This year, an iconic class that once was, came back through the revival of many new classes added for the 2025-2026 school year. Taught by Ms. Lange in the lower 200, this English class isn’t exactly by the book.
Creative Writing allows students to take a writing-focused English class, which, for many people, including myself, is a better alternative to a normal or AP English class. The class is set in 2 periods, 2nd for seniors, and 3rd for juniors. Both classes just finished their first big project of the semester, their memoirs.
The 4-chapter memoir was completed by students in 4 weeks, not including the week of preparation. They are introduced to the project through daily writing prompts that start each class period, beginning with their earliest memories and progressing to the present.
At the end of August, the students would graph their lives with highs and lows and would pick a theme and motif for their memoirs. Junior Maki Stephens struggles with recalling her life experiences, saying, “…there’s been so many things in my life, it’s hard to put them into just 4 chapters.”
Maki ended up writing about something very close to her heart and the heart of many others: suicide and drug addiction. She describes it as, “My lifelong experiences with suicide and death, including myself and others.” Though the assignment became very interesting for her, Maki stressed that because of fuzzy memory, the work that she would come to write wouldn’t be completely accurate.
Another student in the 11th-grade class, Zaida Josephene-White, wrote predominantly about her early childhood life, describing her motif as, “My motif was a puzzle that I built with my grandparents and my brother many years ago that depicted a huge collection of donuts. Each donut represented something or someone in my memoir, and the pieces themselves represented me.”
Zaida described that these specific times in her life impacted her from an early age, and how her youth affected her mentality. Though Zaida didn’t share all parts of the time periods her 4 chapters spanned, she was eager to start writing immediately after it was first assigned.
Zaida was kind to share an excerpt from her memoir. “The little damages on the puzzle don’t appear to be enough to cause a dysfunction, hardly noticeable when looked at individually… I sit and stare at the puzzle sometimes, remembering when the pieces weren’t bent, the edges weren’t folding, and the pieces weren’t faded. The reminiscence causes tears to stream from my eyes, adding just a few more drops to the already water-damaged puzzle. My own self is causing the little extra pain to what used to be vibrant and beautiful collective pieces of a puzzle. (The puzzle that is myself.)”
These two students represent two full classrooms of students with beautiful depictions of their lives, all unique and distinct, flourishing their writing in the highs and lows of life as a whole.
