This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 47: What They Didn’t Teach You In School.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today I’m talking about something that I think everyone experiences but nobody really talks about, and that is all of those things that you didn’t learn in school about writing, about life, maybe about other people. I fully realize that this might end up being a very polarizing episode, which I get, because education is something that, while everybody goes through it, it still manages to be a very sensitive topic because there’s a lot of politics surrounding it, there’s a lot of arguing and methodologies surrounding how we go about educating people. And in addition to being polarizing, this might also be… Well, I can guarantee it’s going to be extremely biased because, really, when it comes right down to it, I’m only qualified to talk from one point of view and that point of view is my own.

So, I went through 12 years… Well, I guess 13 years if you count kindergarten. So, I went through 13 years of public school and it wasn’t a bad experience. But I am fully aware that my experience was probably very, very different from yours. So, you may have been homeschooled. You may have gone through a parochial school system. You may have been through a Montessori system. There’s all… There’s a million different types. Maybe you didn’t go to school at all. So, while you might not identify perfectly with everything that I talk about in today’s episode, what I really hope happens is that we open up a dialogue where we can talk about the things that we learned and the things that we didn’t learn. And I’m actually really interested… At the end of this episode, I’m really interested to hear your thoughts, maybe about what you did learn, what was valuable and what you didn’t learn, what you wish you could have learned, what would have been valuable for you to know.

So, I encourage you. When you’re done listening to this episode, go ahead and you can do one of two things. You can either go to the comments for the show notes for this episode, Episode 47, and leave me a comment there. So, that’s just at sarahwerner.com. S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R dot com. Otherwise, you can just send me an email at hello@sarahwerner.com. I would love to hear your story. I think it’s important for us to talk about these things. I think that that’s one of the ways that we can move on and learn and grow as a community of writers. So, would love to hear from you. Until then, though, I’m going to blather on and on about what we did not learn in school. And in order to do that, I want to first talk about the things that we did learn in school.

So, when I think back, there are three lessons that I took away from my 13 years of public school education, three lessons about writing. And so, for me, the first one was the importance of spelling. I know that technology is changing and now we can rely on spell check and predictive text on our technological devices to spell things for us, but I’m going to sound really old for a second. I’m going to be like, “When I was your age…”. Because that’s not obnoxious. We had to learn spelling. We did spelling tests and spelling bees and spelling drills. There were charts with our names and little checks and X markses… X… X marks. Check marks and X marks. Yeah, that’s right. But, I just… I vividly remember this being just this crucial, core part of our writing curriculum, was spelling. No matter what teacher I had, all through my entire school career, probably through about eighth or ninth grade, we had spelling lists that we would take home. And the way that you learned spelling in this case was by memorization.

So, you would have your list of spelling words and you would take them home and then at the end of the week, you would have a quiz or a test where you would regurgitate the spelling of the words that you had memorized. Or, if you were maybe a less than ideal student, you would try to guess at the words you had not memorized. I was one of those super-nerdy students, so I always had the list memorized. But I was… I was an insufferable dork, so there you have that. But I just remember that that was one of the very first things I ever learned about writing, was that spelling is important.

Along with that, handwriting was also important. It was something we had to practice. We had special paper that had three parallel lines, two of which were solid and one in the middle which was dotted, and… You know, I hear they don’t teach cursive in school anymore. I guess that’s a thing. I don’t know. But I remember hours and hours practicing cursive, this paper, and I hated it because the paper was too soft for the pencil and my pencil would always rip through the paper a little bit, and my little perfectionist mind just couldn’t take that.

Spelling, handwriting, and then sort of hand in hand with spelling was grammar. I’ve talked about my own experience with grammar on this show before, so those of you who have been listening for a while may remember that I actually didn’t learn grammar until I went to college and took a remedial grammar class. It’s not because I’m dumb, because I like to think that I’m not dumb, and it’s not that my school system was bad or anything. I went to a perfectly adequate public school system. But there was an assumption that we had always already learned the grammar when we moved from grade to grade, and this was exacerbated by the fact that… Again, here’s my nerd cred. You’re going to hate me by the end of this episode because I’m not going to stop talking about what a huge nerd I was. But I got taken out of school a couple days a week to go to this gifted and talented school where we would do weird science experiments on plants and listen to opera music and try to learn how to program computers and all sorts of interesting things.

But I think that while we were being shipped away a few times a week, that’s maybe when everyone else learned grammar. And I love that I was off learning weird things about opera music and really how photosynthesis works. So, I’m very grateful that I had that opportunity, but I felt really dumb for most of my life, especially when I had to take a foreign language class and they’re like, “Okay. Well, so, you’ll need the adverbial phrase here and here’s this diagrammed sentence. Now, doesn’t this make perfect sense?” And I was just so confused and overwhelmed. And this is just… This is just me. So, I’m kind of assuming that I am the outlier here and most of you learned grammar along with your spelling in your early educational years.

So, we learned the whole spelling, grammar, handwriting, the basic building blocks of writing. We learned those. The second thing I remember very vividly learning about writing specifically was that there was a vast difference between what I wanted to write for myself and what I was instructed to write. All I wanted to do was go home and work on my sci-fi novel or work on this mystery I was writing, and I couldn’t do that. I had to be at school, answering the dreaded essay question. Do you remember essay questions? I don’t know if you had to do these or not. I think they’re pretty standard. So, you’d be taking a test and you’d be like, “Okay. A, B, C.” For your multiple choice. And then you would get to the end of the test and there would be a fricking essay question, and all I remember is seeing these lines and lines and lines that I would have to fill.

And again, it wouldn’t be asking me to create anything. The essay question would inevitably be asking me to regurgitate something. And I knew what I was talking about because I did the reading and I understood history. We’ll use history as an example, or social studies. So, on the back, it would say, “Explain why Napoleon did this in this year.” And you’d be like, “Oh, my gosh. I know the answer.” But it’s such a chore to write it out. I didn’t want to regurgitate. That was boring to me. I wanted to create. So, number two. I learned that there is a vast difference between what I wanted to write and what I was assigned to write, and that kind of stuck with me, and we’re going to talk a little bit later in the episode today about the effect that some of these lessons have on us through our adulthood.

All right, number three. The third thing that I remember is how to write a five paragraph essay. Again, this is all highly biased toward my own experience, but maybe this is something you had to do, too. So, this was maybe high school years. But there was this five paragraph essay and this was the sort of rubric that we used for all essays. So, you’d read a book and then you would come up with a thesis for your five paragraph essay, and in the first paragraph, you would introduce your thesis. You would then write three supporting paragraphs, each of which would be neatly outlined with a bullet point beforehand, and then you would write a concluding paragraph where you re-stated your thesis. I spent all four years of high school churning out five paragraph essays in preparation for proficiency tests.

Our school had a problem with passing proficiency tests, and I don’t even know if they were state-mandated. I’m sure they were state-mandated, but our teachers were instructed to teach to the tests, and so for four years, I wrote five paragraph essays. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I learned how to craft a thesis, I learned how to support my thesis with three carefully worded paragraphs, and I learned how to wrap it all up. This served me well for college admissions essays and it served me well in my first couple weeks of college when you have to write smaller papers because you’re just getting the ball rolling. So, it did okay. But I just really… I just really remember the five paragraph paper because, again, it felt like a form of regurgitation and not creation.

What I’m saying here is what I remember, and what I’m not trying to say is that school should be super-duper fun all the time and poor little me, I was bored in school. Yes, I was bored in school and maybe you were too, but that’s not the point. Outside of specific lessons about writing, but I think still related to our lives as adult writers, I learned a few other things. I learned that failure is to be avoided at all costs. I learned that if you get an A, people like you, but if you get an F, then bad things happen.

F ostensibly stood for failure and if you failed something, then the punishments would begin. You would be forced to be held back and repeat the grade, so, not only be separated from your friends and peers, but also humiliated and stuck with younger students. And also, doing all that work all over again. It was insinuated that a failing grade meant you were, in some sense, inadequate, that you were not good, that you had not learned properly, that you were a poor student, that you would not be successful in life. We were taught to be failure-averse and along with that lesson came the lesson that if you don’t think you’re going to get a passing grade… If you don’t think you’re going to get an A or a B, then you probably shouldn’t do it at all. You should probably just play it safe.

Along with an aversion to failure and a failing grade was this idea that grades matter. This is something that stuck with me way past high school. This is something that stuck with me through college and actually for many years after college. It was probably four or five years out of college and I was reviewing resumes for a new potential co-worker and I saw that on the resumes, each of them said 3.8 GPA at so and so school and 3.9 GPA at so and so school and 4.0 GPA at so and so school. And I remember thinking, “I don’t care what your GPA was. That matters zero percent to me.” What I want to know is, can I work with you? Are you capable? Are you a good communicator? Do you have a good attitude about the work that you’ll be doing? Are you a good culture fit for our organization?

I remember when I first realized that grades don’t actually matter. I was talking with a friend who had gone through four years of college and had just been this total party student. And I… You know, I had been the kind of student that I did all my homework, I got straight A’s. I didn’t go to Cancun or anything over spring break. I worked and studied and wrote papers and read books. And we both ended up in similar positions at the same company and I started to think, “Why did I push myself to a place where I hurt myself for grades that eventually did not matter?” I’m not saying that you should flunk your way out of school. I’m certainly not saying that, because I value achievement and I liked… I liked getting good grades. I liked proving, in some sense, that I was smart and capable.

But I would pull all-nighters studying and I would turn down time with friends and family in order to study more or to read more or to cram more data into my brain. I drank too much coffee. I didn’t sleep. I developed… I had a heart arrhythmia because I was so full of anxiety and just worry about my grades. I wasn’t healthy and I didn’t realize that until five years after the fact. Kind of along those lines is the fact that you will ever graduate. Graduation is everywhere. Graduation… You know, you see preschoolers graduating from preschool and then you see kindergartners graduating from kindergarten and they have the little hats and the little gowns and they put the tassel on the other side and… And then you graduate from high school and then you graduate from college and then if you do graduate work, you graduate with your master’s or your doctorate or what have you.

And you think to yourself… In the months or maybe weeks before you graduate, you think, “This is it. Things are finally over. I can finally stop learning.” But really, there’s no such thing as graduation. This is going to sound really cheesy and this is probably something you’re aware of yourself, but you don’t get to stop. You don’t get to stop learning. You don’t get to stop working. You can take a break. You can go on a vacation. But there’s never this place where you emerge triumphant and the credits roll and you get to stop putting in effort. I felt like that was the expectation every single time I graduated from something. Finally, this is over and I can rest and relax and have fun. And, yeah, you can do those things. You just can’t do them all the time because you have to go to work or you have to create things or you have to learn. And along with that, I learned that that is not necessarily a bad thing.

All right. One more thing and then I’m going to move on to things that we did not learn in school. The last one I want to talk about is permission. Maybe you went to a different type of school than I did, but kindergarten all the way up through high school, if you wanted something, you had to ask for it. And at face value, that’s perfectly reasonable. If you want to answer a question, you raise your hand. If you want to go to the bathroom, you ask for a hall pass. And then you wait until you’re called on. You wait until you are given the hall pass. And again, this isn’t intrinsically bad. I’ve taught before. I understand what it’s like to have a classroom full of wild-eyed, unruly students. I understand that sometimes you need to use some fear tactics and if you didn’t have the hand-raising, permission-giving system, it would just be utter chaos.

I understand that structure and order is necessary. But I think the problem… And this is where we’re going to transition in what we didn’t learn in school. The problem is we never unlearn this and so we end up with adults who leave our educational system at the high school or college or graduate level and they go into their jobs, they go into their life stuck in the same rubric that they learned in school. There’s no class of life that you take where you learn what a 401(k) is and how to fill out a W2 and how to get health insurance and what it means to have different types of health insurance and when it’s okay to stop asking permission to do things in your life. I mean, if anything, that’s what graduation should be. It should be this giving of permission to go forward and unlearn everything that you’ve learned behaviorally in school. Maybe not everything. Sharing is still caring, after all.

But I talked a while ago about writers, and maybe writers just like you, who feel that they don’t have permission to write or they don’t have permission to call themselves a writer. The wonderful thing about being an adult is that you don’t need permission. But for a lot of us, no one ever told us that. We don’t know. How are you supposed to know? How are you supposed to know that that’s okay? How are you supposed to know that one day you can just sit down at your desk and declare, “Darn it, today I’m a writer.”? You can do that, you know? You can pause this episode right now and say to yourself, “Darn it, today I’m a writer.” I don’t need to give you permission for that. Nobody needs to give you permission for that. That’s the wonderful thing about being an adult. If you want to have ice cream for dinner, you can go have ice cream for dinner. I’m not saying there won’t be consequences, but you can make your own decision. Same thing is true with writing. You don’t need that permission anymore.

I currently work for a marketing technology company, which is sort of a fancy way of saying I work for a website and marketing company, and one of the things that always astounds me is whenever we get a new college grad who comes in to our workplace and essentially asks for permission to do their job. I’m not a permission-granting fairy. Their managers are not permission-granting fairies. We hired you because you’re an expert, so go on. Make some mistakes. Screw up. You’re not being graded. You’re here to learn and do good work, and the only way to get there is to fail and then pick yourself back up, pick out the lessons that you learned from that failure, and keep on going.

Like I said, this is the transition into the things that we didn’t learn in school. First and foremost is, there comes a time in your life when you don’t need to ask permission anymore. With this transition, I want to talk about a concept that I got from a really great video on YouTube which I will link to in today’s show notes. It’s from a YouTube channel that I really love called The School of Life and the basic premise of this video was that success in school does not necessarily lead to success in life. Basically, what jumped out at me… And this is a direct quote from the video. I want to make sure that I’m sourcing this properly. “School curricula are not reverse engineered from fulfilled adult lives in the here and now. That is to say, school curricula are not designed by people who necessarily have much experience of or talent at the world beyond school.”

Again, this is a really great video and I will link to it in the show notes for today’s episode. School curricula are developed to help us pass state-mandated tests. They are there to teach us how to behave as children and young adults, and how to have structure and order in our lives. Again, these are not bad things, but I think what is bad is when we unthinkingly retain some of these things that we have learned in a way that inhibits the otherwise very fulfilling lives we might have.

So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the other things we did not learn in school. First and foremost is really what makes a fulfilling life. What does it mean to be successful? We’re kind of torn from one definition of success, grades, and shoved in the direction of another idea of success, what you’re paid for your job, without any real understanding of what makes us tick as people. Now again, I am speaking from my own personal experience, so I did not learn how to live a fulfilling life in school or even necessarily in college. Along those lines, if you were interested in writing in school, like I was, it’s very likely that you learned a lot about the technical aspects of writing, maybe in high school, and then maybe more of the theoretical aspects of writing in college.

But unless you went through a specific graduate-level program, which I did not, you don’t really learn how to become a writer. So, all through school, I learned spelling and then in high school I learned how to craft five paragraph papers, and then in college, I learned how to deconstruct classic works of literature and I learned how to use all these big fancy-sounding words that impressed my professors, or at least seemed to. But nowhere along the way did I learn, “Hey, this is what a query letter is.” Or, “This is why you maybe should or should not get an agent.” Or even, “This is a window into how publishing actually works.” Or, “Did you know that there’s all of these different careers available for writers?” Side note. If that’s something you’re interested in, go ahead and check out Episode Number 45, Careers for Writers.

It’s just such a weird thing. There’s such a disconnect. I love education. I love learning. You need to know this about me. I love learning and in fact, at one point in my life, I was going to go get my doctorate degree and be a professor, and so I have a deep love of school. But I also have a little bit of disillusionment that I learned a lot of stuff in college and I learned a lot of stuff in high school, but it wasn’t necessarily the stuff that I needed to live a fulfilling life and get a job in a field that I loved. I kind of had to feel that out for myself, and maybe I’m better for it. Maybe I’m not. So, we did not learn, generally speaking, how to get jobs as writers. We learned some aspects about writing, but we didn’t learn how to make money doing this thing that we love.

The next one is something that I touched on a little bit earlier and this also has its own episode of the Write Now podcast. Failure can be desirable. One of the best and quickest ways you can learn something in the professional world is to screw it up. If you’re fortunate enough to work for a company that allows room for failure or if you’re fortunate enough to be self-employed or otherwise not horribly, horribly punished for failure, then you’ve probably already learned this. Fail fast. Fail forward. Keep trying and don’t give up. We didn’t learn in school that failure is okay, and so I think that we’re paralyzed. I think that we’re petrified of failing and not understanding that the worst thing that can happen to us is X, Y or Z. We don’t even think about the worst case scenario, or we don’t think about it rationally. Think it through.

If you dedicate your time to writing a novel and you send it off for publication and it gets rejected, what do you do? Or, do you even dare send it out because you’re so afraid of that rejection letter? Fear keeps us in check. Fear keeps us in place. Fear keeps us staying right where we are, marking time. I mean, really, at the end of the day, what have you got to lose? Send it out. Get rejected. Collect those rejection letters. What’s the worst thing that can happen? You keep getting rejected. You start thinking, “Why did I put all this time into creating this novel?” Well, I’ll tell you. You put all of your time into creating that novel because you love to write and writing that novel was a joy. I mean, yes, sure, it was probably very frustrating and a lot of hard work, but it meant something to you, which is why you did it in the first place. Don’t be afraid of failure.

On to one of the more technical aspects of writing. This is something that always really gets me. Something that we did not learn in school, or at least, once again, that I did not learn. Language is fluid. Language is organic. And I learned that the English language has rules and the rules must be obeyed. Otherwise, you’re doing it wrong. This is actually not true. Maybe this is its own separate podcast episode, in which case I’ll actually take the time to look up the facts and such. But people have been illiterate for centuries. For a very long time, spelling was not set in stone, as it were. It was phonetic.

So, one of the things that we didn’t learn is that it’s okay to end a sentence in a preposition. I don’t know who this present is for. Now, if I was in a high school English class, I would be asked to re-word the sentence so that it did not end in a preposition. The preposition in this case is “for.” So, I would re-word it to say, “I do not know for whom this gift is intended.” Grammatically, it’s correct. But do I sound like a normal person or do I sound like an alien who learned English from reading Shakespeare and is trying to converse with a very confused human being at a birthday party? It’s okay to end a sentence in a preposition. So, it’s actually okay to say, “I don’t know where this banana peel came from.” Or, “I’m not sure when this movie will be over.” You don’t have to say, “I don’t know from whence this banana peel came.” Or… I don’t even… I don’t even… I don’t even remember what I said for the other sentence.

But my point is one thing we didn’t learn in school is that it’s okay to change. It’s okay to question tradition and authority. It’s okay to say, “Hey, this grammatical rule, quote unquote, doesn’t really sound like a natural thing that people would actually say in real life.” There’s something wrong when we’re convoluting our written language to adhere to archaic standards when the actual point of language is to communicate effectively with each other. That’s a problem, in my mind. In school, we learned to value archaic traditional correctness over clarity in communication, and that’s one more thing, for me at least, that goes on my “to be unlearned” list.

Now, I’m sure at this point, I’ve probably upset a good 10 to 20 percent of my listeners. I’ve had this preposition debate before, as well as the debate of should there be one space or two spaces after a period when you’re typing. And, is it really okay to begin a sentence with the word “and” or with another conjunction? I’m sorry if I’ve alienated you. I’m not saying that you have to adopt my beliefs and in fact, I appreciate hearty and spirited discourse. But language changes as people change, as our technologies change, as our understanding of the world changes, and I think it’s okay to embrace that.

One more thing that we did not learn in school. This is maybe going to go full circle. We did not learn how to think and live creatively. So, when you’re taking a test in school, in grade school, in high school, in college, there’s certain answers that are expected. If you put down the expected answer, you are, quote unquote, “correct.” If you put down an unexpected answer, you are, quote unquote, “incorrect.” Again, as we’re growing up, maybe that’s okay. I don’t know. I don’t have a background in childhood education. But earlier, when I was talking about how do we know how to live a fulfilling life… How do we even understand what to us is fulfilling? I think a lot of that has to do with understanding how to think creatively and more importantly, how to live creatively.

I’m not talking about necessarily moving into an artist’s studio and throwing paint at the walls all day. That’s not what I mean by living creatively. What I mean is expanding your life and the way that you live it past the rubric that we were taught in school, past the rubric that we were taught in school and maybe even past the examples that have been set for us by our parents and grandparents. Because I think that one very important lesson we did not learn in school is that we are free. We don’t understand what that means, I think, at least not right away when we graduate from high school or college, because there’s pressure around us. But we have a choice in every single thing we do. You are free to use your free time to write a novel. You are free to write a novel. You are free to live your life as though it is an adventure. You are free to make choices about what direction your life goes in. See that? I just ended a sentence with a preposition.

What I want you to do today is think about, and maybe journal, about what it means to live a creative life, what it means to be free, what it means to have the space to say, “Darn it, I’m a writer.” What does that mean for you? What does a fulfilled life look like for you? Give it some thought. You can journal this for yourself. You can just sit and think about it at your desk at work today or later in the week. Or, if you want, you can write me an email and let me know your thoughts.

All right. I’ve been rambling pretty much forever this episode, so I’m going to go ahead and wrap things up. First and foremost, I want to thank you for listening. I really do. Talking to you is the highlight of my week. Talking to you is something that is fulfilling to me. This is something that I love to do and I’m so excited to be able to talk with you. So, thank you for listening. I would also like to thank my Patreon supporters. Patreon is a secure, third-party donation platform. You can find it at patreon.com. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com. Basically, the way it works is if you would like to help financially support the Write Now podcast and the work that I do here, you can do that. You can give a dollar per episode, 50 cents per episode, $70 per episode. Literally, whatever you want, and I will be grateful for any amount.

So, I do have different tiers of giving, which is why you hear me say things like, “Hey, today I’d like to thank official caffeine enabler blah blah blah.” And official cool cat this person. So, these people give at different levels and so these are their tiers of recognition. I don’t know if I’ve ever explained that before on the show. I don’t think I have. I just say random things like, “Hey, thanks, rad dude.” So, that’s what that means. If you want to see what those tiers are for yourself, once again that’s patreon.com and you can search for the Write Now podcast or Sarah Rhea Werner. You can also follow a link to my Patreon page via my website, sarahwerner.com, the show notes for this episode or using the tip jar navigation link in the main menu.

With that in mind, I would like to thank several of my Patreon supporters, notably official cool cat Sean Locke, official bookworms Matthew Paulson and Rebecca Werner, official rad dudes Andrew Coons and the Sioux Empire podcast and official caffeine enabler Colleen Cotalessa. You all do so much to keep this podcast going. I truly appreciate it, so thank you.

Again, if you want to become a Patreon supporter yourself, you can do so. Just go to my website, sarahwerner.com, and find the option to support this show. If you would like to support the show, but you are super-duper broke right now, I totally get it and there are free things that you can do that can also show support for the show. Namely, tell someone about it. If you enjoy the Write Now podcast, if you find this helpful and valuable in your life and if you know maybe of someone else who might have a creative spirit, but doesn’t really know how to express it or maybe needs a little bit of guidance or inspiration or courage or time, let them know about the Write Now podcast. That would be awesome.

Additionally, if you want to, you can subscribe to my email mailing list. Again, that’s at sarahwerner.com and you just put your email address in the little box at the very, very top of the website and I will start sending you email newsletters. There’s a lot of interesting things that are coming up in the future here at the Write Now podcast and I want you to be the first to know, so go ahead and sign up for that. Otherwise, it’s really important for me to tell you and for you to know that you don’t need anyone’s permission to be a writer. You can say that you’re a writer. You are a writer. You have a story to tell, you have a book to write and you are free to do it.

I know that we all have demands on our time and demands on our intellectual capacity. But it is such a rare and beautiful thing to understand that we have the freedom to live fulfilled lives. I hope that you realize how amazing that is. So, with that, this has been Episode 47 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner and you are a writer.