What Kind of High School Student Were You?

Hmm, are my parents going to read this--lol?! No, really I was a good student but not a spectacular student. I did well in the subjects that I enjoyed and fine in the others.
Not surprisingly, I loved English and petitioned to take double English my senior year and the department allowed me to do so. Basically I took a regular Engish class and then two specialty English classes. I also took German and Spanish and loved art classes. I wasn't so hot on math and science but I tried, sort of.

Even though I didn't study much for tests, I always did my homework. I got a lot of A's when essays were involved but loathed fill in the blank and short answer questions. Anything creative, I was there! Two of my favorite classes were psychology and Theory of Knowledge. I loved discussions and subjects that really got me thinking. I still think back to those classes today.

Another amazing experience that I had senior year was when we were allowed to submit a proposal for a senior project. I chose to write a novel, or at least half a novel during this time. I was allowed to write half the day and go to school the second half during my last quarter of school. This was the beginning of my first YA novel. I wrote 80 pages and still have the novel in my filing cabinet. Visions of Liberty might never see the light of day, but I loved every minute of being allowed to write from home.

So what was I doing during the school day when I was supposed to be listening? I wrote notes to my friends. I mean, tons of notes. My friend Nell and I used to keep notebooks and write in them back and forth to each other. It was so much fun and we had code words for people in case the notebooks were ever "discovered". We also carried around a friend/not friend list and you couldn't even imagine how quickly people moved from one list to the other!

And thinking back all of this behind the scenes stuff was great material for my books. So without even knowing it, I was getting on the job training!