Reproach mingled with contempt or disdain.
When I started scanning my grade school essays and writing assignments I was surprised at how cutting and how incisive still were the comments written in red ink by my English and Creative Writing teachers. Decades later the fresh pain of a teacher’s disdainful, lecturous comments scrawled across my stories still stings. I have a sense of humor about it now but at first glance I see these papers and remember the disillusion I felt at writing what I thought was a great story only to have it dismissed on technicalities.
One story was supposed to have been in booklet form, with construction paper front and back covers. I stapled the pages three times along the side and turned it in that way, earning the dismissive comment that my story was not in the assigned physical format. Space for the teacher’s comments was limited so I got little feedback on the story itself, only its lack of construction paper binding and my poor handwriting.
I wrote way too much as a youngster. By high school I was churning out page after page of unread mental dross, and by senior year of high school the natural cynic in me had strong suspicions that large parts of my stories went unread by the teachers. I had no evidence to support this, but the last story I turned in to an English teacher was quickly returned with a crisply lettered "A" on top. The story was returned with such speed that it seemed impossible it could have been read in such a short time. There was no comment, no evidence that the words had been read, and nothing but my suspicions of the teacher’s attitudes toward me at the time to suggest that he didn’t care any more but appreciated the grandiloquent effort.
As a parting shot I littered the final issue of the school paper that year with a coded obscenity. No one in charge caught it, and I thought it was all in good fun, though I later learned that some kids at another school in town pulled a similar stunt and were expelled just days before graduation.
In college my suspicion that lengthy papers were not fully read by the professors was confirmed. At a few spots in a lengthy paper about sonata form I launched into incongruous obscenities and Tourette-like vulgarities. None of them were spotted by the professor, and I had to warn my mother about these lurchings when she read the paper. I got an A+, and while I actually do think the apper deserved a good grade I think the prof. just gave up on reading it and threw his highest award at it as a show of appreciation for the time spent.
