Megan Literacynarrativefinaldraft

Fifteen Minute Mess Welcome to Mahar Regional High School, home of the Senators, where the football team is taken more seriously than preparing the students for the MCAS test. I can remember entering my freshman year and walking into my first class, English, where my teacher spent the first half hour of class talking about how great the picks were that the quarterback was throwing at practice. I loved the home town pride that my school held. There were multiple pep rallies and blue and red were worn daily. Everyone in town went to the games on Friday nights and homecoming was more important than Christmas. The only thing that my school lacked was actually preparing students for the next big step in their lives, college. The four years I spent at Mahar were some of the best years of my life and I did learn just about as much as any other kid at any other high school. The most important thing that I didn’t learn was what to expect at college and even more importantly, how to write a college essay. Essays were important in the English and writing classes, but I was told what to write and I mastered the art of putting on paper exactly what would impress my teacher to get an A. English at Mahar was really black and white. The teacher shared their opinion on what they were teaching and as I moved up to my senior year I began noticing that there wasn’t many options for students to discuss their opinions and say what they truly thought on what they were learning. It led to me realizing that as my peers and I moved up into college we wouldn’t really be prepared for discussion style classes and opinion based papers that we would have to write. I personally wasn’t prepared for sharing what I thought and I noticed that when I had to write my college entrance paper. I was sitting at the desk in my English class staring at the blinking cursor on the intimidating blank word document in front of me. The question for my college essay was to describe a time that