Touchstone Moment Revised

I walked into my first AP English class my junior year of high school, confident and self-assured. I thought I was a good writer. I thought I was going to do fine in this class. I even thought that I was going to enjoy it.

Nope.

It was nothing as I had expected. The desks were rowed up in lines, the paper on the walls was white, the expo on the whiteboard was black. Everything expected from a normal classroom. Well, a normal classroom devoid of pretty much any creativity or self-expression.

So... definitely not what I expected.

My first two years of high school were pretty much the polar opposite of my initial impressions of that AP English room. I was in an art program, and all of the classrooms were colorful, dawning student's work and cumulative projects. I was encouraged to write what I wanted, in a way that I wanted to express my learning, as I was a creative writing student.

The first assignment in my AP class was to write an essay on The Narrative of Fredrick Douglass. The assignment was clearly lined out, stating the fact that we had to write about the rhetoric devices in the particular format that the teacher (as well as the AP Board) preferred. I turned in an essay of what I thought to be well formulated, still maintaining my quirky form of creativity. My teacher thought differently though.

I did not receive a good grade on that paper. Slowly, I started to learn how to game the system. My papers transformed from something I looked foward to, to something that I dreaded to do. And my grades changed from mediocre to excellent.

While I learned a lot about writing in that class, and gained some valuable insight into the importance of rhetorical writing and communication, I also began to think that writing wasn't something that I should love to do. Instead, it was something that was mandatory, and something that I begrudgingly did.