SnyderC


 * My favorite writing assignment**

One of my favorite writing assignments was in my ninth grade history class. We had to complete a project based on the unit we'd been studying, which I guess must have been Tudor England. We had several options to choose from, and I don't remember what the other choices were, but I chose to write a collection of diary entries as if I were Lady Jane Grey, otherwise known as the Nine Days Queen. She probably appealed to me because of her age (around seventeen) and the pathos of her situation - she was forced into becoming queen of England after the death of Edward VI by those members of the British government who wished to continue Protestant reign of the country. Even though she had no political aspirations for herself, she was beheaded nine days later for treason. I don't recall the specifics of her life, but I do remember the assignment well. I had to research the time period, the political world of Tudor England, Lady Jane herself, and the details of everyday life as Lady Jane would have lived it. I believe it was during this project that I learned about the various dangerous substances that women then used for cosmetics - putting drops of poisonous belladonna in their eyes to brighten the whites, etc. I loved reading about the history of the time, the characters, the drama, and I loved writing about it even more. Armed with my research and my imagination, I immersed myself in my idea of what Lady Jane's experience would have been - what my own experience would have been as a scared teenager thrust upon the the throne of England. I think E. L. Doctorow said something about how fiction allows us to understand the world in ways that traditional historical accounts do not, and I agree. By writing a fictional diary of Lady Jane, I was able to put myself smack in the middle of that time in history and understand it more vividly than I would have by just reading about it and writing an essay. In fact, I enjoyed that assignment so much that I chose to use that format again when we studied the Irish potato famine later that year. The interdisciplinary element of the assignment was particularly appealing to me, since I got to use my own affinity for creative writing in the context of a history class.