Tenth Grade English Sucks

As someone has already mentioned, I did not find much to disagree with in this week's readings. What is disturbing to me though is the perpetuation of the belief that following a formula makes one a better writer. I just received an admonition from a professor to do a short outline before beginning to write in order to avoid "stream of consciousness" writing. Does this really make one a better writer or just a lazier one. As Spandel suggests, students do not need to be taught how to write, but how to think. I was assigned my first first full length research paper in tenth grade. Every sentence in the 10-page paper had to either be a direct quote or paraphrase of a sentence from a book or journal article. This assignment taught me nothing, except maybe that my ideas are not worth anything. I just now, in this moment, realized the detriment of that assignment. I think that paper instilled in me a severe aversion to taking risks in my writing; it also robbed me of the right to draw my own conclusions, and I haven't done so since. Schools say that they value critical thinking skills, but it doesn't show in the way writing is taught.
I appreciated Smith's discussion of Psychological blocks. While I know these are present in me, they primarily reside in the subconscious, and I appreciate Smith bringing them out into the light of day for me to observe. Perhaps that fact in itself will allow me to get past them.
Sommers' analogy was effective, and I particularly like her sentiment of a teachers job being to show students how to be designers. The customer is not always right.