Throughout my life, I have done many things, been called many names, and called myself by a couple as well.  Among all these things and names, there is one that I avoid doing whenever possible, and one that I have never been called.  I will dodge most writing assignments like the plague, and have never heard anybody refer to me as a writer.  However horrifying this may sound to an English teacher, I would like to clarify that this does not necessarily mean I am a bad writer, I am just a bad student.  When I was very young, around the age of six or seven, I enjoyed writing, and would jot down little stories that my little child brain imagined, show them to my parents all proud of my work, and then forget about them in a box somewhere in a closet.  I would do just about anything to get a story down on a page.  I drew some miniature comic books, would type up two pages in word and believe it was a novel, and all manner of things along those lines.  As a child, I truly enjoyed the art of storytelling, and writing was my preferred medium.  This does bring us to the issue at hand: what changed?

Throughout my later childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood now, time became progressively more limited, and with more limited time meant less time writing what I wanted.  I can not remember a specific teacher that made me dislike writing, but rather I would blame this on the whole system of writing works for school.  Assigned prompts, strict rubrics, due dates, boring classes, it all just kept piling on and sucking the life out of any writing spirit that probably 12 year old Tom had left in him.  Now I may not have someone I can specifically blame for the fall in my writing enthusiasm, but I can blame a specific teacher for my hatred of schoolwork, and thus heavily feeding the problem of murdering my enjoyment of writing.

In the fifth grade, my school decided I was “smart” enough to be placed in their highest elementary school math class.  The teacher of this class was one Ms. Grogan, a retired army drill instructor who quite often forgot she was teaching a bunch of ten and eleven year old children.  She would often assign multiple hours of math a night, which for me meant the loss of much of my free time, and for my dad meant many nights of having to sit at the kitchen table with me for hours because I was too busy crying in frustration to keep going.  I can remember the slow drag of grinding out order of operations and long division problems nightly beyond the point where the outside world had turned pitch black.  I hated every second I spent working on that homework, and I believe it is safe to say that my fifth grade math class permanently scarred me mentally.  So much did I dislike homework that I rarely completed another homework assignment.  I did the bare minimum in middle school, and in high school I did less.  Throughout all four years that I spent in Western Albemarle High School, I can think of four or five times where I actually did homework for a class.  My grades suffered heavily because of it, but my test scores were enough to support my GPA.  Graduating high school seemed like a miracle to my family, and my acceptance into VMI was even more befuddling to them.

All those years of procrastination, negligence, and laziness have all caught up to me, as I am fighting to force myself to work hard and study here.  Even now, with good teachers and classes, I still struggle to find that will to work.  At some point over the years, this hatred of homework turned into a general distaste for all things school.  I have lost much of my interest in learning about history, which was a massive part of my life.  I still find it interesting, but I do not have as much of a drive to pursue the furtherment of my knowledge.  My enjoyment of writing is long gone, but through countless five paragraph, double spaced, times new roman, twelve point font essays my skills remain sharp.  Numerous times of adding fluff words to make them seem more sophisticated and meet word requirements with less effort also dampened my drive.  I understand that without a word requirement many people would write maybe a page of nonsense and be done with it, but in my case, I wrote what I had to say on the topic, and then had to go through and just add trash to meet the minimums and fight to avoid diluting the work underneath with it.  Quite often, this was the extent of my revision and editing.  Nothing more than fluffing the proverbial pillow.  While trying not to sound so grandiose, my relationship with writing could best be compared with that of Oppenheimer and the bombs.  He began loving the craft, the physics, but hated the use of all his research, and the culminating result.  I have pumped out more of those cookie cutter high school essays than I care to remember, getting A’s on just shy of all of them, yet not spending more than an hour or two on any.  If my writing were to fit into a genre or a common theme, it would be hollow with a hint of bitterness towards the constraints and guidelines often laid out; filled with fake voice and tone, often coming off as near sarcastic, but riding the line where it is just too hard to tell.  Everything I do, or at least everything I did for school outside of those few pieces of homework that I chose to do, I did with a resentment.

I do not hate writing, if anything I could see it being a means to free myself mentally, through writing either a journal or short stories again as I did when I was young.  It may even be fair to say that I enjoy writing.  I despise having to write.  I despise the American public school system’s method for standardizing everything in preparation for their standardized writing tests.  With how limited prompts are it’s a miracle more people are not accidentally committing plagiarism.  The writing “method” and requirements as often laid out by schools can quite easily strangle creativity, and the system that does all this has been my largest literary sponsor thus far.  This is feeling of dislike for the standardized writing conventions is something that Ray Bradbury and myself share.  One of the very few things in fact.  I believe that he has serious grievances that should be taken more seriously against the common writing schools of thought.  He however is mainly focused on being anti higher education establishment writing, whereas I believe the required literary works of students negatively impact many of us, and set us up to fail in situations that require thinking outside of the box, and ruin the enjoyment for many of us belonging to things that could have been such great and purposeful activities in our lives.

I do not write.  Not because I dislike writing, or because I find it boring, I have just spent so much time writing what I did not want to, that now there is nothing I do.  Thanks, Ms. Grogan.