High School and College Education

Generally, our teachers were good people, underpaid and overly devoted. Some of them were plainly inspirational. One good example is my high school teacher Donald Rawding. A small, thin man with soft, sincere mannerisms, he persuaded us to drop our sarcastic veneer and sincerely, openly express ourselves. He used all the right tools, too: journal writing, freewriting assignments, and plenty of feedback in his scrawled hand. Most of his comments were positive, some of them negative, all of them honest. Almost 25 years after having Donald Rawding as my teacher, I clearly recognize his impact on my choice to become a professional writer.

Many of your teachers were like Donald Rawding. Yet you probably recall many others who inadvertently knit a fabric of dread that still tightens around you 10, 20, 30, or more years after you have shed cap and gown. Their fabric typically included the following three components.

When you were a student, your young mind probably burned with ideas, opinions, and information. Yet your education most likely smoldered this flame with grammar rules and instructions on how to diagram sentences and distinguish a gerund from a participle. In the process, you started thinking that writing was as clear-cut as math, where one and one make two no matter how many times you toy with the numbers. In reality, writing is never black-and-white. It’s full of endless shades of gray and flamboyant colors that no rules can completely control.

TRY THIS! Saying So Long to Your Teacher. Write a paragraph about a teacher who inhibited your writing skill. Perhaps this person was a college professor who assigned absurd papers — and too many of them. Perhaps he or she was a junior high school teacher who once commented that your writing skills were far below average. Explain exactly how that teacher affected you.

Then, write a paragraph about a teacher who fostered your abilities, making you feel confident enough to overcome any obstacle, with writing or in another way. Whenever you have trouble writing, take a few moments to recall that second teacher and all the positive thoughts and feelings he or she inspired. Finally, visualize that teacher escorting the first one out of your life.

Remember, don’t worry about your writing style in this exercise. Your mission is simply to get the words out.

Here is a client’s sample:

I can never forget my junior high school teacher Miss O’Malley: a classic 1960s bombshell with a jet-black bouffant hairdo, tight dress, spike heels, and plenty of makeup, who dated, naturally enough, the gym teacher. Miss O’Malley was quiet and shy but had a fierce red pen. Her main concern was grammar, diagramming sentences, that sort of thing. Up until that point, I loved to write. But after getting low grades on my quizzes and papers — and a C in the class — I had a hard time. That feeling still lingers.

On the other hand, I had a great drama teacher in high school. He doubled as an art teacher and his wife taught English, although not my class. Both of them believed in me. They gave me the best role in the school play, spent time talking to me about my other classes, gave me suggestions on papers for other classes before I passed them in. More importantly, they liked me. In fact, they once invited me and a few of my friends for dinner at their house. From them, I learned that I was smart, creative, and capable.

Each teacher had his or her own method of commenting-little checks, dots, circles, and, of course, glaring X’s, all denoting failure or success. As you moved from school essays to business letters, those red-letter comments cast a faint but unpleasant shadow that caused you to double-check your thoughts, rewrite prematurely and basically, and slow down your writing. This response is so universal that everyone, from editors to writing coaches, learns to write comments in blue, black, even green — but not red. The very color intimidates the businessperson beyond receptivity.

Grades

Perhaps the most intimidating factor in your entire educational experience was those letter grades at the top or the back of your papers telling you three things: (1) how you measured against some seemingly arbitrary standard of writing — which either a teacher or a textbook determined; (2) whether you were an abject failure or budding success; and (3) reminding you, however falsely, that your writing would forever be judged not by its merits as a communication device but as a test of your ability to follow rules.

As an adult, you know that self-consciousness only inhibits your ability to perform well. Like a dancer, you have complete control when you lose control and let out your true forms of self-expression. When you feel you’re being judged, you become awkward, your steps out of beat. When writing, you have the same calamitous experience: the words don’t seem to come, and when they do, they’re as delicate as a garbage truck.