... when you're nearly driven mad out of being denied the chance to write about LotR.
On my English Regents exam, which I just took recently, there are four essays. Some here will not be familiar with what I am about to talk about so I shall explain. On one essay there is this thing called the "critical lens." This is a quote by some famous person, and you are supposed to agree or disagree with the quote and then support it using two books/short stories/plays you read at some point, and literary elements from them (setting, POV, theme, etc.). It's totally bogus. So the "critical lens" (ugh, I feel the need to make little quotation marks with my fingers whenever I say that
) was about how every great story is about a journey of some sort.
Now, I had asked my English teacher previously if the books had to be those we had read in school, and she told me yes. I was absolutely going out of my mind, torn between whether to disregard what she said and write a brilliant, ten page essay about LotR (because it's oh-so applicable), or be a good little student and write about something by Nathaniel Hawthorne that isn't nearly as interesting. In the end I begrudgingly wrote about things we read in school, but still... it's not as though LotR is some sort of obscure work or anything.
Curse you, New York State Regents board!