A Tribute to Dr. Brandie R. Siegfried, OR, An English Major's Reflections on Growing Up

In 2006, when I was a senior in high school, I was in AP English with Ms. Sue Norton. My class was composed of the same people as inhabited every single one of my other classes. It didn't mean much that it was English--we were AP everything students--so we didn't expect to get anything else out of it. Ms. Norton was this sweet old lady who smiled a lot and had a very soft voice. We expected it to be a breeze.
The first thing she showed us was a template for a research paper. You know what I'm talking about. The intro paragraph has intro sentence, intro sentence, intro sentence, thesis. And every other paragraph had topic sentence, concrete detail, commentary commentary, etc. You've all seen it. And she told us that if we tried to emulate it at all in her class, we would fail on our papers. I was excited.
Through the course of the year, we learned not only to write with our own voices (or to utilize the voices we had already had without knowing we had them) but also to teach ourselves. Instead of lecturing on her own ideas about the literature (like so many teachers used to preach theories passionately over our heads) she gave us background and set us loose. We read plays in a circle and stopped to discuss. We had to have real opinions and ideas. We learned to truly think.
And then I came to school at a huge university, where everyone--and everything--was smarter than I was. My English professors were so varied, I didn't know what to expect. But I followed the prompts, I analyzed poems based on word meaning and whatever theory that professor preached, and I spit out papers that followed all the guidelines. I learned to speed read so fast I finished Frankenstein in three days. I forgot what it was like to get sucked into a book and to actually feel sadness when it finished and there was nothing more to analyze. Reading became work, and I couldn't get through a story or poem without thinking of how the women related to the men, how the power structure played out, what the story said about the personal experience of the author, etc...
And then I jumped into this semester, taking English 292 and 382. In 382, Shakespeare with Dr. Siegfried, I was really nervous the first day. She had all these strict beliefs and requirements which made at least half the class disappear after the first day. The class got down to 11 people before she announced that it was about the size she liked, and she became more personable. The fear I had had the first day immediately evaporated, and this class became the one that proved I was in the right major. I actually got excited about all of my papers, because when she asked us a question, she expected a real answer. Not just a spewed out knowledge of what she had told us the day before, but a real answer. So these papers involved what I actually thought and felt, and I began to grow as a person, not just remaining static in my studies and telling people I was an English major. Now I'm a critic. A real one.
And then, the last two weeks of the semester, there were a couple of things that happened that have changed me permanently. First, was the final research paper. When Dr. Siegfried told us about it, she said she wanted us to produce something that was an actual contribution to the literary scene--something real, that we could submit for a contest, an undergrad journal, a conference, etc. So we began thinking real thoughts, making real hypotheses, and and putting real thoughts and feelings down on paper. I'm not going to say that my 11-page monster written on how Portia from The Merchant of Venice is a reflection of Elizabeth I just as much as Shylock becomes a prototype for Rodrigo Lopez, her Portuguese Jewish doctor whom she executed for a suspected murder plot. It's pretty genius. And it's all my own. And I couldn't find many people who even suggested things like that before, so maybe it'll be worth something.
But then, we were also reading a book called Mama Day. And suddenly, I'm re-learning how to read for pleasure. I can't remember the last time I did that. It's so refreshing.
So now comes the conclusion, as every good English major knows. Ms. Norton taught us to write with a voice, but Dr. Siegfried taught me to write the things I actually think. I'm not trying to argue somebody else's point, I'm arguing mine. I'm not trying to spew out information to prove that I've learned something, I'm telling her how I feel and what I think and I'm making all the work that everyone groans at when they hear I'm an English major mean something to me.
Okay, I lied. That was not the conclusion. The reason I've written this big long sermon/personal history/whatever-you-call-it, is because this morning I turned in my paper. And attended the very last class of Shakespeare 382. And I've never felt sad about finishing a class before. You can think I'm cheesy, make fun of my nostalgia and sentimentality; I don't care. I never thought it could actually create a space in the room of my mind that is full of things that I genuinely care about. But somehow it has. And now it's over.