One of the high schools I attended required incoming freshpersons to write a paper titled "Who am I?" These papers were fairly big deals for the kids, and a source of much stress. Every year, there were rumors of kids trying to photocopy their student I.D. cards and turn them as a clever meta-essay, but none of these rumors were ever confirmed by me.*
These papers were then read by the student at the end of their four years at the school. I guess the goal was a forced existential examination, but given the vast gulf between the person I was in my senior year of high school and the person I was in the fall of my first year of college, I can't imagine that this would have been particularly fruitful for the students.
Since I started attending this school with my sophomore year, I did not write one of these papers. I have plenty of written paragraphs that can only really be described as journal entries from the last fourteen years, a great many of which are thoroughly public as blog posts. Leafing through them traces a character arc that I doubt is unique among the lives of American consumers aged 18-35. Looking back at my various journals, paper or digital, is a great way to remind myself that while I may be unemployed, at least I am not as much of a chundernozzle as I used to be.
Who am I?: I make two u-turns and hold up traffic on a one lane road to move a turtle off that road.
* I never cared enough to even begin the process of asking my advisor about the grading process for these papers.
3 comments:
We never got the papers back..and they were almost always garbage anyway. Asking immature, selfish, privileged 14-year-olds to write papers about themselves was pretty ill-planned. I pity the faculty having to read and grade these epic papers of self-centered drivel.
A photocopied ID would have been a relief.
Haha. I thought you guys got them back.
Chuckles is my hero and Tim is my hilarious...comment fro the day!
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