We had some big discussion on books vs. movies in my English class last year, you know, anything but learn English, but one major point was that a movie based on a book is only one interpretation of the book, while you can interpret a book however you want when you read it. Like sometimes for fun I just imagine the characters flailing their arms about while talking, and you'll probably never see that in a movie... :/
Man, I didn't like that English teacher. He needed a therapist to talk to, because he would make us listen to his stories and advice which had no relevant point, often no point at all except to talk for the sake of talking. I talk for no reason too, but not during class when we're supposed to be learning. What's worse is that no one else seemed to be interested in English, and people would ask questions about his tangents which would result in more tangents, and it seemed like he would always explain everything in long, convoluted examples that were often weak in the first place, making him have to use another example and go on and on and on... He also asked vague questions when he expected one specific answer that he should have just told us. For example, "what does every story have?" Out of all possible answers, he meant to talk about "Endings", although we never really got around to it because he ended up getting sidetracked by himself and telling us some other story. One time we started class by letting us read a poem and then analyze it, but instead he spent no shorter than fifty-five minutes talking about how adulthood is dismal and we would all grow up to be fat and unhappy and depressed, after which I had to raise my hand and start analyzing the poem to everyone else's verbal dismay, which made me stand up and yell what Ben Jonson's "On My First Son" was about for another five minutes until my adrenalin subued and I sat back down nd trailed off. I had promised myself I wouldn't freak out in a class that year too...
The only reason I'm complaining is because this is the Angst thread and it makes me feel better. Because I don't have a therapist either, so I dump my problems on all of you, we dump them on each other in this thread, don't we? Besides, he's not my teacher anymore, and I got through the class without too much of a fuss(besides that one time), especially since by second semester I learned to take his lessons not seriously unless he was talking aout English. He loved to get himself worked up and talk about really serious melancholy subjects, like how he fell on afire when he was three and now his legs have burns on them, or how he had to take five years of high school and eight of college to get his undergraduate degree. He would just introduce these stories, and I didn't know whether to feel sorry for him or pray he would get a therapist. I learned more about his childhood than I did about writing essays. Of course if he were talking about something outside himself in a matter-of-fact way, I loved to ease the tension with a good one-liner. Man, those can ease anything!
