Gere: Sarah Hanson

When I went to high school extracurriculum was not encouraged. We were pretty much robots, we were assigned a paper and told exactly what we had to write about and given an outline to help us. I had one teacher who allowed us to pick our own topic and work in groups. So two friends and I decided we wanted to write a paper dedicated to lowering the drinking age to 18. We researched it for weeks and weeks, worked long hours on it, and eventually turned in the final copy. Two days later, the vice principal of the school walks in, points at me and the other co-authors of the paper and told us to follow him. Twenty minutes later i was forced to pack my things and go home because i was suspended from school for two days. The teacher had reported our paper to the principal and they thought it was "offensive" writing. So needless to say my writing experience in high school from that time forward was not a very positive experience. To this day i credit that incident as one of the reasons i am not studying to be a teacher. It was always read this and then talk exactly about this. I never had the freedom to write what i wanted until i got to college.

Until we talked this week in class as us being writers, i really never thought of myself as a writer. Teachers have never praised me on my work. Sure they put some notes on a paper that i turn in that they liked a sentence or two, but never told me i was doing a good job. When we had the conversation in class on thursday that we are all writers, i do now consider myself to be a writer, and not a terrible one. When i was in high school no one every said i could not write, but i was put down a lot for my writing. Like i mentioned when i was suspended from school, that really made me think that i was not a good writer. When i got to college and took some entry level english courses, teachers really gave me good or bad critiques, but it was much needed. Because of them my writing schools have improved tremendously, and they have instilled some great techniques that i use now.

I do believe though that teachers need to include extracurriculum into the classroom. I believe the most important time to do so is in high school. In high school you are building skills to get you ready for the college level. I also do believe that it is essential to start earlier in school, but it is most important to develop those skills before you get to college. I did not have all the skills a writer should have going into college, and it did put me behind a significant amount from my other classmates. One truely great professor worked with me the entire semester and help me develop much better writing skills.