freewrite on freewriting

Yes freewriting, you remember it, from your middle school days, where you got to class and perhaps teacher didn't have her lesson quite solidified yet so she set a timer for ten minutes, threw out a topic and told you not to erase.

I always associate freewriting with one Kimberly Simmons, my seventh grade core teacher, because she was the genesis of my biggest freewriting disaster. We had to freewrite in her class every day, just to practice penmanship or something, and she would write some question up on the board to get your juices flowing (does a more horrifying phrase exist?), but she promised, on her honor as a teacher and as a child of God, that she wouldn't read a word of what we wrote unless we drew a little peace sign up in the corner of the first page, which was like a little permission stamp from us. Because we had to store these journals in the classroom you see, so good old Simmons could check off that we had done the work, but she said she wouldn't read them without permission. Me, little Jo, mortified at the prospect of criticism from peers and teachers alike, never, ever drew the peace sign, and wrote quite contentedly about the various and sundry topics assigned, but as the days and weeks and months wore on I began to doubt the divine inspiration of Simmons's topic choices, and freewriting frankly got tedious. So one day, Alex, Peter and I agreed that we would all use that day's freewrite to spew the most bitter vitriol we possibly could against the institution itself. We were protected by the absence of the peace sign, so we really let ourselves go. I used the opportunity to spin off into a diatribe against Simmons's methods in general, and even as I wrote I was surprised at the amount of pent up tween rage that made its way onto the page. Freewriting was pretty great when you let yourself get into it. Alex and Peter agreed. Good freewrite.

That bitch read every word. We all had detention for a week, and not the nice kind of detention where you show up and she tells you to go home, but the kind where she actually makes you do heavy lifting.

Do you see a peace sign, Simmons? My ten minutes is up.