by Christina Elias

Throughout school, it has been drilled into my head to always follow a teacher’s directions. If he or she tells you to write about the effects some obscure event in history had on modern day society, you do it. In detail. If you are told to write about what Jesus means to you (shout out to Ms. Betsy Hansbrough), you follow the guidelines without complaint (at least within hearing range), and that’s fine with me. That’s cool. I know what’s expected of me and I understand what the teacher requires out of the assignment. That’s great. Fantastic.

What is not fantastic is when a teacher tells us to write a two-page essay on whatever we want. That is not cool. That is not great. I’m all for creative license and everything that comes with it, but all these years of, “Christina, you can’t write about that,” and, “Oh, no, that doesn’t answer the question I’m asking you,” has given me expectation of always having some sort of guidelines to follow.

I have all the freedom in the world – I can write about the influence celebrities have on the general public, which politician has recently dug himself into the deepest hole or how weird teenage boys are, but what I really want out of an assignment is structure.

Whenever I get an assignment like this, I immediately think of what the teacher wants to hear – not what I want to write about. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who sees these things as a some sort of weird test (or at least I hope so).

I know it may sound backwards, and some of you might not be thinking the same thing (hello, aspiring authors), but all these years of English classes and writing papers to analyze why Shakespeare made this character do that and what the moon represents in some novel has made me expect the teacher to always tell us exactly what to do.

I mean, I procrastinate on my own enough as it is… I don’t need anything else keeping me up at night.