Personal Narrative-Back To The Classroom

The rain had been falling all day. I grudgingly canceled the tennis game I had planned with my doubles partner Jackson, changing out of my tennis whites with a sigh. I tossed my phone across the room, and it landed on my desk, on top of a pile of folders, binders, and nearly unused school supplies. I had just graduated from high school the day before, and hadn’t gotten around to cleaning up yet. “Well, since I have nothing else to do,” I thought, I shrugged and started placing piles on my shelf. This wasn’t the best system, and my things were already disorganized, so inevitably the top shelf spilled its contents onto the ground. The first thing I went to pick up was a ripped green folder, stuffed to the brim with papers. When I sprang it open,
A flood of memories instantly came back to me. I had written this piece when I was five years old, winning an Illinois Reflections award for the composition. Playing the song transported me back to my kindergarten years, which I spent trapped inside a classroom with a teacher that clearly didn’t want me to be there. I remember staring down at a lined sheet of paper where I was supposed to be writing down the letters of the alphabet. Ms. Zentmeyer, my teacher, would stood over me, and seeing that I had no work done would sternly ask, “Have you been paying attention at all today?” I never knew how to answer to this because I was frustrated with learning about the letters multiple times during the year. I had been repeatedly told that my handwriting was terrible and that I needed to spend extra time working to make it legible. I was known to teachers as a scattered kid, who almost never payed any attention to the instructor or the lesson plan, and I often felt disrespected or misunderstood by teachers. Multiple teachers tried to diagnose me with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, but when my parents took me to doctors, they informed me that I didn’t have any sort of disorder, and that I just learned differently. This didn’t matter anyway, as my parents refused to put me on any sort of
My first analytical writing assignment was in seventh grade, just to write a two page essay on a short story titled “Charles”. The class and I were quickly taught the proper format of an analysis essay, before attempting to rush write one ourselves. By the time I was done with my essay, I was proud of my work. I thought that I had made a thorough analysis and had completed the assignment to the best of my ability. The class was a bit harder because it was an honors class, but I felt that I could easily manage the work and had enough skills to succeed. A few days after the essay was turned in, my teacher pulled me aside after class. She then began a tirade, throwing out words such as, “This is not honors level work! Your ideas are too concrete and your sentence structure is terrible. This is not a good essay, I will reccomend you for a regular class in high school. And this is what you get for not paying attention!” This was all based on one essay, in fact, the first proper analytical essay that I had ever written. As one could imagine, this did not make me feel good about my writing, and though her explanation of my troubles with essay writing were a bit vulgar, there were many truths to it. This teacher was a negative role model and influence on her students and was not willing to help me reach my goals in writing at all, so my writing progress was stagnant through the two years she was my teacher in middle school. It’s