I recently purchased a book entitled Writing and Being: Taking Back Our Lives Through the Power of Language from the clearance section of my local Half Price Book store. When I first flipped through the book, the language seemed a little flowery, but for $1, I figured I could find something useful out of it.
As I whipped through the introduction, something seemed very familiar about this style of writing. I know I hadn’t read the book before, but as I skimmed through the book, I realized that I’d already been subjected to half of the writing exercises in this book. This book undoubtedly was the basis for roughly 60% of my senior year English class. And I had hated 100 % of it.
Senior year English was my least favorite class I ever had in high school. I can safely say I preferred calculus, where I was barely hanging onto a B and ran home to cry my eyes out after nearly failing the first quarter term exam, over senior year English. My teacher, Mrs. Bradner, was very into journaling and “exploring your emotions”. That is, exploring your emotions out loud – in front of the class – in a feather circle.
Most of her curriculum was born out of a college journaling class that over 5 years later, still made an impression in her life. “It’s so freeing” she used to tell the class. “People used to share their journals and have emotional breakthroughs all the time. We went through so much Kleenex in that class”.
Minutes before our first class feather circle, she then regaled the class with yet another testimonial about the power of sharing your past traumas in front of a group of people. In the previous school year, one poor kid began sharing about how his father left their family when he was only 5 years old, and this boy bawled his eyes out in front of the class.
According to Mrs. Bradner, this was “such a beautiful experience. The raw emotion that came out from him was so powerful. I could tell it was something he had kept bottled up for years.”
I thought this was crap. Who was she to dredge up awful memories? Was she a trained psychologist? Did she know how to guide a broken person through the recollection of a painful memory?
Every time we did a feather circle, I only shared humorous memories of my youth. In the back of my mind, I couldn’t shake the image of some high school boy sniffling through his beet red nose with tears running down his puffy cheeks. I could imagine that the rest of the class probably dulled down into an awkward silence. But what happened to him later? Did the other kids tease him? Did they pity him? Did they ignore him? Or did they actually empathize with him? Did he regret sharing that memory at that moment or did it empower him?
I didn’t have a problem with journaling or the idea of exploring your emotions. After all, isn’t writing a way to explore thoughts and feelings in different contexts? What I took issue with was the constant push to share one’s deepest and most painful experiences in front of one’s peers. Most of the class felt the same way I did. Nobody really wanted to share any deep, dark memories with anyone else in the class.
Mrs. Bradner didn’t seem to understand the difference between being a college kid and choosing to participate in a class where this type of sharing is the norm, and being a high school kid without any say into whose class the district computer placed you in for a required credit. When I brought this up with her, she gently suggested that I should transfer to another English class. At that point, I knew she would never understand my viewpoint.
When I realized this book was the cause of my painful high school memories, my first instinct was to run to Goodwill and throw it in the donation box. Instead, I’ve decided to hang onto it. I’m curious to see how closely my old English teacher stayed to the intended purpose of this author’s approach to writing.
In a future post, I’ll describe my thoughts of this book, and compare it to how these concepts were presented to me over ten years ago.
That’s okay – I hated high school english too.
I do keep a journal, but I can’t say that I’d want to read any of it out loud to anyone.
LOL – Tina that is hilarious considering what you are studying right now. See, that was my point exactly. People do use writing as a form of therapy to work through all sorts of experiences, but don’t force people to share everything they’ve written if they don’t feel ready for it!!!
I actually teach high school English. I can understand where your teacher was coming from as this sounds likes a more innovative way to get kids interested in Language Arts. However, it also sounds like maybe she pushed things a little too far. I make my students keep journals in class, but I always stress that journaling is a “safe space” where they should be free to write about anything.
Once a month I do have a “Speak your Mind” session where my students each get a few minutes to say whatever is in their mind. Sometimes, the students do read from their journal, but most of the time I find they want to talk about current events or grievances they have with school policies.
I however, would never, ever push these kids to share anything they feel uncomfortable saying out loud to other people.
Jim – thank you for sharing your perspective. I have a better appreciation for what my teacher was trying to do now that I’m years removed from the situation, but yes, I did feel like she was pushing us to share really deep experiences with the class. Many of us were barely getting used to keeping journals and relying on those journals as a private forum. Then we were basically being asked to share out of them just weeks later. It felt very intrusive.
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Your English teacher was trying to get students to “think outside the box”. Sometimes in order to get people to try new things you have to make them step outside their comfort zone. She probably felt you and your peers needed a push in order to get the most out of your writing.
Thank you for your comment.
I do understand that sometimes you have to give people a push to get them on board with whatever you are trying to accomplish, but when it doesn’t look like it is working, that is a signal that you are trying the wrong approach with your audience as no one really shared anything significant through their journal writing. Maybe some people utilized their journals privately and just didn’t share it with the class, which is fine if they were finding solace in their journals. I just think for this audience we needed a better idea of what she was trying to accomplish and it needed to be done in smaller steps.
I actually used to love writing and writing fictional stories. After that class, I pretty much took to research writing when I went through college because her approach turned me off to writing for quite a while. Now that I’ve been doing research writing for years, it has taken me a long time to get back into writing for fun.
Well, stay tuned. I’m sure my outlook will be a little different after I finish reading this book.
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