Contrast Essay

      When we were being "prepared" for college English, all we were ever told was that college will be a lot harder than high school. You'll have to write 100-page essays, read thousands of text book pages a night, take notebooks full of notes every day, and read long, boring books until your eyes dry up and fall out. After getting through high school English, I thought college English would be a nightmare. But because of my love for writing, I was never really afraid of it. But now that I'm half-way through my first semester of college, I have come to realize that there are significant differences between high school English and college English, other than the difficulty.

     In high school, English classes consisted of looking at text-books. The extent of an English class in my high school was, "Turn to this page, read this person's story, and write about your feelings." In college, even though I'm in a non-traditional online class instead of a traditional in-person class, I haven been  re-introduced to the variety of things that an English class should offer, including lectures, essays, reading other people's work, brainstorming, researching, getting creative, and being given all the slack in the world to do what I want to do with my writing.

     The homework assignments in my high school English classes were the equivalent of what we had done in the class. "Read Frederick Douglass's narrative and then write one paragraph telling how it made you feel." "Read the next chapter out of Of Mice and Men and write a couple of sentences telling why you think Lennie Small acted the way he did." The assignments were about things that are good to think about, and that are good knowledge to have, but they really limited our capabilities as writers, and gave high school students a really easy, but boring, way out. In this college English class, we are given a lot to think about, and new things to try, and although we are given guidelines to follow, we are very free to write about whatever WE want to write about. This essay, for example, needs to contrast two things, and needs to be interesting to US, and be five paragraphs long. But the sky is the limit for the two things we want to contrast!

     The grading system in a high school English class is based on two things: did you do it, and does it relate to the topic? If you answered yes to both of those questions, congratulations, you get a 100. This was great news for us lazy high schoolers who just wanted to pass the class and move on with our lives. It was very little effort on our part, and even less effort on the English teacher's part. What I have found (rather, what we were ever so bluntly told,) in our college English class, you have done well if you have tried, if you relate to what you have written, and if your writing does what it's supposed to do. But Mr. Goldfine will tell you if it needs work, or if you have obviously blown off his well thought out assignment for something that has interested you more. In college, you are pushed and guided to your full potential by being given the sky as your limit.

     It's no secret that I enjoy college English so much more than I enjoyed my robotic, high school English classes. After four years of forgetting "hey, I can write about anything!" I'm glad to have my writing tested and criticized again, and to not have my nose shoved into a text book when I sit down to do my English work.