I’m not a big reader or writer, but I’ve had some great english teachers. Some of my
teachers were better than others. The one that helped me the most was, Mrs. Fyke. She was an interesting teacher, she would have fun activities to do that related to reading and writing. We came into the room one day, after we started our mythology unit and we watched Hurcules. Our purpose was to find all the things that related to mythology. It helped me to write, and it helped me see why it’s important to research about what you’re writing.

One of my biggest problems as a writer is finding some thing good to write about. Mrs. Fyke found that to be true in most of the class. So one day we sat down in our seats and we were told to pick a piece of paper out of the basket that was brought around by Mrs. Fyke. I grabbed one from the top and it read “robot”. I was quickly able to find a story line from those five letters. It soon came to me that I was not good at controlling my run on scentances. That was probably because I wanted to get the story out quickly. I didn’t think of how it sounded to the reader I only saw what it sounded like to me. I gave it to a friend of mine for peer grading and he didn’t get half of what I wrote. Over all It helped me slow down in my writing.

Later that year we had to do a research paper, I wrote mine about sailboats. We would come in every day and go to the library where I did more research than most of the class. I would first grab a computer and try to find legit places to do research like world book online. I would grab a note card for citing and I started writing until the class was done. I worked for hours in and out of school. That was probably the hardest I ever worked on a paper before. My paper turned out better than most the class because of my research and hard work. I was learning MLA formatting and the basics of a research paper. Later that year after the research paper I headed into the school hoping we would do something fun in english, instead of the research paper. I grabbed my binder from my locker, and closed it. The split second before I heard the locker slam I forgot my No.2 friend, who always seemed to slip to the bottom of my back pack and always makes me late for class. We walked into the newly arranged classroom that had had its desks moved about into a rounded off square. I spotted a seat next to my friend only to find that we had new seats. “We will be reading The Outsiders this month in class starting today!”, Mrs. Fyke explained after our numerous questioning about the new seats. When we read the outsiders, we each had a part to read. I was really confident with my part because it was only two sentences long. Turns out I wasn’t able to read ten whole syllables without error. Yes, I felt like an idiot, but not only did it help me to read better but it was more fun than reading it at home. It wasn’t like the time in seventh grade where our teacher made us write loads of B.S. notes to fill up space on our blank sheets of paper. I would sit in my bed for literally an hour making notes on only twenty pages and she expected us to do that every night. I gave up in the book half way through to save my sanity. In class we would “discuss” the book for a half an hour in class but the discussions were not good at all. Since she saw that our discussions were not doing well she had us write them in a web pattern. That was the worst english experience I have ever had. The notes were supposed to make us better at reading but I think they made you think to much about a thing that should be enjoyable. That’s one reason I stopped reading for the most part in 7th grade.

At the end of the year we wrote poetry which I am not a fan of. Yet again my yellow friend ruined my attendance. We came in the room and she had blocked the windows and all outside light and illuminated the room with a lamp with eight lights sprawled out like an
octopus. The lighting made it feel like an underground poetry cafe. I like reading poetry but I don’t like creating it. She had us write for the whole hour many times. I’m not very good at poetry even the poem I performed was about how bad I was at it. I came up to the podium and I read my thirty second poem (minimum time length). There was applause and I headed back to my seat feeling confident in my poem. I’m better at poetry that has some sort rule like five syllibils in the first line, seven in the second and five in the last sentance.

I think the reason I am not a great writer is because I stopped reading and writing for the most part in seventh and eighth grade. That may have been because of my seventh grade teacher.I hope this class will help me with that.