Writing History Response

Writing History Response

Ever since I was little, I have never really enjoyed writing. My parents pushed math and science more than the liberal arts. I first learned to write my name in preschool, but that is as far as I went. The first time I really started writing was in kindergarten. I had an excellent kindergarten teacher that was very understanding and helpful to me as a writer. In kindergarten I mixed up all my letters and numbers, by writing them backwards. My parents thought I was dyslectic because my writing was so atrocious. My teacher continued to tell them I wasn’t and that I was just developing and would get the hang of it. My teacher had the class writing in a journal once a week about what ever we wanted. My mother still has the journal. To this day I still cannot read on word from it, but you can see improvement from beginning to end. My teacher was right and I eventually was writing just like all the other kids. I still have messy handwriting but it is defiantly legible. This was the beginning of my writing career.

In elementary school, the next teacher that really made an impact in my writing was my second grade teacher. She pushed the subject of spelling, and was the first one to actually be strict about it. There was no more using phonics to spell everything. There were rules I had to follow, and I was a terrible speller. She also taught the elementary basics to sentence structure. Every morning when I came into class, I would sit down and there would be a piece of paper on the desk with a sentence or two on the board for me to copy onto the paper. After all of us copied the sentence she would explain the different parts of the sentence. Once I got further into the year, she would write sentences and intentionally put mistakes in them for me to catch and fix. They were not hard mistakes but they allowed me to focus more on the sentence structure at a young age. In third grade I had the writing test for the first time. My 3^rd grade teacher had to teach me about proper writing etiquette. She taught me what paragraphs were and how to start papers. At this time I was starting to read adventure series. I wanted to be as creative as all the authors I was reading. They inspired much of the work I created at the younger ages. All of the papers I wrote were rudimentary stories that I got to make up based on a prompt. I liked writing like this because I was able to be creative. When I finally took the test, I made a passing 3 out of 4 on it. I was so proud of myself because lots of people fail that first writing test in 3^rd grade. In 5^th grade I learned how to write more complex and non-fictitious papers. They were almost like mini research papers. I did not like these as much as the writing I had been doing in previous grades because it wasn’t as exciting. We all have to learn this style because it is the most used in life later.     

            In middle school I wrote my first full-length research paper with sources and everything. It was the biggest grade I have ever received I any class. It had to be on what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wrote about car designers. Its funny how my life has changed and I am nowhere close to that career choice. Now I am an accounting major, but I still have that dream in the back of my head of designing fast cars in Italy. I worked very hard, listening to the teacher tell me how to write it and I used any additional tips she had. She was the best teacher I have ever had in the subject of writing. She taught the language like no one else I have ever seen. I guess this is why she received the prestigious award teacher of the year in the county. I finished the 8 page paper and eagerly awaited my grade. What I got back shocked me. I had received a 107 out of 100. I celebrated and my writing esteem rose.

            Next came high school. I never had very good writing teachers in high school. All the teachers focused on was reading and analyzing books. Even though I was in all honors classes, the only teacher who taught me anything about writing in high school was my junior teacher. She was a good teacher, but she was a push over. She would give me a 100 if I showed effort in my writing but never really critiqued it to make me better. I also had a huge research paper that year. I was a minimum of 12 pages, analyzing a theme in any of the books we had read that semester. I worked very hard and made a very good grade on it. My senior teacher was the same way because it was his last year as a teacher and was already in retirement mode. All he did was tell facetious stories about students from previous years and stories about himself.

            In college this is my first English class and so far has proven to be a good one. I expect to learn much from my teacher Megan. She seems very enthusiastic and motivated to make me and everyone else in the class better writers.

            As a writer I have had much experience, but I do not think I am at the point I should be. I still have much to learn and there are many areas I need developing in. I am excited for this upcoming semester and I hope it proves well.