Mommy Gossip

I am participating in Wordful and Wordless Wednesday. Click on the links to join in the fun!


Brooke is my baby sis. She Photoshopped this pic, so that tells you right there how awesome she is! And, irreverent, considering we were at the cemetery. My grandma is busting a gut in heaven as she looks down on this :). Anyway... although Brooke and I are 20 years apart, we are the most alike of any of the rest of our Sisterhood of the Traveling Pant—ies. And just as it so happens, the main thing we have in common is our love of writing. So, when she signed up for a writing class this semester—her first semester as a freshman in college, no less—I agreed wholeheartedly to help her. After all, I worked more than 10 years as a writer or in the writing industry. How hard could editing freshman papers be?

The first paper was pretty cut and dried. Nothing too complicated. A reader-response essay. The next just happened to be on Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, which I loved. When I saw the required reading and accompanying homework, I literally said: "This one is in the bag." I edited the paper four times. Can you tell which one of us really wants to be in school? And then one little letter makes me take a walk down memory lane. She got a C! WHAT? I am a professional writer. I recognize I haven't won any nobel prizes in literature, but still. How could she get a C? I got Cs when I skipped class, not when I turned my homework in. What is wrong with this picture?

This is when I remembered exactly why I hated school. Teachers and their love of marking you down but not giving you any feedback, leaving you to wonder what in the h.e. double toothpicks you did wrong and could improve. Lazy is what that teacher was. A couple of brief comments in the margin to let my baby sister—first-time college student that she is—guess what she means by "unclear." Unclear? Unclear to who, you subjective little don't-know-a-good-paper-when-you-see-one biotch (Yep! I just called her that.) That's for all the teachers that were too lazy to properly edit my papers and for the ones who are attempting to squash baby Spice's educational excitement right out of her.

To Brooke I say one thing and one thing alone: Blog! Blog where you can be you and people write sweet comments. And where if they don't, you can delete them and not get a bad grade.