So the prompt said to think of a writing assignment that I am very proud of. Well the first thing that comes to mind is a weird example. When I was in high school English we had a poetry assignment. Our teacher was super strict but super awesome. I remember doing the poetry assignment in my journalism class a day or two before it was due. I'm sure it was very angsty, very teenagery, and in the grand scheme of things not very good. Thing is though, I turned it in and the feed back blew me away.
My teacher took me aside after class a few days after we turned it in and said she wanted to talk to me about my poem. She took it out and said, "this is one of the best poems I've ever had turned in for this assignment, but..." There was a "but" but before we get to it, how cool is that! I was super excited and felt very very proud. But back to the "but." "But, Trevon there are sooo many mistakes." She proceed to tell me that she loved the poem, loved my word choice, my metaphors, and my symbolism but that the thing was riddled with spelling errors and small grammatical problems. She said that if I ever turned something in like this in collage that I would never have gotten this kind of feedback, I would just get an F no mater how great the poem was.
Being the rebellious teenager I was a big part of me was just really excited that I managed to pull off an A on a paper with so many mistakes, but her comments did get me thinking about the future. You see I didn't do much of any thing that was included in the prompt. My only reference was a thesaurus, and the only person I had review it was my friend and there's probably no way I would have changed anything major just because he said to (and obviously he was no good at the technical help.) I definitely didn't revise it before I turned it in. And sad thing is, I may not have revised it afterwords. I do think this talk contributed a lot to me putting a ton of effort into all my writing my first two semesters of collage (I didn't want them to just reject my papers as I had been led to believe they would.)
Looking back I kind of wish she hadn't given me an A right off the bat. Maybe if I had had to revise it I would still have it today. Maybe I would at least remember what was so great about it, and I for sure would have come away knowing the importance of revision.
I think when I am the one in the teacher roll I'm gonna play it a little differently. When that gem of a paper comes across my desk chalk full of errors (that is if I can even tell that there are errors,) I'm going to have them revise it, have their peers look over it, have them look over a few more sources.
Then I'll tell them it's the best paper I've ever read. Because I mean, come on, who doesn't want to hear that about their work.
