My Daughter's Homework Is Killing Me: Analysis

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I sat across from Helen and watched as she got her packet while I got a single piece of paper. It only took one page to say “I’m sorry, but your writing was not selected.” Helen’s packet took multiple pages to reminder her parents to sign their permission for the publishing of her essay. Helen’s story got in and mind didn’t. In retrospect, mine didn’t deserve to get in. Why? In an overzealous state to write an epic, I took what was originally 2 pages and turned it into six pages of unnecessary details, overcomplicated world structure, and random vocabulary in a classic freshman attempt to sound intelligent. It didn’t work. Three years and four months later, I’m realizing that my essays usually don’t need me to add as much as subtract for …show more content…

The blunt honesty in My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me—“I have inadvertently yet perfectly re-created my own eighth-grade homework conditions: getting stoned, attempting math, and failing at it.”—shows simple passion for writing the essay, and it’s funny. If I was to rewrite my memoir, I would have used more blunt honesty, and mentioned something along the lines of “I’ll admit, part of my problem was me not caring about art” or “I guess I shouldn 't have taken the class”. I used Greenfeld’s sentence idea “I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed.” in my D.A.R.E. essay when I said “I’m not here to explain why underage drinking is actually good for the youth of America or to fight the drinking age. I’m here to say why … D.A.R.E. needs to prioritize safety over law enforcement.” because I loved the idea of brutal honesty so much, and I thought it was a bold way to get the point across to the audience to forget the counterargument and related subjects for a …show more content…

I used to cram fancy-schmancy words into my essay, in part following classmate’s examples from classes like World History where the language wasn’t at all important. Because of the insecurity in my own voice, it took me a while to develop humor. My art memoir was even pretty dry in part because of the depressing topic, but also because I just didn’t put any humor in. My D.A.R.E. essay was much more fun to write because I got to joke around with it, using words like “devil’s lettuce” and “It 's easy to paint the "bad eggs" as

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