Throughout the duration of this course, I have learned many things. Most importantly, I have learned that writing is a process, drafting is a process and the rewriting a piece of writing does not mean you failed. Beginning the course and especially throughout high school, I had on a very straight forwardmindset about writing. Sure, I had taken Foundations of Creative Writing last semester but when it came to academic writing, it had been something I had always dreaded doing. When turning in a rough draft and immediately didn’t receive the best feedback or having the professor say, “this needs to be improved”, shutting down and giving up was my go-to coping mechanism. Throughout this semester, even though it has been my third semester in college, I learned how important it is to not look at writing as needing to be immediate perfection, but more so as what it really is, a process.
When reflecting on high school, most teachers taught using the same concepts: learning, teaching and writing, for the grade, and not to learn. I did have some really amazing teachers that truly did care about if I was learning and how I was learning, but a lot of my teachers did not. In most cases, while writing papers in high school, most teachers did not only teach for the prompt but also graded you on your ability to write to the prompt. Because of this mindset being taken on by most of my teachers, the writing process became something very generic and students were writing to get a good grade and not to learn or understand the material on a deeper level, we were simply writing for an A. This led to students getting in a bad habit of waiting to the last minute to do something and still getting an A on it. Especially within students who were in advanced and honors classes. These habits formed because the writing assignments given to students could be done quickly without engaging into the assignments on a deeper level and thinking about what was to be written. Because of these habits, I didn’t practice writing to learn and grown, instead, practiced learning how to write to get an A on the assignment rather than engaging and interacting with my writing.
