Beowulf/Jaws Essay
My sister recently showed me her deep-storage writing files - she's got stuff going back to middle school. I was especially inspired by her piece entitled the Jupitarian Gazette, a newspaper she and her friend wrote as though they were aliens living on Jupiter. Great stuff. I'm working on getting her permission to publish it.
Anyway, she inspired me to look back into my own deep storage files. I don't have as much as she - I've lost quite a bit over the years to different computer failures and such - but I've got a couple gems.
One of them is my first real essay. It was a little two page Beowulf/Jaws comparison assigned towards the beginning of 9th grade (or 3rd form as we called it back then). I remember spending an inordinate amount of time on it, and feeling quite frustrated. I knew my paper wasn't what a proper paper was supposed to be, but I couldn't figure out how to make mine into one. Now that I teach 9th graders how to write, I come back to this memory quite a bit to help me remember what it was like. To empathize.
But I hadn't returned to the actual paper. This was shocking to me - I now grade 9th grade papers, and try to teach them how to make better ones. How had I not gone and looked at my own writing? So I thought I'd try a little experiment - I would grade my own paper.
As you can see, I gave myself an 89. I don't actually remember what I got on this essay, but that seems reasonable. But then, on the other hand, maybe I'm being too easy on myself - perhaps it's easier to understand myself than others, not because I'm a particularly good writer, but just because it's me. Or maybe I'm just an easy grader. I spend about as much time worrying about being an easy grader as I worry about being a harsh grader, so I like to think that I end up being somewhat fair. But who really knows - lacking the exact prompt for this essay, as well as knowledge of what the teacher was emphasizing, it's hard to know what the essay really deserves.
And, of course, papers don't 'really deserve' anything. Grading papers, despite the claims of English teachers everywhere, is a highly subjective act. This seems obvious and incontrovertible to me on the basis of human psychology, as well as on the deeper question of what makes one paper better than another. But that's a post for another day.
It was interesting to see my old writing. There are obviously many things I would do differently today - like include more paragraphs, and be more logical in how I understand the nature of a text - but by and large, this still sounds like me, I think. There are moments where, beneath a layer of wordiness and confusion, I can see the same patterns of writing I use today. Take, for example, this point:
How can Grendel’s mother be evil if Beowulf says less than ten pages later that “It is always better to avenge dear ones that to indulge in mourning” (Heaney 97)? Because Beowulf is certainly on the righteous side of this two-dimensional conflict in the two-dimensional world of Beowulf, Grendel’s mother must be at least somewhat good.
This is how I would write that same point today:
Yet Beowulf says soon afterwards that "it is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning" (Heaney 97). Certainly Beowulf is on the righteous side of the epic's two dimensional conflict; Grendel's mother, therefore, must be at least somewhat good.
The order of the ideas and much of the phrasing remains pretty much the same. Both sound like me; the older one just sounds like me when I'm tired. That is remarkable to me. If there's a thing such as my voice, and I think that writers do have distinct voices, where did it come from? Before now, I would have said it comes from what I read and learned in high school and college, but apparently (this was my first essay) a good portion of my voice was intact before high school. Where did it come from?
It certainly didn't come from any teacher - or, at least, not just from a teacher. Thinking now, I imagine that my voice comes from every interaction with language I've had - all the books I've read, all the things my peers and teachers and parents said to me, everything I hear on tv or the radio. That's an amazing and humbling thought for a teacher - I can't teach people to write. I learned to write from the world all around me. As a teacher, The best I can do is make that world a little richer in language, and perhaps give them a few techniques and concepts to help them use what they encounter.
Me as a ninth grader. Watch out ladies.
Writing the note was an interesting experience as well. I often wonder if students understand my notes at all - if they're of any use whatsoever. How can my note affect a students' understanding of writing enough so that their writing actually changes for the better? Sure, I can tell them to use more paragraphs, but paragraphs are just window-dressing - it's shorthand for what we're really concerned with, the quality and logic of the ideas. Does using more paragraphs necessarily improve your ideas? In writing the note for myself, I imagined my 9th grade self reading it. Would he understand me any better than my students? Probably not - and, actually, I don't remember getting anything useful out of essay comments whatsoever. I remember comments that hurt my feelings, and I remember comments that flattered me, but I don't remember any actual writing advice. Obviously emotional reactions stick around longer than the content - perhaps I should pay more attention to that aspect of my comments.
I plan to come back to this essay. Perhaps, some day, this essay will feel like someone else wrote it. However, just now as I propose that idea to my dad, he tells me of an essay he wrote in 5th grade. His central thesis: if I could be any animal, I would be a dinosaur, so that I would be extinct and therefore unable to write this stupid essay. I have to say, that does sound like my Dad - probably writers' voices shift over time, but not far enough to change the writer.