My Hardest English Teacher

I always thought that I was a talented writer. By writing, I mean conveying my thoughts or ideas in ways that people found interesting and fun. Writing came easy to me, and I could write pages of original ideas and thoughts in a matter of minutes. It was fun and easy - not something I had to work hard at.

That was until I entered into the tenth grade. That year in Honors AP English, my whole writing style was turned upside down. We were no longer writing the "In my opinion." or "I think." papers. We were writing critical and analytical essays. We actually had to prove and support our ideas - something totally new to me. Of course, with my writing "expertise," I thought this would be no problem at all. That year, everything changed, and six years later, I still use the techniques that I learned in that class. In classes prior to this, teachers had always stressed the ideas of pre-writing, drafts, and editing. But because writing always came so easy to me and I excelled at it, these were just practices I completed to humor the teacher. I had no use for them. They didn't seem to have any effect on my writing at all. However, that changed when I entered the tenth grade class.

The teacher of the class was the department head, Mrs. K. We called her "the K'ster." She was a fairly short, roly-poly woman - the kind that are supposed to be so nice and call you "sweetie" and "dear." But she didn't. She wasn't mean, but she didn't take excuses, and that was made very clear to us early on. If we didn't work in her Honors AP class, we could kiss our seat goodbye. According to her, there was a list of people just waiting to get into the class. The K'ster always carried around a water bottle. Every time she spoke, she would get two words ou...

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...writing assignment." This feeling has stuck with me for years. However, now I can whip off a theoretical paper in no time flat! In fact, I have fine-tuned my system so well that, depending on the assignment, I can sometimes skip writing down my brainstorming, and just think about the ideas for a couple of days until they blossom.

As much as I didn't like the K'ster, she forced me to deal with a new type of writing with which I had a very difficult time. Because of her, I now have a system of writing that works for me, and can be applied to almost any type of analytical assignment that can be given. However, I have the opposite problem now. I can write analytical and theoretical essays very easily, but writing creatively is difficult. I'm out of practice. I don't know where to start.I don't feel good about the ideas.The same excuses I had when I started tenth grade.