Here is my first draft. My personal experience is based on my third year of high school. My high school was “Hillcrest high school” in Jamaica, Queens. Walking to my first day of AP English and didn’t know what to expect. Walking to the door I thought it was going to be a fair class. My classmates would say hi as if they knew me for the past years in the school. However, when it was the second week of my AP course, I got assigned my first paper which the topic was a piece of nonfiction literature “Queen Elisabeth speech” to her citizens about to get invaded. I first did not get it at all. The English back then was difficult to understand and had a hard time to comprehend. My first paper was not my best. My teacher did not like it at all and told me to rewrite it. That brought down my confidence because I thought my writing was good. I was growing a cloud of negative thoughts without trying to push forward. I am writing down the way my thoughts are telling me. I know this isn’t a good draft. I could keep going on until the end but that will be a complete draft done. Going on with this draft I can remember this day like if it was yesterday my feelings, my reaction and trying to not show how I felt in front of my classmates. However, my group were the ones that help me get motivation again to redo my paper. They helped me by staying after class to help me interpret the language back then and see if my paper is going well.
LN draft– Jamilet Martinez
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I can relate a lot because I had an English teacher who was very tough indeed. Sometimes he use to make me rewrite essays twice till it’s perfect in his mind. But at the same time it did teach me a lot. Hoping to read rest of your story soon.
I think we’ve all had teachers like that — I know I’ve told y’all that I certainly did. For this, you might go on and show us how that affected you not just in that class but in the rest of your classes, too, if it did. Or you could talk about what should change about education so that those kinds of experiences don’t happen — what can the system do to make it better? What was the point of that essay supposed to be, anyway? Was it tied to current events or was it just that kind of assignment we read about in Ellen Carillo’s piece — that the only thing that’s important is the text and not the audience or situation it was created in or our current world? Did it have an impact on how you felt about English classes, or just about that teacher? There’s a lot you can do with this — great start.