Two juniors nominated for NCTE writing contest

Junior Carolyn Pyun sat in the back of her Spanish class, intently scribbling the rules of past participles during the lecture. Her attention broke as English 11 Honors teacher Natasha Ritchie strode into the classroom. Ritchie handed Pyun the essay she submitted for the annual National Teachers Council for English (NCTE) contest, adorned with annotations, and congratulated Pyun as one of two of the school’s two nominees for the NCTE competition. Ritchie promptly left, leaving Pyun with a sense of total shock.

“It was so surprising to be recognized as a nominee in such a random setting,” Pyun said. “It was surreal.”

NCTE administers an annual competition urging high school students to respond to a given prompt through any writing medium. The English department typically assigns the prompt to all juniors taking English 11 Honors, with the two best responses selected to compete further into state and national segments of the contest.

This year’s NCTE prompt was “I hope or I could not live.” The prompt asked students to either “create a piece that paints a picture of a hopeful future” or “identify a global, national, or local problem that affects you or others you care about but that you feel hopeful you could change somehow.”  Ritchie and fellow English 11 Honors teacher Amy Keys selected Pyun and junior Adam Xu as this year’s SHS nominees.

Pyun’s piece was a speculative fiction piece about a history teacher in a futuristic classroom with various hologram-type technology tools. In the piece, the teacher describes current world issues, particularly climate change, as if they’re just historical issues that have already been solved. Pyun said she found the process of conceptualizing the emotional component of her piece challenging.

“The kids in my story will never have to understand the severity of climate change, but it’s something that we all are living with,” Pyun said. “Building their innocence in a natural way was extremely difficult but extremely rewarding.”

Pyun’s favorite line from her piece is her final line, “This is why I teach history, and this is why they take history after all.” She said that this line encapsulates the raw humanity and hope of the prompt, since the students have faith that issues like climate change can be resolved.

Xu wrote an autofictional piece revolving around a withdrawn teenager who finds a friend that brings them hope and comfort in opening up to others. Following that friend’s unexpected passing, Xu describes a hopeful future in which they reconnect with their friend’s family and peers. 

“I explored my personal experiences with grief and interpersonal connection in this piece,” Xu said. “Since a large part of the piece was about dealing with death, it was pretty difficult to draw on those past experiences and put what I had gone through into words.”

To narrow down the pieces sent in for consideration, Ritchie and Keys generally take into account the NCTE rubric, but have also devised their own rubric as they have found the NCTE rubric to be occasionally vague.

“We have to consider how good the writing is in terms of not just structure and flow but also originality and syntax, texture and voice,” Keys said. “We also wanted to see if the students truly answered the prompt as well. Students only have four pages to answer the prompt, so there’s a lot to squeeze into a small space.” 

After Pyun and Xu were selected, Ritchie and Keys met with them and gave them feedback to help them revise their pieces. 

“Constant revision with Ms. Keys was incredibly rewarding,” Xu said. “She really helped me bring out the hope aspect of my piece. Her advice helped me consolidate my ideas into something stronger than before.”

The winners also send another piece they wrote in the past to the contest as their “best” piece to be judged for advancing in the competition. If their work reaches the national level, NCTE will publish their work onto their website. Participants will also receive a certificate applauding their participation and excellence in writing.

Given the vast diversity of student responses to the prompt, Ritchie said she enjoys the contest because addressing a national prompt is a different experience from answering prompts for class assignments, especially due to the depth of the NCTE prompts every year. Ritchie finds that the assignment is a great way to see the humanity 

“Most of the time, [the prompts] are really fitting and relevant to what’s happening,” Ritchie said. “For this year, being hopeful really fits with what I think we should be writing about right now.”