My Experience with Writing: May I not
dare teach what I was taught
Not in a million years did I ever think
that I would start my own blog, at least not in this life.
I have had a very unpleasant experience
with writing and would avoid any form of it. Don't get me wrong, I do
enjoy writing poems and putting my thoughts down on paper when I feel it necessary. But generally I’ve had a series of teachers who ruined it for me.
Teachers teach students badly because
they don’t want to go through the hassle of individualizing the task or they
just don’t know how to teach. As a result I was just given a template to listen
to or read and asked to reproduce another one by feeding off of the perfect
example.
Year after year I’ve had teachers tell me how to write: "No, you can’t say that. This is wrong. Do it like that instead. Start the essay by saying that". So eventually I learned to write with the particular teacher in mind. During the course of the school year, I studied what meant the most to them when grading papers and how they would allocate marks. I would master that information and use it to my advantage.
I really don’t think that students
should be penalized every time they misspell a word, or place a hyphen where it
wasn’t needed. There is more to writing than technicality. Teachers should make
an effort to be less shallow. But who’s to be blamed? You can’t squeeze orange
juice from a rock. They’re teaching the way they were taught.
I would hate to go into a classroom and
practice this very same injustice to my students. May I dare not ask the
students to write an essay entitled “My summer vacation”, bottle it up into
five hundred words and then grade it based on how many times they visited the
beach! May I not give the students a template of an informal letter and tell
them to write one just like it. Students are not templates!
This is my experience with writing. Writing,
I don’t hate you- I hate what you did to me. I’m a bitter writer trying to
write my wrong.
