College Professor | Teen Ink

College Professor

June 1, 2011
By BritneyTollefson GOLD, Oshkosh, Wisconsin
BritneyTollefson GOLD, Oshkosh, Wisconsin
15 articles 0 photos 4 comments

Favorite Quote:
"Just because something is hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try, it just means you should try harder."


As a blonde pig-tailed girl with hundreds of freckles I wasn’t sure who I wanted to be; I only knew I wanted to help people, make a difference in the world and most of all write and read. I believe that by being a college professor, I could comply with my dream considering all aspects. From the age of six leading up to my current age, I have had at the least fifty notebooks filled with stories, poetry and words. Words have always been my form of escape whether it came from a book or from the movement of my pencil. As a child I witnessed my mother and father fail over and over again. My mother has lived with a husband who throws her around, calls her names and manipulates her for fifteen years of her life because she does not believe she can support four children on her own. She conveys that she is miserable and seeks peace of mind by going out late at night and conversing in the bars with unknown people. Sometimes I come across her crying in the small yellow painted kitchen or writing about the pain she endures but she does not have the audacity to leave nor do I believe she really wants to. My father drinks a twenty-four pack of beer every day on that small beige couch watching cooking shows, possibly hoping to drink his pain away and repress the memories that haunt him. He lives countless miles away in the suburbs of Milwaukee with a long battered country road that sits parallel to the old white building with a girlfriend that pays the bills and provides the necessities. In seeing them fail and depend on other people, I contemplated on what to do with my life and strived endlessly to do better for myself. I sought to face my problems with my inner strength rather than relying on a substance or another human being and writing let me do that. I was determined as a child to be something and do something grand with my life that could help others at the same time. That determination has followed me to this day and I have to thank my parents for the strength and motivation they have given me to be independent through seeing them live in unstable and unhappy conditions. I was blessed by taking a creative writing class my junior year, simply because I was given the opportunity to experience others emotions as well as dig deeper into mine. E.M. Forster once said “What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.” In reading his quote I could not by any means agree more. I was astonished by the way it made me feel and there's nothing that could replace that emotion. As a young brunette woman with hundreds of freckles, I know exactly what I want to be and what I want to do with my life and that’s to be a creative writing college professor.

The author's comments:
This is after my teacher's critique.

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