Essay for Week 12: High School and College Writing Experience

I have taken a lot of English and writing courses over my years in high school and college.  In fact, for my first two years of college  I was majoring in English Literature! I ended up switching to International Area Studies because I did not know what I wanted to do with my life at that point.  To be honest, I am still not really sure what my plans are for after graduation.  Nothing is set in stone yet.  Anyways, at the time I loved to read and write.  I still do, but I switched my major to a minor so that I would have some more time to focus on things other than writing papers.  I love what I am doing now, but I occasionally miss the classes that I used to take.  My senior year English teacher in high school was the main reason that I wanted to major in Literature.  She is a wonderful woman who encouraged her students to do the best that they could.  At the same time, she was not really strict and she understood that things came up that her students had no control over.  Mrs. Sanchez was a great teacher; she did what she could to encourage her students love of reading.  One way that she did this was to have group discussions and allow us to decide how the book did and didn't meet our expectations.  In college, my experiences have been both good and bad.  I have had a professor that marked down on papers if you did not agree with her stance on an issue, or if you had managed to somehow get on her bad side during the school year.  I have also had great experiences, however, where my professor made the lectures fun and gave great advice on how to best improve a paper.  I don't use my writing skills outside of class very much at the moment, but I believe they will come in handy when having to write letters and such for work.  If I was teaching a writing class, one of the first assignments that I would give would be to write about something you are passionate about, such as a favorite band, sport, animal, etcetera.  I would do this so that I could see the level your writing was at.  It would give me an idea of how capable you are at writing at the beginning, as you should be able to write a lot about something that you love.  One assignment that I have generally always hated has been timed writing.  They are almost always a part of entrance tests, which I think is the main reason that I dislike them.  For that reason alone I would not give those to my students.

(Turkey stress ball; Image source Wikipedia)