High School Writing Experience
My memory of the four years of high school I spent in sunny CDA are quite clear, but anything to do with writing in the classroom I can’t really recall. This most certainly comes from my juvenile conceit I developed in high school: I’m the greatest writer that’s ever been born! Reading some of the papers I have saved from high school, it’s all too clear that that wasn’t the case. But I cherished that conceit in my early school years, and so I can’t rightly say I took the time to notice how we were taught to write in high school.
Most of the classes, if I remember correctly, were made to write a few drafts that the teacher would write comments on, and then go on to revise those drafts into a final paper. The reason I can’t really remember what the requirements were is that a handful of students, including myself, were exempt from that process. We were placed in honors courses that focused exclusively on literature. We would write responses, journals and essays for the literature we read, but the classroom focus never centered on the mechanics of writing unless some glaring mistake needed particular attention. I really don’t know how I was taught to write, and I now know I have much room for improvement, but the art of writing ‘A’ papers for schoolteachers has never been much of a mystery.
I do, however, know where much of my development as a writer took place, and it wasn’t in the classroom. This isn’t a slam against my teachers, but rather a simple statement about my pig-headed inability to use my teachers to my own benefit. My out-of-class experience as a writer came from my fortunate discovery of students from my high school and our neighboring high school who were interested in starting an independent student magazine. The idea was to have everything to do with the magazine—from writing, artwork, layout, to funding—to come from the student body; the finished product then to be distributed free-of-charge during lunch at the end of every month.
Despite all the initial obstacles, the magazine was born. It was titled, “Institution-A-Lies.” Yes, a horribly overblown title, but you must understand that this was born from a bunch of overblown high school students. At its worst, it was a melodramatic flare of righteous indignation, fueled by listening to far too much Rage Against The Machine, reading too much Chomsky, Zinn and Derrida, being obsessed with Che Guevara, and taking bell hooks "Teaching to Transgress" and Paulo Freire’s "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" as cornerstones for attacking our teachers. At its best, it taught me to write news articles, inventive essays, poetry, and above all, to take writing serious as a process in which I am constantly teaching myself to write better than the day before. It taught me basic layout skills, how to use Adobe page maker, and how to be resourceful enough to get the materials to publish the finished product.
Apparently it taught us how to be too resourceful, and we were made to discontinue its publication and distribution after the first year because we had illegally used school supplies to publish it. We had distributed about a thousand copies between the two schools for each issue—each issue being close to 36 pages—and in doing this for the better part of a year, we were accused of stealing thousands of dollars of school supplies in computer software, paper and copy toner. Needless to say, we had no ground to stand on, but neither did the school, and so the magazine soon died. Even though it was short lived, it is certainly my key experience in learning how to write in high school.
In regards to Murray’s essay and my own thinking on how writing should be taught, I’m at a loss. My own personal attitude towards the classroom is that even the best teacher in the best class won’t be able to teach you very much unless you are self-motivated. Eighty percent of what you learn in school will be learned outside the classroom on your own will power. Now with my new job as a tutor, I have to reconcile my feelings of believing that school is mostly an enterprise of self-taught people with how I will attempt to help people in the writing center. I now know that I have to have a different attitude for writing and teaching inside the tutoring center than I do when I’m outside the tutoring center. For example, when something is published, I have no problem tearing it a part if it is poorly written. I owe no writer in the published arena a kind word—they have to earn it. Yet, when someone comes in to the writing center, I have to see that as outside that arena, and give everyone my full attention. I don’t know how my tutoring ideas will change in relation to my ideas as a student over the course of this year, but I’ll have to address those difficulties of reconciliation in another blogger.
Most of the classes, if I remember correctly, were made to write a few drafts that the teacher would write comments on, and then go on to revise those drafts into a final paper. The reason I can’t really remember what the requirements were is that a handful of students, including myself, were exempt from that process. We were placed in honors courses that focused exclusively on literature. We would write responses, journals and essays for the literature we read, but the classroom focus never centered on the mechanics of writing unless some glaring mistake needed particular attention. I really don’t know how I was taught to write, and I now know I have much room for improvement, but the art of writing ‘A’ papers for schoolteachers has never been much of a mystery.
I do, however, know where much of my development as a writer took place, and it wasn’t in the classroom. This isn’t a slam against my teachers, but rather a simple statement about my pig-headed inability to use my teachers to my own benefit. My out-of-class experience as a writer came from my fortunate discovery of students from my high school and our neighboring high school who were interested in starting an independent student magazine. The idea was to have everything to do with the magazine—from writing, artwork, layout, to funding—to come from the student body; the finished product then to be distributed free-of-charge during lunch at the end of every month.
Despite all the initial obstacles, the magazine was born. It was titled, “Institution-A-Lies.” Yes, a horribly overblown title, but you must understand that this was born from a bunch of overblown high school students. At its worst, it was a melodramatic flare of righteous indignation, fueled by listening to far too much Rage Against The Machine, reading too much Chomsky, Zinn and Derrida, being obsessed with Che Guevara, and taking bell hooks "Teaching to Transgress" and Paulo Freire’s "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" as cornerstones for attacking our teachers. At its best, it taught me to write news articles, inventive essays, poetry, and above all, to take writing serious as a process in which I am constantly teaching myself to write better than the day before. It taught me basic layout skills, how to use Adobe page maker, and how to be resourceful enough to get the materials to publish the finished product.
Apparently it taught us how to be too resourceful, and we were made to discontinue its publication and distribution after the first year because we had illegally used school supplies to publish it. We had distributed about a thousand copies between the two schools for each issue—each issue being close to 36 pages—and in doing this for the better part of a year, we were accused of stealing thousands of dollars of school supplies in computer software, paper and copy toner. Needless to say, we had no ground to stand on, but neither did the school, and so the magazine soon died. Even though it was short lived, it is certainly my key experience in learning how to write in high school.
In regards to Murray’s essay and my own thinking on how writing should be taught, I’m at a loss. My own personal attitude towards the classroom is that even the best teacher in the best class won’t be able to teach you very much unless you are self-motivated. Eighty percent of what you learn in school will be learned outside the classroom on your own will power. Now with my new job as a tutor, I have to reconcile my feelings of believing that school is mostly an enterprise of self-taught people with how I will attempt to help people in the writing center. I now know that I have to have a different attitude for writing and teaching inside the tutoring center than I do when I’m outside the tutoring center. For example, when something is published, I have no problem tearing it a part if it is poorly written. I owe no writer in the published arena a kind word—they have to earn it. Yet, when someone comes in to the writing center, I have to see that as outside that arena, and give everyone my full attention. I don’t know how my tutoring ideas will change in relation to my ideas as a student over the course of this year, but I’ll have to address those difficulties of reconciliation in another blogger.
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