Application essays and college writing

Princedog
Sun, 25 Feb 2007 02:46:45 +0000

I went through the IB Middle Years Program and am finishing my IB Diploma, and I’ve had the same experience. At parent-teacher conferences in middle school, my teachers said I did wonderful work, but that I was “too creative” and needed to work on following directions (catering to the rubric). I haven’t written anything creative since eighth grade; my current English teacher (a wonderful man) says the IB sucks the creativity out of people. I’m thinking he might have a point. To its credit, I did learn to write analytically–more or less.



Haha the almighty rubric. That’s great. I have like 58473728 copies of that rubric. They attach it to everything. Sometimes twice. I can probably quote it. My favorite is “appropriate register.”

Although we still do creative writing. Not really personal writing though. We did this character thing though that was basically writing a story about a character in the last book we read. Things like that. The World Lit 1 paper has to be analytical but the World Lit 2 can be one of the creative options. However (I don’t know about your schools) they then go on in the next breath to tell us that if you do the creative option you probably won’t score well because most people won’t be able to pull it off. LOL. I went for the commentary on a poem.

We do all sorts of creative writing in French. Our teacher tries. But if she flunked us for five spelling errors, LOL, things would not be looking good. We just did a letter from an animal to the president about ecological issues and then we also did a conversation (aloud) with a partner with one person being an interviewer and one person being an animal.