I get it Mr. Anderson!

Merci beaucoup! Gracias! Arigatoo! to my writing group :)

"No more rubrics!" I imagine Mr. Anderson holding up a protest sign in front of the White House, as I attempt to complete my writing contribution for the ISI anthology.

"But, Mr. Anderson, how am I supposed to figure out what I’m supposed to write? How do I know that I have achieved what is expected for composition, expression, and mechanics?" I asked myself.

Back in prep school, twenty years back, we did not have rubrics and I envied my classmates who were able to "guess" what the teachers wanted and got that illustrious A+. I tried and tried. I varied my sentence structure. I subordinated my clauses. I looked up synonyms.  Still, the highest grade I could get from Sister M was a B+.

So, when I arrived at grad school a few years back, I was elated to see this new system of transparency - the rubric. Alas! If only Sister M had given me a rubric, I would have gotten that A+.

However, it is not that simple. Having Mr. Anderson in our writing group helped me see that the rubric would not have been the end-all-fix-all solution to my problem.

After three weeks of ISI 2015, I have realized that my problem was not the lack of rubrics but not writing from the heart.

Working under the guidance of my fellow writing group mentors, I’ve been able to revise my story exponential times until I reached into that vault of memories, from twenty years back, to identify the significant events that changed my life and articulate how these affect my teaching style today.

So, I get it Mr. Anderson. It’s not about the rubrics. It’s about being an authentic writer. It’s about the creativity and freedom that writing can express. It’s about the inner strength that I have gained from telling my story. It’s about the responsibility that I have to tell the story of those whose words remain unspoken.