I transitioned from Isaac Newton Junior High to Arapahoe
High School, going to the big school with all its attendant cliques and high
school social drama.
I was also transitioning from special English to a regular
English class. I started to learn English when I was nine years old in Central
America, and by the time my family moved to Littleton Colorado, I was speaking
and understanding the English language, but I was still quite self-conscious
about my written English. As I was destined to be an engineer, at least in my
mind, I paid very little attention to the English classes that was required. It
was yet another obstacle to be feared and survived as I made my way into
engineering; that transition from special English to regular English was also a
point of pride with me, as I was moving into the mainstream. Additionally, this particular transition is also disguised
by the fact that everyone else is going to a new school, where we had no history,
I was going to slip in unnoticed, I hoped.
My first English teacher at Arapahoe was Rahn Anderson, an
extrovert and a beloved younger teacher who had the energy to out enthuse all
of us. I was an introvert, made more so by being a someone that doesn’t stand
out. I tried to fly under the radar as much as possible but I was not able to
escape Mr. Anderson’s eagle eyes all the time.
Mr. Anderson delighted in the practice of the impromptu, an extemporaneous essay
written in class. He loved the challenge that the impromptu presented to us, I considered it a death sentence. It was
during one of these impromptus that I
learned the definition of the word trite.
I received one of my essays back after a dreaded impromptu assignments with the word trite written over a paragraph that was circled in red.
In class, Mr. Anderson explained to us what trite meant: overused and consequently of little import while lacking
originality or freshness. He further expounded on the evil of using trite and
clichéd phrases. Amazingly enough, that lesson stuck with me through the rest
of my life. My writing may not have improved but I have always checked myself
when I read or wrote, or thought. I further extended that idea of trite to thoughts and ideas, readings,
music, even to jokes and stories.
Every time I saw unoriginal phrases and ideas I avoided them,
I elevated my expectations and made it my daily mission to never tell the same
joke twice to the same crowd; I became much more sensitive to the words and
phrases that I read as well as the words that I wrote. I became impatient with people who told the same
stories the same way all the time.
I grew to be an expert at spotting things that are trite, at
least by my exacting standards, and I also became a connoisseur of the most
overt offenders of my own sensitive palate for originality.
This heightened awareness also made me delve deeper into language
and thought, it made me think about how the great writers express themselves. I
never made parsing sentences as habit, but I did learn to appreciate the well-turned
phrase and the clever sentence structure. I reveled in all the ingenious ways that
sentiments can be expressed, with originality.
Digging even further, as I became a better writer, I learned
to appreciate the different forms of the English language. I came to appreciate
the long form essay, the personal essay, the writings of people that I never
thought I would ever read, since I was still a stereotypical engineer.
In recent years, I started to gain an appreciation for poetry.
The most precise and imaginative form of writing, even though I am terrible at
writing original poetry, I know what good poetry is: simple, spare, and
definitely not trite.
As I move through this life, I look back on the simple and
unexpected things that had moved me and shaped my thinking along the way, and
that simple and unexpected lesson in trite
definitely molded me in more ways than I could have imagined.
Thanks Mr.
Anderson.
