My Writing Process...Or Lack Thereof

Well, I'm back again for more.  It's always the times when I'm supposed to be doing something else that I sit and think to myself, "You know what I should do right now? Write something down on my blog.  It'd be much more productive than writing out your cat analysis paper for English."  I'm not joking about the paper  by the way.

Something that I do enjoy writing about here though is my English class.  It's the class this semester that has given me the most to talk about in terms of the weird things that go on there.  The official title of my class is: English 2010, Writing From the Environment.  When I signed up for this class, I envisioned that it would be something along the lines of going to a specific environment, say a bakery, and writing about the experience somehow.  I didn't think that it literally meant the environment.  Nature environment.  I've spent the last month and a half writing about how leaves dance in the wind or how the majestic mule deer flies through the untamed brush of the really really really tall mountain. For me, this class is a little bit of a struggle.  I am a person who definitely appreciates nature in its many forms, but when it comes to expressing that appreciation in the form of a very poetic paper, I'm at a loss.  To compensate for my lack of poetic nature writing skills, I fake the paper, mostly to myself.  I become a different person altogether.  My papers end up sounding like a cheesy greeting card since I sit there and use thesaurus.com to help me find words that sound more intelligent/pretty.

 The end result, my papers are complete and utter garbage, but so is everyone else's in the class.  After reading over other's papers and seeing what they've written, I cry a little inside.  Every single person tries to use as many poetic phrases they can in trying to describe their topic.  In my mind, I always just picture fluffy little bunnies running around in a cliche forest.  Yet, our teacher eats it up.  He goes on and on about these papers and how some are wonderful and some could use a little work.  I recently just got an 'A' on a paper that I thought for sure would be ripped apart because it was so utterly ridiculous.  My plan had worked.  All I had to do, was write for the teacher.  I write ridiculous papers on nature and everyone wins.

Is this the proper learning process for writing well?  Probably not.  The only thing I've learned so far is that I'm good at writing silly things in a short amount of time.  I can also write in great detail about trees.  Those things are so riveting sometimes.  Is it bad to write just to please the teacher and give up things that actually sound sane and written by me?  Or am I just going to have to get used to learning what gets you a good grade?  I guess I'll have to wait and see.