I was taught writing in a variety of different ways.

My mother was a school teacher, and had

gone through the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s teaching program, which at the time in
the 1960s, was regarded as one of the very best in the entire United States. She was very
big into making sure that my punctuation, format, grammar, and things like that were
accurate. The content creation, however, was my responsibility, when it came to crafting
papers.

My elementary school teachers really didn’t assign particularly challenging assignments when
it came to writing. I actually enjoyed writing huge stories on my own, especially in the 5 th and
6th grades, about the Transformers toys that I enjoyed. These were not simple 500 word
stories, these took up twenty or thirty pages easily, and had a massive amount of thought
behind them.

Middle school, or junior high school, there was a little more of a challenge, but nothing I would
regard as useful instruction. One of my fellow female classmates who was Japanese said
that I had really nice handwriting for a guy, which I thought was pretty cool. Considering how
precise the Japanese are when it comes to writing kanji characters, I thought this was a
tremendous compliment.

High school was interesting at the junior year and senior year levels. My junior year instructor
gave us the opportunity to rewrite any assignment, with the exception of one, for high credit. I
had top marks in his class, although one time he wrote, “See me,” on a paper. The
conversation was regarding what to expect the following year, because the AP English
teacher was more interested in memorization of material, and a bit of format, versus what I
had been doing in his class, which was really expounding on ideas, making points, and
supporting evidence for those points. As it turned out, that is precisely what happened my
senior year. My mom actually became extremely angry with one of the grades I had received
on a paper my senior year, called a conference with the instructor, and told her to change the
grade, which actually happened!

College writing was very easy for me, as the instructors were interested in a similar style of
what I had done my junior year of high school. Even when I was taking a comprehensive
short course through Harvard for my Higher Education Teaching Certificate in July of 2020,
that was still the prescribed, and favored, method.