#me age 12: estella would totally conspire to help her dad and stepmom commit insurance fraud together

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

hi! i’m curious, what does “not being self-taught” mean? if i took English classes and extra creative writing classes does that mean i’m not 100% self thought? i was just wondering :0

No, I just meant that I have a Bachelor's in Creative Writing. Which is a weird degree, and not one you see much in the U.S.

But most people who go to school in the modern U.S. get at least ~10 years' education in writing and reading English. Obviously it's going to vary in quality and focus, but modern literacy is off the charts compared to 100 years ago. Which is everybody's win.

I've also been lucky with regard to high school English teachers, to be clear — I used to straight-up turn in fan fiction as homework and get passing grades for it. (I guess from Ms. S's point of view, my 15-page AU of Great Expectations about Magwitch and Mrs. Havisham conspiring to burn her house down, collect the insurance money, throw a lavish wedding, and run off to Australia under fake names.... at least proved I'd read Great Expectations? Which is more than most of my class could say?)

Most valuable of all: from 1st to 4th grade, I had teachers who'd assign the class to "write a page a day." What about? Didn't matter. Some people wrote diary entries, some people wrote lists of things they could see, some people (me) wrote about scientists saving the Titanic passengers through trying to turn them into fish but accidentally creating horrible mer-mutants instead. We weren't graded on grammar, or content, or handwriting, or whether trout-people could survive the North Atlantic; we were just graded on having written. That exercise (no offense to my professors) was better for my literacy than any college class on Poetics Theory or Advanced Essay could ever be.