Writing tips, part 2 - my first writing teacher

I went to a campus elementary school that was linked to a "state teachers college." Even as a kid, I realized what a great deal this was. Our classes were small - I think the largest one was about 20 kids, at one point, though generally, the classes were smaller than that. We had one "real" teacher and two student teachers - that's one hell of a good ratio. Though most of the students were faculty brats like myself, there were local kids too, including some whose families occasionally needed help from others. As I recall, several mothers (including mine) would step up with hand-me-down clothing or transportation for school-related events when necessary.

I remember this time as one of the best in my life. My brain was exploding with ideas, and there were teachers on hand to say, "Go ahead! Do it!" I will forever remember when I first learned to read - when the letters on the page that we had learned to pronounce by rote suddenly combined to make recognizable words. Of course we had rules; but we didn't have grades - we had evaluations instead. Even the classes were flexible and geared to academic ability.

We weren't afraid of tests. We had them all the time. Being somewhat experimental, our school was subject to lots of evaluative tests. The teachers explained that these weren't to evaluate us, they were to evaluate the techniques being employed to teach us. I have no idea how the evaluations played out, since we had almost no anxiety about them. Testing was just part of the routine (I can't imagine something like this being done in a public school now).

Of course, there was a down side. By third grade, we were being subjected to "new math," a mistake in pedagogy that left me math-impaired until 8th grade (when I remembered and started applying the two years of arithmetic I had before I was 8 years old). This was really unfortunate, but there were so many good things that we learned - film animation, history, studying different religions, science field work, geography - I guess I have to forgive the geniuses who screwed up my math ability, at least in the short run.

Our curriculum included boxes of lessons we could work through at our own pace. The teachers' job during these lessons was to act as tutors, and to check our evaluations that we had to fill out at the end of each lesson. Among them (and I remember there were quite a few of them), there was a box called Organizing and Reporting Skills. As awful as the title sounds, this became my favorite Box, because I learned how to write a three-paragraph essay. Among the skills presented were how to write a topic sentence, how to write supporting sentences, and how to coherently organize my little argument in subsequent paragraphs. Additionally (and importantly) the Box gave examples of poorly organized writing and asked me how I would fix it. The Box also gave examples of when a writer's opinion entered into what should have been a dispassionate report. As a grownup writer I can easily make the argument that most "objective" writing actually isn't objective at all, but at the time, seeing where facts were being made to dance a certain way (or were disregarded altogether) became a valuable life skill.

I liked this Box so much that when the end of the semester came at Christmas time, I was afraid I would not be able to get back to the Box after the break, that I would be moved on to something else (that did not happen. And by the way, I was a seriously geeky kid).

I liked school - until I got to 7th grade, and had to transfer to a "regular" school, with lots and lots of rules, where the fundamental point was that we had to be controlled all of the time, or we might do something "bad," but that's another story. The relevant point is that we had English class and learned parts of speech, vocabulary, etc., read some Shakespeare, but we no longer wrote paragraphs - on anything. I am serious. For five years. By the end of that time, I could write boffo sentences, but I had forgotten everything the Box had taught me.

Being a little precocious, I skipped my senior year of high school, and skipped both Physics (which I would have loved, except for the dorky teacher), and English Composition, which, as I recall, was the only required course I would have had to take if I had stayed on, but I didn't. I had aced my SAT's, and I was bored shitless. Time to move on. But the Box wasn't done with me yet...