That sums things up pretty damn good.
I've always thought the "writing process" stuff that they forced you into was bullshit. I've never been all that good at essays, but that's due to a couple reasons: I'm not that good at expressing myself through written word, most of the stuff I had to work with was not an idea that I actually liked or wanted to do.
I'm sure there were a couple more reasons that came and went depending on the circumstances, but I wrote every single essay I've ever done in 1 run, except maybe the beginning paragraph. Usually it would take me about 2 hours. 1 hour of talking on MSN and occasionally writing something down, and 1 hour of writing stream of consciousness essay. I say that because I didn't do it in 2 phases like you described, but in 1. My subconscious mind was able to order things into a workable essay format, so I just wrote, start to finish, and made the occasional tweak.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, I'm not all that good at expressing my ideas when I have to write them down. I don't think in a straightforward way that most people do. I like to describe my thought patterns as in tangents. Most people work their way from the start to the finish of something in a straight line. I don't, I sort of spiral around it, eventually arriving at the goal. Thought patterns like this don't lend well to written communication. I work much better in an informal oral environment. When you have an actual discourse between people with regards to a subject, it allows you to revise your points and rethink things when presented with a response from the other party involved. However, you are not presented with that when you write something. The editing process gives us some semblance of input simulating an oral discourse, but fails to provide the same level of input, because it targets the words themselves, instead of the thoughts. I abandoned the editing system for a couple reasons: it only really edited from a grammatical standpoint I would lose my train of thought completely if I stopped working on it to let someone edit what I had; and when I was finished, I felt that it was as good as it was going to get, because most of my editing was done before I ever went to put the thought to words. Before I wrote a sentence, my subconscious mind would begin to form the sentence, and would catch itself if something felt wrong, or awkward, and anything that got through that self-editing process, could be changed right after I read it.
Anyway, I did much better on on-demand essays, because of the grading being different. I produced essays on about the same level whether I wrote them on-demand in class, or over a couple hours on my computer at home.
As for other classes, I think my favourite has to be the programming courses I went through. Sure, the teacher talked at the front of the class every now and then to try to explain things, but we usually had plenty of time in class to actually sit down and write code. I had a lot of fun there, and learned quite a bit from those classes (actually I already knew a good portion of what they taught in those classes, but they provided me with a way to make something that I could add on to and learn stuff beyond the scope of the class with.)
Unfortunately, the teacher I had for those classes barely knew anything beyond the scope of the class. We asked one time if it was possible to manipulate C++ pointers in a DLL file through visual basic, and he had NO idea what we were talking about..... That was kinda pathetic, really.
Anyway, I learned a lot of Java from the second year there. (I don't think I actually learned anything in the first year class, which was all in VB.)
I like what your teacher did there.. That must have been an interesting network.
