms right after I had read, for recreational reading, Kafka's Metamorphosis. As anyone who has read that book nows, in Metamorphosis, the protagonist is suddenly turned into a cockroach and copes with the ensuing existential angst of being a cockroach and fearing getting stepped on. At least that is what I remember. I only read the book once when I was 14 or 15, so it was long ago.

When she announced the assignment to describe our bedrooms, the teacher, who had struck me as one of the sharper tacks in the dull faculty at our h.s., spoke enthusiastically of creativity, urging us to be as creative as possible in describing our bedrooms.

With Kafka's cockroach on my mind, I decided to describe my bedroom from the perspective of an ant walking all over the things in my room.

My English teacher could make no sense of my bedroom description. I had worked on it.  One had to think to get what I wrote. I did not announce "I am going to describe my bedroom from the perspective of an ant."  I tried, seriously, to imitate Kafka and simply write from an ant's perspective with no further explanation regarding why an ant's walk  through my room was how I chose to creatively describe my bedroom.

I got a 'D' and the teacher told me I deserved an 'F' but she didn't want to mess my college options. Fuck her. I didn't think fuck her back then. Back then, I was ashamed. Back then, I actually assumed the teacher had understood I had been trying to imitate Kafka. I credited her with knowing much more about literature than she did.  It was only much later, like ten years ago, that I thought of that ant paper and realized "Duh, the teacher had no idea about Kafka's cockroach."

Sure I might not have done a good job imitating Kafka but anyone familiar with the Metamorphosis would have realized what I was trying to do.

I got no points for creativity.  I had believed her when she urged me to be creative.

Lesson learned. I never tried again to be creative in an English class assignment. I did write some poems my senior year that were so good my then-English teacher was shocked and did not hide her great surprise that I had written such nice poems.   One of my poems was so good that many girlfriends asked if they could give it to their boyfriends.