Why I'm an English Major

This was an assignment for one of my classes, but I do get asked this a lot so I thought I would share.

Whenever I tell someone I am going to major in English I usually get the same reaction. A startled look and one word, “Why?” I am always told that there are so many people majoring in English that it would be impossible to get a job.  I usually just shrug it off, or try to play it cool by saying that it is the only major that I am even close to getting done, and I want to be done as soon as possible. I find that reason a lot easier to say than trying to explain to someone what my real reasons are.  Throughout my years in school I have had many good and bad teachers. What you probably wouldn’t expect me to say that one of the best teachers I had and one of the worst teachers I had were both English teachers.  Oddly enough, these two teachers that I am thinking of I had in the same year.

 The first teacher encouraged us to write to the best of our abilities. Then when she corrected our paper she told us what we did good, and how we could improve our writing. She had us read books that got us thinking about the importance of literature, and of course she helped us understand grammar and the way it works. She was a great English teacher, and even inspired me to try to write a book one day. For some reason or another I decided to transfer into another English class. Whether it was because I needed to take a different class the same time as hers or because I wanted to be with my friend I don’t remember. (This was actually in middle school, so it was a while ago.)

 I was pretty young, but after my first day in my new class I started thinking of the teacher as a tyrant. Of course there were the petty reasons, like assigned seating so I was across the room from all my friends and she had no tolerance for talking in the class, but what I remember most of all was her way of correcting papers. We had to write in a “journal” every week. Usually something assigned, and usually something fiction. I thought this would be a breeze. My friends and I always wrote silly stories about ourselves, but of course doing pretty outlandish and crazy things. So I took these assignments and had a lot of fun with them. As I started getting them back graded she only told me the things I was doing wrong. She didn’t say how to fix it and she even wrote on one paper that my idea wasn’t good and that I didn’t have a good writing style. Of course my dreams of becoming an author were dashed and I started to retaliate in class. I refused to do the homework, though she didn’t seem to care much, and I found myself with an f for the two terms that I was in her class. The following year I had to make up those classes by staying after school and doing an online version of the class. I took my next year of English from someone else and she reinstated my love for English.

Now I am just getting to the point where I can answer your question. “Why do you want to be an English major?” I want to be an English major because I love to read and write. More importantly, I want to be an English major because I want to teach. I want to inspire future generations to get out there and write, to read books that can have an impact of their lives, and to understand the complexity and the real beauty of the language that we speak. I hope to show the kids I will be teaching that there is a reason to take English classes other than being told they have to by the school systems. I want to be an English teacher because I want to make a difference, if just a small one, in someone’s life the way the first teacher made a difference in mine.