When I decided to write my first essay, the one about my writing experience, I thought of all the things that I could say. I thought about what some of my past teachers had told me, what some of the other kids in my class had told me, and what I had told myself about my own writing. I thought that there was no way I could possibly remember my writing experience when I was in kindergarten, like some people can. I only remember ever learning about the alphabet as well as playing on the playground when I was in kindergarten. The thought never even crossed my mind that even then, I was writing. I tried really hard to think of the first essay that I wrote. I came up with nothing. The earliest thing that came to my mind from my writing history was when I wrote a poem about my dog dying.

I tried to think of some general things about my writing experience in the different levels of my schooling; elementary, middle and high school. I came up with the idea that I would write about what my teachers had done to influence my writing, whether it was good or bad. I remember, when I was in middle school especially, that some of my English teachers either really didn’t care about their students, or cared just enough to keep their jobs. I remember multiple days that I would come home flustered because I didn’t know how to do something and my teachers expected me to.

One such time was when my English 10 teacher gave the class an article and told us to annotate it. I came up to her after class that day and asked her how to annotate. She looked at me like I had just said that I didn’t know how to read. She tried to give me a crash course, about 2 minutes, in annotating and when she was finished, I still had little to no idea how to annotate. I didn’t know how to annotate because I had never been taught how to annotate in all of my previous English classes. And when my teacher then told me to annotate, I was freaking out because I didn’t know how to annotate. I came home and my mom taught me how to annotate a little bit better than what my teacher decided to send my way.

When I was thinking about some of my other teachers in my schooling, I realized that I didn’t have a lot of teachers that either were good teachers or teachers that didn’t seem to teach the way that I learned. I had a lot of teachers, in middle school especially, that seemed to only care about the smart kids and not the kids like me that were well-rounded middle-ground students. I tried to look past the terrible things that my teachers would do just to help the smarter kids instead of trying to get everyone to the same level.

I have had a lot of poor interactions with my middle school teachers especially and that has changed the way that I write. I see now that the teachers I didn’t like were the ones that decided that they were going to ignore all of the students that were kind of mid-range, quiet and shy and pay attention to the ones that were extremely bright, obnoxious and outgoing. I tried my best to ask the teachers a question when I had one but they would only explain it in a brief way so they could get on with the material. The teachers I did like would be the kind that sat down with me and thoroughly explained the topic I was having trouble on and helped me to understand the material not just understand how to get through class.

When I write now, I want it to be good. And when my writing isn’t good, I feel like a failure because throughout my entire schooling there were people that continuously got A’s in all of their classes, were social butterflies and made it all seem easy while I had to struggle the whole way. Grades have been a big factor when I feel like I’ve failed at writing when my writing isn’t as good or better than someone else’s work writing. I love writing but when someone tells me that my writing isn’t good enough via grades that really erodes my self-worth and it makes me not want to write again.

For the second part of the essay, I tried to think of as many multi-faceted ways that writing is incorporated into society and how it helps it run. What I found out was that writing is in everything we do. It’s in our planning, our architecture, our military forces, and even in our daily lives. Writing is a ways to a means and we have the power to clearly state to one another what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and why it needs to be done, and that’s through writing. Without writing, we would never know about anything outside our community unless someone told us about it by word of mouth.

When I thought about all of my past experience as a writer, I found a lot of negativity from other people towards my writing. When I thought about how writing effects society, I found that it is a very crucial part of society because it helps society run.