Struggle
High School is a tough place for everyone at first, whether it comes to English, Physics, Calculus, or even figuring out how to open up your locker. For me it was always English essays that were tough. Every single year in high school I was always stuck trying to figure out how to write and piece together my monstrosity of an essay. I’ve always been in the regular english classes instead of any Honors or AP due to the reason that I have had trouble writing essays throughout my High school english career. Every class I feel like we would just read out of textbooks or narratives and then write essays on them without actually learning how to write the essay which is what i had trouble on. I’ve always been fine with this because it was easier to get a better grade in the class but I still felt I needed to get better at writing essays if I was going to do well in my college english class. This all changed my senior year when I got my favorite and most helpful teacher, Mr. Staples. Every class would hold something new in store for us. Some classes we would watch a movies, other classes we would take vocabulary quizzes, and sometimes we would work on essays. But the difference in Mr. Staples class is that he would walk us step by step through how to write the essay itself. My senior english class was beyond helpful in my english learning experience.
Mr. Staples was the type of teacher that everyone liked and respected due to his understanding of the average student. He knew exactly how to help us on problems we would be stuck on. For example one class I was stuck on a confusing class discussion on this book we were reading, Macbeth. So he took time out of his day to stay after school with me and explain what was happening in the book that I didn’t understand. Towards the end of the year he told us that he was going to give us a very difficult writing assignment called an isearch. When he mentioned that it was going to be a very difficult writing assignment I didn’t even have a worry in my mind about it because I knew that he would be able to help me with anything I didn’t understand. He told us an isearch has to be a minimum of 13 pages but we could write it on anything we wanted. I decided to write mine on the controversy over whether or not global warming is caused by humans or not.
Immediately when I got home after school that day I rushed to my computer to get a headstart on this essay. I started off by putting together an intro paragraph but none of it sounded right in my head. So I kept re wording it until I would find something I like but I just couldn’t piece together a well written intro for some reason. I decided to seek help from Mr. Staples and without hesitation he said he would be very happy to help me with the intro. I was having trouble with the thesis statement and transitioning into the first paragraph. He told me to start a good thesis statement I will need to present my ideas into two to three sentences then talk about what I will be writing about in the middle of the intro paragraph. After I got together a well informed thesis statement we worked on the transition into my first paragraph. He started me off by giving me some conjunctive adverbs and transitional phrases I could work with such as nevertheless, and In addition. After I finally got my intro paragraph done he told me that I should use these methods for every paragraph for starting and ending them and in the middle of each paragraph I should provide my information and explain it so it points back to my thesis.
After gathering all my research I soon realized that he was right, this is a very difficult writing assignment. I found this assignment hard because of my difficulty piecing together the information and keeping it organized so it isn’t all over the place on paper. But after I stayed after school most days to get the extra help I needed in order to learn how to piece together this essay I got 14 pages done and I actually felt confident in my writing for once. Once he graded them and handed it back I ended up getting a B+ which I was very happy about.
I feel this was a very good topic for my Literacy Narrative because it shows my struggle in english class and how I overcame it. The value I learned from this was that putting in enough hard work will get you where you want to be. This helps me today because I am now writing well structured essays that I had no idea how to do before. Additionally, This experience showed me the value of a good teacher that acts as a mentor. Mr. Staples helped me get through the research and writing process that led to a great grade. One of the more important lessons I took out of this was that I learned a new strategy to use in my college writing experience.
