This week I took what is called an Accuplacer test. It was for college, and I didn’t do very well on the writing part of it. Let me rephrase that, I tanked it.
As people well know there are many different styles of writing, apparently what I do here is the creative type. What they are looking for in school is the academic kind, the kind that follows a regimen of rules and do’s and don’ts. I took my time and answered the way I believed they should read, and tanked. Here is one of the parts that get me though… This is school, and in doing their testing, is it right for them to try to trick people? Try to get them suspicious of everything they are being taught about? The natural exponents of that end is a suspicious and untrusting nature of folks dealing with schools or other government entities, power positions and work trainers. I don’t trust that the test I took accurately reflected my abilities, and I felt tricked on many of the questions, is that the way we teach our children anymore?
The downside to this is that I have no one or entity to trust as I look forward. The college is full of advisors and people that want to help, but the nature of the education and the repercussions from that end are never debated. If you have coursework that you have to not only learn, but be on constant guard that someone is trying to trick you? To teach you that wrong lesson or give a bad grade on something you devoted a lot of effort to? Yes, it is a cutthroat world out there, those lessons don’t need to be reinforced as you are trying to learn though. That kind of mistrust just gets carried to places people never imagined they could go. I myself am in a great debate as to whether I should even consider continuing to try to write, to tell my stories and my views. With people like myself, when you tell them that they cannot do something properly enough, correct enough, then they stop doing it. Painfully aware of the masters in the field, and of the efforts that goes in to this act, I don’t deserve to blight any pages with my rants.
That goes across many areas of my life though. This writing business was/is my outlet into the make believe intelect I think I need. It’s a tool, and it is selfish and self serving and all at once mine alone. Like Forrest Gump, when people asked him why he stopped running, he simply said that he was done. That is very much like I feel today, I am just done writing, I cannot do it well enough not to embarass myself, and I am not up to snuff to join the ranks of those they call writers. Defining a purpose in life is very hard for me right now and the next indicated thing is not always there. Without that outlook and insight that life unimagined has brought me, I am apparently overwhelmed within the silence that is life anymore.