Humphries 3
How The End of the Beginning Began During my sophomore year, I excelled in my English class. I was in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, and each student was required to do a project in order to advance from an internal program called Middle Years Program (MYP) to IB. I voluntarily took on a huge writing project (45 or so pages) instead a simple research project that most faculty encouraged and most students did. While most of the other students were using Elmer's and poster board to present their project, my friend and I co-wrote a small novel and got it spiral bound. I remember being so proud that we took on such a huge task. Some called us overachievers. At this time, I had high self-efficacy and an internal locus of control; this means that I believed I had both the ability and knowledge to complete my work well and that I controlled how well I did. It was not luck, chance, or the professor who decided my grade; I decided that by how hard I worked. I also took "active control of [my] writing", a direct symptom of an internal locus of control (McCarthy et al. 467). I was in a really good place, mentally and emotionally, with my writing, but of course, this narrative wouldn't be fun if there wasn't conflict. Naturally, I went into my junior year of high school with a lot of confidence in the English field, and that was very quickly shot down. The interesting, engaging, and thought-provoking assignments from my sophomore year were ghosts of the past. My junior year, we began tackling academic paper writing. We read things such as Christ Stopped at Eboli, Metamorphosis, The Stranger, and The Heart of Darkness, and we had to draw connections, look deeper into the text, etc. My interest level plummeted, and I simply saw every assignment as just one more hoop to jump through. I transferred my skills of examining a text from Harry Potter, but my writing itself took a turn for the worst. It was so rigid, so formulaic. I closed off my writing by self-imposing (or maybe not exclusively self) "rules" about writing. (I believe we talked about this in several articles across both pedagogy courses. Luckily, my internship mentor seems hell bent on breaking every one of them for his students.)