What I Hated About High School?

     The abundance of shitty teachers. Every year of high school I would have at least two classes I dreaded going to because I didn't like the teacher. In college, you don't get better grades if you go up to the professor and ask them how their day was. They'd be able to see right through all that ass-kissing. And that's the way it should be everywhere, not just in college.
     That was one of the many things I really hated about high school. To me, it seemed like some teachers would dole out good grades that were somewhat based on whether you were their favorite, and how you had done on previous papers. 

     My senior year, I decided to take a creative writing class. The teacher seemed like she was part whack job, part free spirit, and a little part teacher. There was really no point to sitting in class, all we did was listen to her lecture us about sentence structure, writing devices that authors use, and lots of other writing mumbo jumbo that everyone learns in fourth grade. But still, I showed up every single day, whereas, a favorite student of hers skipped class (and got away with it) on a regular basis.

     After being in that class for a while, I definitely noticed a trend going on with the grades of the kids who sucked up to this teacher compared to my grades. Huge difference. I've never been one of those students that sucked up to their teachers. I don't really care if my teacher had a good weekend or not or how their son's basketball game was, etc. I'm not going to sit here and obnoxiously claim that I think I'm the best writer in the world, but I know I didn't deserve C's and D's on the majority of my papers. This teacher never specified what she was looking for. One of our assignments was to write a story where you focus on character development. You could write about anything.

     Students that had an A- or higher were exempt from taking her final. I remember the last day of class before finals, she went up and down the rows telling people who had A's that they didn't have to take the final. I saw her making her way up my row, telling all my friends that they were exempt, then when she got to where I was sitting, all the way in the back of course, she gave me a weird look then turned her back.

     Sitting there taking her bullshit final was a time when I was super discouraged. It just didn't feel right. Looking around the room, I saw people that would regularly skip class and hand in papers late every time. I started to tell myself that I must be an awful writer if I actually tried on every paper she assigned, came to class, and I still had to take the final among people who didn't try at all.

     At the time of my college orientation at Temple, I was a communications major. Frankly, I was hesitant to switch over to journalism, which is what I really wanted to do. At orientation, I had to take placement exams - one for English and one for math. The English placement test was part reading comprehension, part sentence structure/grammar, and part essay. After taking that awful creative writing class in high school, I assumed I didn't do well on the essay portion because I was used to getting bad grades on all my papers, even if I thought they were good. And I've always been pretty bad at reading comprehension. I was dreading the results of that placement test for sure.

     On the second day of orientation, we got the results of our placement tests. It turned out that I was the only person in my group of 30 people or so that was exempt from taking freshman English. I know that couldn't have been because of the reading comprehension part - it had to be based off the grammar section and essay. 

     The first thing I wanted to do was run all the way back to that creative writing teacher that had pretty much destroyed my confidence in my writing, hand her a copy of the essay that got me exempt out of a college English class, and I'd probably want to throw in a "fuck you" as a personal parting gift from yours truly. That same day I switched my major to journalism, what my major should have been all along.