Some of my friends tell me that I write the way I talk. One of them says that when she reads my posts, she feels like she's hanging out with me. This is good, since she lives about 800 miles away and we rarely get to see each other. Occasionally though, I'll be talking to friends that live locally and I notice that maybe they're not really paying attention. Or maybe they seem a bit impatient. It's like they already know what I'm going to say. And then it dawns on me: they do. They read the blog. Whoops. OK, there's no way for me to know they read it, so I guess it's not really my fault. I don't mean to be redundant. Some of my friends used to tell me that I told them the same thing over and over again. That was my fault. But I just stopped talking to them anyway—jerks. Unfortunately, though, now I'm beginning to get confused. The other day I started to tell a friend something and almost stopped myself because I thought she might have read the post, but then I realized that I hadn't written it yet.
I write in my head while I'm walking or driving the car. It gets a little crazy because then I have to rush to get wherever I'm going so I can type some notes really quickly. I don't want to forget. I run through the door yelling "don't talk to me" or something similar and grab a computer. The husband gets annoyed because dinner is ready. I can't really blame him. The family is hungry. But my memory ain't so good these days. Gotta write things down.
I sometimes write in my head in the shower, too. I thought about writing on the shower doors but that wouldn't really work well. I wouldn't be able to see what I've written until someone else is in the shower and then I would be on the outside and everything would be backwards. And, I imagine that whoever is taking the shower wouldn't really appreciate it. Also, someone would probably draw a big smiley face over my notes. They have no respect for the written word. Even if it's printed in steam.
I'd never really written anything significant before I started writing these posts a few months ago. I didn't think I was very good at writing. In my senior year of high school, my AP English teacher took me aside and said, "I don't understand why you're doing so poorly in my class. You did better than everyone else on the placement test." Hmmmm. Even as a kid I knew that the placement test, a multiple choice exam given in ninth grade, wasn't indicative of how I would write in twelfth. Or how my critical thinking skills would be. This was a woman with a Ph.D and a side job grading AP exams. I hoped that she wasn't going to be the one grading my paper.
It's troubling to me that school kids are forced to write a comprehensive essay in a class period. It's a lot of pressure. Sometimes these essays are worth a large portion of a kid's grade. I know from my own experience that, at least in my real world, I will never have to write something really super important, something that might possibly make or break my future, in less than an hour. I suspect that this is true for most people I know. Unless, of course, you are a journalist breaking a big news story. Or you're taking a test. Of course, we all know that testing is the reason there is so much stress on writing a complete essay in under an hour at school, but no one will tell you that. Because that would probably fall under the heading of "teaching to the test," which no school wants to hear they do, even though many of them do it.
It typically takes me longer than an hour to write a good email. If this were the olden days, if someone were to draw a cartoon of me writing, there would be crumpled papers everywhere. They'd be on the desk, on the floor; the trash can would be overflowing with crumpled papers. Timed writing tests kill me. I am not the type of person who can whip something out. I have no formula. I have to think about it, mull it over in my head, try things out and give things up. My kids are the same way. Fortunately, they have usually been able to get through timed writing tests with good scores—they are able to grasp the format, the "key words and phrases" that get them the grades they need. Luckily, they haven't internalized some of the more dubious writing "skills" they were taught under the guise of good writing. In the past, I would occasionally read one of the girl or boy child's essays and ask, "Why the heck did you write that?? No good writer writes like that. It sucks!" And the kid would answer, "That's the way we're supposed to do it."
Certainly, there is validity in teaching a child how to organize himself and write quickly and efficiently. The bottom line is the kids need to do well on tests—efficient test-taking is an important skill they will need to get into universities and graduate schools. They might even need it for job placement. But test taking skills and good writing skills need to be differentiated from formulas that "test graders" use for rating standardized tests. Critical thinking and creativity need to be added to the mix. I'm not sure this differentiation is made clear, at least to the kids. When they were little, I may have once or twice advised my children to do whatever the teacher asked them to do, and then to completely erase it from their minds. I am a rebel. I am also afraid. I imagine that soon we will have created a generation of good writers thinking that they can't write because they have not learned how to write badly enough to get a good test score. Does that make sense?
Back in my senior year, two of the books we read were A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, and Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austin. At the time, I'm sorry to say, I couldn't get in to reading either of them. In the subsequent years, I have not picked up Portrait again. The fate of Stephen Dedalus never quite piqued my interest, although I have remembered his name all these years. Perhaps I should try it again. But, I've read Pride and Prejudice more than once and enjoyed it, thanks, in no small part, to Colin Firth and that scene in the mini-series where he arrives home and goes for a quick swim. You know the one. And, you may be wondering how I did on that AP exam I took so many years ago. I wound up with a 3, allowing me to skip a semester of freshman English. I guess we know who didn't grade my test.
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