Page 22 - Priorities #45 2010-January

A Passion for Writing:
Sue Koppett
and Writing Lab
Priory teacher Suzanne Koppett has a passion for good writing. “I think language is ev- erything,” she says. When she talks about the improvement she sees in her students’ writing, that passion bursts forth. “It’s like making a good cake!” she exclaims. “And I don’t cook!”
For the past 16 years, Mrs. Koppett has taught Writing Lab, a required half-year class for all Priory freshman. She covers the fundamentals of grammar, literary analysis, outlining, and argu- mentation. Then her students write one-paragraph papers, three-paragraph papers, five-paragraph papers, and so on, and she meets with them individually to go over every line of everything they’ve written. “I tell the kids—it doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, an architect, a lawyer, you all need to know how to write.”
She admits it; she’s demanding. She wouldn’t have it any other way. “I think being demanding and precise is important because that gives them the tools. If you don’t, and you allow them to get away with anything, then they don’t acquire those skills and then they don’t have them. So I think the discipline is absolutely neces- sary.”
“Look,” she goes on, “If you want to be a dancer, you can’t get away without the discipline. You wouldn’t dream of saying, I’m playing a violin piece for the first time and now I’m going to go out and give a concert. The same thing is true of writing. It’s another one of those skills that you have to perfect.”
“It’s not always pleasant to be the Wicked Witch of the West,” she laughs, “but if they learn, that’s all that’s important to me.”
And, despite some trepidation, learn they do. Kyle McAuley,
’05, writes, “Writing Lab had a reputation for being a difficult class. Although it was certainly challenging, I remember it as the most purely useful class I took at Priory.
No one else in my educational life thus far had ever taught me how to write effectively, so I was and am immensely grateful for the many lessons I learned in Sue’s class.” Mrs. Koppett, take note: Kyle is now an Editorial Assistant for Oxford University Press and on the editorial staff at Guernica Magazine, both in New York City.
When he thinks of Writing Lab, Daniel Wenger, Priory Valedictorian ’05, Harvard ’09, sees a correlation between what he calls “scariness and utility”. “Writing Lab was the high school class that I feared most beforehand. It was also the high school class that proved most useful to me after- ward. Mrs. Koppett not only made me a better writer, she made me a better person. I learned, for the first time, the value of slowing down and taking an honest look at myself.”
Sue Koppett is careful not to take too much credit for all of this. “Of course I’m not alone. We have a whole English department that continues this work.” And with the high standards that are her trademark, she adds, “[Writing Lab] certainly doesn’t take anybody to the end of the road. To me, it’s the beginning of the road.”
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