“Alright class, I want you guys to write about a time when you had a lot of fun.” Okay that’s easy. Recess yesterday was a lot of fun, that one time, last year, in Kindergarten when we brought all our teddy bears to school was a lot of fun, oh I know! The MOST fun I have ever had was the snow day we recently had!
So I began my essay by writing “One day it was very cold outside, so cold that it began to snow.” Now I was in first grade so I didn’t understand the mechanism behind snow—I was under the assumption that if it was cold outside, then surely it was going to snow. Next I talked about how I went outside to build a snowman and have a snowball fight with my dad. Then was the best part of my essay. “My mom let my dog Trixie outside and I love Trixie. I also have a turtle named Zoe. I love Zoe a lot. I love animals.” For me, I thought this essay was genius work—I then showed my teacher, Mrs. Greenwood, and she had contrary ideas.
Mrs. Greenwood told me that I needed to try …show more content…
It was extremely frustrating not being able to stay on topic, but looking back on it I laugh at how I tried telling a story and just mentioned how much I loved my pets. What motivated me to keep writing was the promise of going to recess as soon as I was done, but unfortunately I never got to go. Missing recess as a kid seems detrimental, but it does give you a story to later tell when you’re older.
I wouldn’t say this experience really developed me as a writer, since it was one of the first paragraphs I ever had to write—but it definitely was like my training wheels for writing. In high school I took AP English and my teacher absolutely challenged us. The first day she told us most of us would receive a 3 or 4 on our first essay and that truly pushed us to want to try harder and receive the best possible score we could