I remember an 11th grade English teacher who would always talk about the "human condition". His philosophical asides were interesting, but it seemed like to get a good grade you would have to apply his own, rather unusual, filter to literature.
In 12th grade English I had a teacher who was obsessed with connectives and flow in writing. At first it did seem rather contrived: brilliant, stimulating, creative writing that was not full of explicit connectives would get a B, whereas rather contrived boiler-plate writing would at least get an A-, as long as it was very obvious about linking sentences and paragraphs together with explicit connectives. At first I found this really annoying, because it didn't seem like the grading correlated well with some overall 'objective' quality in the work. In retrospect, though, I have to say it was probably the most useful English class I ever had. Even though the grading was a bit unfair, it was a good pedagogical exercise that made me think more formally about writing structure, which ultimately gave me more control over the quality of my writing. I found before I would sometimes produce great writing and other times poor writing, and it felt like I had little control over the quality. There was nothing reproducible about what I was doing. I now look for things that I wasn't explicitly looking for before. Now, even if I'm not feeling inspired, I can at least craft something that will be half decent, if I put enough effort into it.
In first year university I had the same English prof for two semesters. With her it was all about the appearance of effort to adjust to her requirements. At first you would, at best, get an A-. If you visited her at office hours, and placed importance on her wishes, and appeared to progressively adapt your writing style to suit her priorities, you would get an A or an A+.
