About BerkWe’ve seen her in the past, but this is the first we’ve officially been introduced to the self-righteous chair of the English Department.  Berk.

So what do we know about her so far?  No one seems to like her (for an extreme example, see Cleo’s reaction to her at Thanksgiving), and after this weeks comics, you can’t blame them.  She’s irritating as heck.

Berk was inspired by several different stereotypes out there.  One is the obnoxious coworker.  The overachiever that could get along with others if they so wanted, but instead chooses to make everyone’s life difficult.  Passive aggressive behavior, backstabbing to make you look bad, all the works.  You know, the irritating person who’s always right, and on the occasion you’re 99.9% sure they’re wrong, you keep your mouth shut because you know it will just cause more trouble than they’re worth.  I think we’ve all met someone like this.

The other influence was high school English teachers.  Now I’ve seen some good ones and bad ones, but a majority of them have been the latter.  Albeit I’m biased, because I do not see the point of overanalyzing a piece of literature to death.  As a writer myself, I would hate for someone to have to analyze my work trying to find things that aren’t there.  Now, that being said I have no problem with analyzing literature (a discussion for another blog post), but I do have a problem when teacher’s grade you on it.  The worst English teachers tend to have a self-righteous air about them, where they know what’s right and the student is a clueless fish, trying to learn how to swim upstream.  Whatever argument you come up with is inferior to their own–and if it is their own, well, you’re unoriginal.

Now I think literature is a great subject, and grammar is necessary.  And there are a lot of great English teacher out there.  However, Berk represents the not-so-great end, and the available jokes are endless.  She’ll be rude to her students and coworkers, and English will be taken a little too seriously.  We’re going to see  a lot more of her in the future, especially interacting with the other staff.  Ironically, as much of a hard worker as she is, she won’t get any respect around the school.  Maybe it’s karma.

Also, who didn’t love seeing Roma totally school her on how difficult Foreign Languages are compared to English (again, a topic for another post).  High school politics, gotta love em!  😛

Best,

TY