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Appreciation post: That old binder I found in my parents' attic
Went home last weekend and dug through a box from high school. Found a 3-ring binder from my junior year English class, 2008. It had every essay I wrote that year, all with handwritten notes from my teacher, Mrs. Hartwell. She wrote stuff like 'good point but dig deeper' and 'try a stronger word here' in the margins. I sat there for 20 minutes reading through them and realized how much I got out of that class. Has anyone else found old school stuff that made you rethink how you learned things?
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west.richard25d ago
Yeah @anderson.piper pretty much nailed it. I found my old chem lab notebook from 2007 last year and spent a solid hour laughing at how I wrote down "the liquid turned blue which means science happened." That teacher definitely wrote the same "good observation" comments on every single kid's paper. The whole thing was just me copying procedures wrong and mixing up formulas. It hit me that most of what I "learned" was just memorizing stuff long enough to pass the test and then dumping it. Still cool to flip through but yeah, not some big life changing moment like people act.
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anderson.piper25d ago
Nah, I gotta push back on this a little. Not because it's a bad thing you found, but because I don't think digging through old school stuff is all that healthy. I found my senior year history folder last year and spent an hour cringing at how wrong I was about everything. Like, I thought I was so smart back then and I was just repeating stuff from Wikipedia. Mrs. Hartwell sounds nice but those comments are mostly just her doing her job, you know? She probably wrote the same thing on everyone's paper. I think we put too much weight on teachers being these life-changing figures when a lot of them were just regular people collecting a paycheck. That binder might just be a reminder that you were a decent student, not some deep learning moment.
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