Memories in the Corner of My Mind...

As a future Secondary Ed - English teacher I am reminded of encouraging and damaging things some of my instructors did that had positive or negative impacts on students. In this particular memory I am the student that was negatively affected by an instructor's seemingly helpful decision.

When I was a junior, in high school, my new English instructor assigned a creative writing project to the class. This was a regular English course with varying levels of student ability. I realized this when I finished in class writing assignments, I deemed easy, before others, who viewed the writing as difficult. A few students asked me to help them with their writings outside of class. After turning in my short story about the untold life of a secondary character in Gloria Naylor's novel The Women of Brewster Place the teacher passed back everyone's paper, but mine. She gave the class a "Do Now"/warm-up writing exercise and asked me to step outside with her, in her hand was my paper. My stomach "dropped," while my body temperature rose. Although I cannot everything she said in that moment, I do recall her being "impressed" and expressing her joy over my creative accomplishment. Her proud feeling moved her to tell me I did not have to return to class. I got the feeling that she felt the class was holding me back. For some students this news may have been a dream come true, but for me it discouraged me from writing with my full potential until my senior exhibition project. I can now communicate that I felt separated, and in a sense punished for producing exceptional work. My parents still do not know that I spent the rest of the school year, for that period, in the library learning how to catalog and check books in and out. As a College of Education student there are suggested actions teachers are advised to follow in order to continue helping good student writers.

Here are some things my teacher could have done or suggested to me:

a. Share the story with the school or district newspaper
b. Enter a creative writing contest
c. Expand the story into a play
d. Add another literary component or artistic expression to compliment the story

These are just a few things I could do as an educator.

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