For a First semester class Who Are You was an option taught by Ms. Wrambel. Students would learn about the memoir writing style and different ways to write when making a memoir or and also how to read a memoir text differently.
The class started off the year reading The Glass Castle. The book is a memoir about the life of Jeannette Walls, with many interesting topics in the book. Personally I loved the book and how complex it was and the hidden meanings behind her words. But other students had more mixed signals about the book like Nhidi Gowda (‘25) who commented on how “the book is interesting, but the characters are meh and I wasn't really invested in the story.” As an introduction for this class this book allowed us to get really adapted to writing memoirs.
The next book we read as a class was Stephen King’s On Writing. In this book we focused on how he started writing books, and why, but also how he came to be Stephen King. . This book induced many mixed reactions from each class. For example my class really liked the book while the other class disagreed, saying, “it was boring”, and they “didn't connect with the material”. Due to the conflicting classes' opinions Ms. Wramble changed the project for this book. Instead of the usual project, the other classes ended up just writing an essay instead.
Later into the second semester we read The Rules Do Not Apply. The Rules Do Not Apply is a memoir about Ariel Levy, explaining how sad her life truly was. This memoir was more recent, with the time period being set in the 2000s. Neither of the classes really liked the book, due to how Leavy showed herself through the memoir. She depicted herself as very self absorbed, and had conflicting ideas with lots of students in class. For example, when is cheating actually considered cheating.
The last memoir we read was Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, a graphic memoir by Roz Chast. This book was very refreshing to read because it was a graphic novel but still told the story of a memoir. It was also received well by the students, allowing for us to really see how emotions were to be perceived, and how to observe an author's words way differently than when a first appears with just a picture. I myself personally enjoyed this book a lot and is probably my favorite of this course.
But this course would not be itself without the teacher Ms. Wrambel. Ms. Wrambel has a very inviting, welcoming, and understanding personality that allows the students to be able to express their ideas freely and without worry. When asking the students in this class what they thought about Ms. Wramble, they commented that “she was the best teacher for this class” and “she was really cool and chill”.
Overall this course was amazing to take and I recommend taking this course or looking into it if you like to do something more different that a typical english course. This will allow you to understand yourself better.