In choosing an experience or event to write about, you may take into account anything at all that has something to do with schools or education generally. For instance, you might write about an important encounter you had with a teacher or about a course that was special to you for some reason. You might also write about an experience associated with an extracurricular activity such as debate or an athletic team. Or you might write about a social event, such as a prom, that is traditionally associated with schools. In addition, the experience you choose to write about may be a positive one or a negative one or neither. You might, for example, write about a time when you ran afoul of some rule or about a teacher's strike or some controversy (like school prayer) that you were involved in or about an unpleasant experience you had with a specific teacher. On the other hand, you might write about winning the state debate championship or about becoming editor of the school newspaper or about an especially good teacher who influenced you in a special way. What's crucial is that the experience is an important one that says something to you about schools or education.

You might look at some of the essays written for this assignment in previous semesters. Those essays represent an incredible variety of experiences--and approaches to writing about those experiences--and may help you think about how you'd like to approach this assignment. You can link to these essays by going to the Student Writings page.

The challenge for this assignment, then, is to find a way to tell us about your experience so that the experience is vivid to us at the same time that it raises for us important issues and/or questions about schools and education. Use whatever techniques or approaches that seem to work best for the event or experience you are describing.

The essay should be at least 1000 words in length. That figure is a guideline, not a hard-and-fast requirement. If you can tell about your experience effectively in fewer words, do so. If you need more, that's fine. However, it will be difficult to write an effective essay for this assignment in fewer than 1000 words; in addition, a story that goes on too long can make it hard to share your drafts effectively with your classmates and with me. So use your best judgment.

Deadlines

A complete draft of this assignment is due by Monday, September 17.

The final version of the essay is due in class on Tuesday, September 23.

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