favorite high school teacher

I don't have any evidence to support my stance, but I can share a personal experience that defined the processes creative & critical thinking for me.  My high school creative writing teacher, Mr. Terry Arends, was a hardass.  Nobody liked that dude.  He was a Vietnam War veteran, didn't tolerate childish behavior (he was there to get us ready for college, not babysit), and never accepted work that was a grade below what we were capable of creating.  He hated pretentious vocabularies but loved military precision.  He was famous for giving us writing assignments that were pretty heinous – once we weren’t allowed to use the letter A, we had to write our autobiographical essays in iambic pentameter, and we could never start sentences with “I, a, an or the”.  Most of us struggled at first, but he would remind us our generation didn’t invent angst – HE invented angst. 

By the end of the semester, though, we could dominate any stanza restriction or writing style he threw at us.  The last day of class, he let us in on a little secret – he didn’t like us very much.  He hated hearing about how stupid his class was, he hated our attitudes, he hated that “entitled” young people were leaches.  He could, however, tolerate us now to a certain extent because we were able to think openly and react appropriately to situations we weren’t familiar with  – restrictions, he said, were the key to creativity.  He said that creative writing wasn’t about how artistic you were, it was how well you could think your way out of a problem.  Forcing us to write in standard meters made us think outside the comfort of keeping ourselves in our own little boxes.  And he said thinking outside of the box was the first step in not being little assholes when we went out into the real world.