Bean 1 Rachel E.

Bean Professor Robert Arnold English 1101 10 September 2013 Finding the Missing Piece to My Puzzle People can become literate in most anything they strive for. For me, I became literate with English as I made the drastic leap from elementary school writing to formal high school writing. Yes, one may be able to write the answers to a free response question but what takes talent is to be able to create an answer with support and enough detail to make it an answer worth reading. Just like most kids I learned how to write and read at a very young age. It started out with simple picture books and journal entries to psychology textbooks and research papers. As I transitioned from middle school English to high school English, I began to realize writing as well as reading was not my strongest point. I struggled to understand how someone could take a random topic and write such a strong persuasive paper with vocabulary that blew teachers away. All my many questions were answered during my senior year when my AP English teacher gave me the advice I had been searching for eighteen years. Mary Beth Ferrell changed my whole perspective on writing within the first couple weeks of my senior year. Already skeptical about taking an advanced English, I talked to my principal and requested that I get out of that class before I failed miserably. When I approached my teacher about dropping her class to be placed in honors all she did was laugh and said Rachel, youre not leaving my class. I looked at her with despair and anger as she walked away. I knew from past experience I would not be able to write as well as the rest of the students in my class. For all of my high school English up until that point, I had watched movies and

Bean 2 taken open note quizzes. Never had I been told to write a four-page paper on a Shakespearean poem using only literary terms. When panic began to settle in, I realized in order to keep moving forward with my education I was going to have to face this fear of writing eventually and decided the year before I go to college is the best time to start. My teacher could easily tell how intimated I was with her class and how my style of writing lacked those features that would have made it successful. When my teacher sat me down and lectured about basic grammar all the way to syntax and composition, it forever changed my life. We started out by simply reading practice essays that her past students had done who are now majoring in English. Being able to see the transition of sentences and vocabulary that they used helped me see the different techniques I could try out. After looking at writing we decided to improve my comprehension skills. I had never even heard of annotations before until she explained that simply underlining and writing side notes for any piece of literature helps organize thoughts, in the end producing a better quality paper. I am one of those learners that get the most out of a step-by-step process. Mrs. Ferrell knew this and while she explained everything she wrote down steps that I could follow until this whole process started to become natural to me. Four hours later my teacher and I were still enveloped in this world while everything started to fall into place. She reassured myself that I am just as accomplished as anyone in her class making me realize she was there because she genuinely wanted to help and see me succeed in the future. Confidence. That is what I took away from my morning lecture with my AP English teacher. I had never had a mentor or any teacher that would take time out of their morning to sit down and help me step by step through my situation. People would tell me that not everyone is good at writing and maybe it just wasnt my niche but with writing being such an essential to

Bean 3 success, I couldnt let it hold me back. It may have taken me eighteen years for the light bulb moment to go off but I am so grateful that my teacher recognized my struggle and helped me in the direction I needed to go. Not everyone is lucky enough to get this one on one time I was fortunate enough to receive. With so many students in all of their classes, teachers hardly have time to hear out every student and help them find their own writing style explaining why it took me so long to find my own. Maybe for some people they have quality caring teachers but for those who are stuck with the lazy teachers it makes grasping the concept of literacy that much harder. Most people who werent successful with writing usually found another point of interest that intrigued them. Unfortunately, that wasnt the case for me. I wasnt captain of a varsity team or head editor of the newspaper staff. I was just an ordinary high school student trying to find where I fit in. Then I took psychology and everything fell into place. I love to listen to people and their problems whether it is a serious tragedy or advice on fixing a friendship; I am always there for anyone at anytime. I didnt think about how necessary it is to have a solid writing background in order to major in something where my main job is to hear out someones life story. I soon learned how wrong I was. No matter what job I want or what path I decide to take, English is a crucial part of being successful. As my teacher last year told me about my casual writing style, I had to take into account the more professional side of writing if I want to be able to write down my discoveries to share with others. As I major in psychology and start my own practice in South Carolina, I will have mastered as well as I can master the true meaning of being literate. Not the fact that I can speak correct English or write a full sentence but the fact that I can grasp my thoughts and put them into words that people enjoy listening to. I am not used to having people listen to me since it is

Bean 4 usually the other way around. Part of me believes that is why I doubted my English skills in the beginning. In fear of boring the audience when all I needed to do was trust my thoughts and write how I was feeling. One day I hope to be able to help those that are in the same situation as I was most of my educational career, stuck. Literacy is about finding out who you are and being able to express that on paper. For those who dont have that golden moment from a teacher or mentor, I hope to help them find that light bulb moment so they too can find the missing piece to their puzzle.