Young Writers Society

I have a love-hate relationship with my English class. lol. I absolutely hate writing essays for that class, because our teacher is a really tough grader; not a good thing when you basically suck at writing essays. It's really frustrating to me that I'm so bad at essays. I should be good at writing essays since I love to write. But sadly, that is not the case.

write me wrote:My English class is like death. Maybe worse. I hate writing essays on pointless things, especially when the teacher calls them 'journals' when she really wants an essay and then makes comments about the content and mechanics...of a so called 'journal'. I don't know...but all I have to say is Journals are NOT Essays.

You're lucky! My English class (all 13 year old "geniuses" who hate structure) has to write an essay every day, in five minutes. Of course, we don't have to write five paragraph essays in five minutes, but still. To top it off, my teacher calls them "Daily Goals" and we have to put them in our "Writer's Notebook".

It makes me sick to think that we could be learning how to improve our writing, but instead we have a first-year teacher who thinks we are learning from these goals.

She's a good teacher but I still feel kind of above the majority of the class....I wish we had advanced English, though. Next year I can take AP (Advanced Placement - college-level classes) Language & Composition but that'll be the first chance I get.

Colly- So you're in a regular English class? I'm in an honors class and I'm STILL bored out of my mine and I feel above the majority. Proof reading essays a few weeks back almost killed me, because first I was editing nearly everything, then I remembered: they're not like me. So I had to hold back the urge to edit anything if it wasn't extremely necessary, or if it was a grammar mistake. It killed me inside. The sentences were just...poorly structured, and felt so weak. Then I felt bad because I knew I was getting vain again about my skill. And am I really all that good? Maybe a bit better than some people, but only because I've been writing/reading obsessively for so long and have been making efforts to improve my writing ability. No reason for me to get vain -_-

It's just so tough, its like the smart kids in math who are bored. (Pff! Not in my class! I never see those.) We're gifted, so we get stoned in the streets of normalcy. (not really 'gifted' though my teacher said I was gifted for being able to read like i do, but you get what I mean)

Erm, off topic by regaling my middle school years.

This was not for an English class but I was once required to write a two page essay on Africa. Well.... Heh, being that it was a History class, my fiction story became three and a half pages long, and was appointed by the teacher to be read allowed in class with my premission.

I gave it, and after she finished, many of my classmates asked who the author was. I. being the shy type, kept quiet but sat with a big ol' grin on my face. During my middle school years, three more of my stories were published or used as examples with premission. Two for English, and one used again for World Cultures.

So, do I detest essays? Not when they revolved around my areas of expertise.

You should have seen my high school years, LOL! My Creative Writing teacher seemed to adore me, If only he could see how much I've improved since eighteen.

I. Hate. My English class.

First off, my teacher makes countless errors in punctuation and grammer herself, which annoys the heck out of me, and simply stands quietly while the seniors who can hardly read brutally butcher Beowulf and Macbeth, not even attempting to correct them even when they pronounce the word "laugh" as "laaayyugg?" Yes, they are 17-18 year olds. I'm one of the few that can actually read in that dumb class.
Secondly, it's a British Literature class. We just started getting into real British Literature this semester. What did we do the first semester? Well, my teacher LOVES the movie "Pay it Forward", which has nothing to do with English. She told us that we had to do three unsolicited acts of kindness every quarter and write them down in a journal (no less than about a page each. I can't do that. There's only so much I can write about giving some random kid a pencil, even if I saturate it with detail).

Then we had to write a 1500 minimum word research paper on someone who has paid it forward to society. I worked my butt off on that paper, even though I was steaming that it was not related to English in any way. Even though I hate MLA format and structure and Jane Schaffer, I did it, and I had a nice, neat, 1700 word paper along with my works cited page.
She gave me a D- on that paper for a couple punctuation errors and on the back she wrote "How did this person pay it forward??" Well, duh, that's what the whole paper was ABOUT, for crying out loud. I was so upset that I cried for the rest of the period.

So, when she assigned us a creative writing project for the Canterbury Tales, I had my little moment of revenge. My teacher loves fluffy stories with happy endings, so I wrote this dark, gory story in which a man kills raiders invading his town and he witnesses his wife burning to death in a house fire. She'll probably give me an F on it for "disturbing content" or something.

Well, there's my little rant about my English class

From the four or five different school systems I've been exposed too, I thankfully had to never deal with craptacular teaching abilities.

Perhaps the reason was I was somewhat decent on editing my own work, or I guess I ended up with teachers that liked pages engrossed with details at the time, lol.

At either case, it seems I was fortunate.