BRUNSWICK — For four decades, English teacher John Brassil has brought the adventure of literature to his classrooms, a venture that through his work with the College Board’s Advanced Placement program has sent him on literal adventures across oceans — and all the way to Shanghai, China, last December.

Brassil taught English at Mt. Ararat High School for 36 years before leaving at the end of the 2010 school year. Since then, he has been teaching at John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor where, like at Mt. Ararat, he still teachers Advanced Placement English Language and Composition. In 1994, Brassil began scoring AP exams.

The College Board’s Advanced Placement program “enables willing and academically prepared students to pursue college-level studies — with the opportunity to earn college credit, advanced placement or both — while still in high school,” its website states.

“It’s unbelievable how it’s grown,” Brassil said of the AP program which encompasses 38 subject courses all concluding with an exam. He recently finished a four-year term on the development committee that creates the tests. He has served as an AP consultant for many years, which has afforded him the opportunity to travel. Each summer for the last 10 years, for example, he has journeyed to Toronto, Canada, to present on the AP English Language and Composition course, “and was privileged to be involved there when that course was taking hold as a new element of the Canadian Advanced Placement curriculum.”

Two years ago, he was invited to present at a workshop in New Delhi, India.

And just before last Thanksgiving, Brassil was asked to travel to Shanghai to meet with teachers from schools all over China interested in the AP English Language and Composition course. Different than the AP English Literature course involving study of major works of literature, the language and composition course concerns rhetoric and argumentation, Brassil said, “which the Chinese have discovered is the better fit for their students,” who while gaining strength as readers of English, will have to compose their course work in English across the curriculum when they come to the United States to study in college. Teachers want students “to have as much experience with college-level tasks as they possibly can,” he said.

The English Language and Composition course ranges across the disciplines and subject fields, Brassil said, and “if taught properly,” students study essays and speeches, and look at controversial issues and make arguments. Chinese teachers found that while Chinese students haven’t read any American or British literature, “they are interested in making arguments; they are interested in being alert readers; they are interested in rhetoric — really on a global basis.”

Brassil took the long flight to China in December with wife Claudette Brassil, who teaches English at Mt. Ararat High School. He and three other AP consultants met with students their first day in Shanghai at Gezhi High School. On the second day, Brassil taught a demonstration AP English Language and Composition lesson while observed by 40 teachers from all over China.

He chose an excerpt from Annie Dillard’s memoir, “An American Childhood,” in which she recalls an incident from her childhood when she got in trouble after throwing snowballs at cars. He asked the Chinese high school juniors to write about a time they had a good time, but got in trouble — in English. The students understood his directions, read the piece closely, recognized what was going on “and they could talk about it a little bit. They were very attentive and they did a great job in front of this audience of teachers.”

When the lesson was over, the students left and Brassil took questions from the teachers about what they’d just witnessed.

“What they’re really interested in is what they call ‘inquiry-based learning,’” Brassil said. “In other words, I asked them to inquire into their lives, and then inquire into the text, discover things, and then share those discoveries with each other and then with me. And of course, I’m guiding them along the way.”

This is not a teaching tactic the Chinese are accustomed to, Brassil said, “and it seemed interesting to me that the Chinese were very interested in how we do things in terms of Advanced Placement so that they could take what they consider to be our best methods,” and put them into action, “so that their students would think more creatively than they currently do. They seem to think there’s some real value in that, and they believe that’s what their students will encounter if their students attend American universities.”

If there is a word to describe what the Chinese AP teachers-to-be were interested in, “the word was success,” Brassil said. “They are very focused on success.”

Emphasizing that in his travels and preparatory reading he’s only scratched the surface of China, Brassil said that while the Chinese don’t explore the way Americans do, “there is plenty of talk and thought about ideas and concepts that matter, and have mattered for many, many, many centuries.” China, he said, “has gone through amazing transformations in its long history and now it seems quite aware that it’s going through another one.”

It is an experience that Brassil said left him better equipped to teach at John Bapst, which now has 35 students from China this year who plan to attend American colleges and universities, and “want as big a dose of American education as they can.”

If the Chinese are saying “‘Success. Achieve. Work,’ what are the implications for us?” Brassil asked. The Chinese value American expertise and techniques and are willing to identify the best of those techniques for their own use, but will also keep working in their own way.

China is not just challenging us, but “arguably, they’re accelerating and they’re about to pass us,” Brassil said. “What do we do and what does that mean for us?”

Working with the Chinese teachers in the two-day workshop, Brassil slowed his normal pace but was amazed at how many teachers could cut to the meaning of the text he placed before them and see the possibilities for instruction. He gave them Donald M. Murray’s essay, “The Stranger in the Photo is Me,” and was amazed when several teachers could analyze the essay and point out elements of the text they’d lead their students to discuss. But they also had some insights about the text that since Brassil started teaching the text in the early 1990s, “nobody else had seen and I hadn’t seen. There I was on the other side of the world learning about a perception of a text from teachers I didn’t know … never would have met, and that they would bring those insights forward into their AP English classes next year — I think is exciting.”

Brassil said, “The reason I really love this work, on top of my work with the students, is you extend your reach into classrooms other than your own, and other people have the chance to teach the way they want to in front of their students, and that to me is really exciting.”

dmoore@timesrecord.com