I'm not sure if I would call this a lower level of schooling. It's English 101, at a technical college. It's not the highest English class, but it's pretty far along the line. I'm not sure what my professor wants to teach us with these restrictions, something about better sentence-level expression. Either way, it certainly feels like a lower level of schooling.
I left high school after one year and went to college instead. High school sucks. It's boring. It has no challenge. This class is challenging in that there are cumbersome restrictions placed on our writing, and subjects that the students care nothing for. It is no stretch of the imagination or creative mind to answer the questions we are presented with; instead the creativity is held back by the strict guidelines being enforced.
I came to this college to better myself as an artist and a writer. This class accomplishes neither. So yeah, you could call it a lower level of schooling.
Hm, sorry, I just assumed you to be in high school. All the same, yeah, the perspective I'm coming from are the scholarly papers I've read (typically on some literary subject) and the papers I myself have written for various courses. As I've seen the professionals write in the first person, I think there are good grounds for it. Generally it arises when it expresses an opinion regarding the subject matter. That is, how can you write something in which you are to be expressing something new without falling into the first person?
Now, in this sense, perspective can change. That is, some of the paper may impartially be telling details in the third person, ie. this happened, and this person said this. However, it can lightly shift into first person. I suppose a pure explanatory paper should be soley in third person, but as you move along you should be expressing your own ideas, and this is only possible in the first.
As for a change in tenses this, too, is admissable, though at the moment I'm rather too tired to think of an example. But what you really must keep in mind, more than some set rule or stricture, is context and viewpoint. You can use a present tense, in a way, to give immediacy to something that is typically in the past (you see this even in other languages, such as in Greek, which tends to something called the 'historic present'... it speaks about the past using the present tense.) For example, you could be talking about this ancient figure having done this and that, and then go 'and at this point he comes into the city, and destroys it.' A change in tense, to be sure, but is it technically, or stylistically wrong? I would argue that it isn't. The prevalent past tense of the verbs overshadows this and the present, rather than setting it into an actual present, gives it the feeling of action contemporary with the other verbs. Or you could use a present participle, too, I suppose. Language is a very fluid thing, and it's a pity that it's taught through such rigid frameworks. I mean, it's certain that you have to know the rules, and there are certainly rules, but all the same, it's not so dry and simplistic as it often appears to be. There's a lot of room for adaption within the strictures of even proper language that are a joy to vary.
Anyway, that's what you're thinking, I suppose, in that you're not fond of the cumbersome restrictions. What IS it you are taking in college anyway? You say you're trying to better yourself as an artist and writer. Are you taking creative writing or some such thing?
