I can’t say that my high school was the best in the country, because it wasn’t. The ugly pink building may have housed private school kids with good teachers, but it was out in the Midwest, Kansas to be specific. And while location doesn’t matter, being out in a relatively small city tends not to have the quality of a high-end school in a big city.
However, it’s not to say that my high school was bad either. It was actually better than most (around the area, at least), and one of the truly great things about it was its writing program. There are some high schools that only start forcing kids to write essays during junior or even senior year. Mine started the summer before freshman year (and even before that, since the entire school was made up of a lower and middle school as well). And we continually wrote essays – not just at the beginning and end of the year, but within it as well. It was normal. And by the end of freshman year, three page papers were no big deal.
And we didn’t just write these papers for English class. Throughout my high school career, I had papers for Spanish, History, and Chemistry as well. For Spanish (I took it all four years, with the last being a seminar), the essays were light in terms of length, naturally. Still, it was hard to write in a foreign language. For history…well, those essays were longer. Sophomore year I had the occasional two to three page paper due, as well as the eight page paper at the end of the semester, but nothing too bad. APUSH my junior year is where the essay workload got really heavy. First of all, I hated that class – even though I loved World History sophomore year, I just didn’t find American interesting. So I had to write six to seven page papers every couple of weeks on a topic I hated. That was fun. As of for Chemistry, for the two years I took it (Chemistry II and AP Chemistry), we had to write lab papers. And not just the papers where you fill out the blanks for the answers for the lab – formal papers with an intro, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion. It wasn’t that bad though – our chemistry teacher taught us how to write a lab paper well.
Of course, the biggest source of writing papers was English. We always had random writing assignments and periodic essays due my freshman through senior year. Though freshman year was a blast (our English teacher was hilarious), my favorite year had to be my junior year. Incidentally, it was the most writing-heavy class, but I loved the class because my teacher was so good. She had assigned a twenty-page paper at the beginning of the year, which was due at the end of the year. But it wasn’t bad, since she broke it up into two to three page essays throughout the year, which we synthesized into a complete essay at the end. My favorite assignment, however, happens to be the creative writing paper we did for the Beowulf unit. I wrote mine over two characters, battling each other at the ends of an apocalypse. I had a ton of fun writing the fight scene with the weapons I created.
Beowulf and his Dragon
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