The Writing Redemption by Gavin Bergman, Literacy Narrative Audio

The writer had a strong dislike for writing due to a boring teacher and a lack of constructive feedback. Their mother pressured them to improve their grades, leading to a frustrating experience with an essay assignment. However, in their senior year of high school, they took a writing class with friends and a supportive teacher who gave them freedom and positive feedback. This experience changed their perception of their writing abilities and allowed them to enjoy writing and take pride in their work. The Writing Redemption, by Gavin Bergman Throughout my education, I've hated writing with every fiber of my being. I blamed my hatred for writing on my sixth grade English teacher, Mr. Shoemaker. Mr. Shoemaker was a rather boring, monotone teacher. He was tall and his face was long, but he wore small, beady glasses. I, for one, was not a fan of his bland demeanor. It didn't make writing fun. I had somewhat enjoyed writing when I was taught in a colorful, elementary style of teaching, with such projects like comedic graphic novels or argumentative essays about why we should keep chocolate milk in the school cafeteria. However, it was a brutal transition over to a middle school classroom that prided itself on its plain white walls and painfully boring style of writing. I disliked Mr. Shoemaker for a number of reasons, but most of all was that his class was impossible. No matter what writing assignment I would turn in, it would never be perfect enough for his unforgiving rubric. I am not one that typically complains about a bad grade, but I hate it when I don't get any corrective feedback on what went wrong, something that Mr. Shoemaker would never provide. This inability to write anything deserving of a grade higher than a C greatly impacted my overall grade, and got my mom to pressure me to do better. How was I going to do better? I had no idea, since I didn't even know where I was going wrong. Using the advice of a friend in my English class, I tried to ask Mr. Shoemaker for help on the draft of a major assignment before I turned it in. I remember sitting at the corner of the table with my small school Chromebook open to my essay, whilst he sat beside me reading it in silence. The essay I had written was something of an informative essay on how global warming was affecting the walrus population. The assignment had told us to write about something related to saving the environment, so I decided to write about how the environment was affecting my favorite animal, which was at the time a walrus. After Mr. Shoemaker scanned through my entire essay, he turned over to me and blandly said that it was fine, but he did say he wanted to see more explanation into defining the food chain. In my essay, I talked about one of the main reasons for the walrus population decline being that the heating waters were killing off plankton. Plankton are food to shellfish, so shellfish were dying too, and from that walruses were starving because they eat the shellfish. Basically, the food chain was being disrupted by a massive decline in plankton from global warming. Now, Mr. Shoemaker didn't want me to explain this phenomenon itself, but rather provide an explanatory definition into the general idea of the food chain. I personally saw no point into this because the food chain is such a self-explanatory topic that it shouldn't need an entire synopsis, and besides, even if I did add one, it would distract the reader from the main point of the paragraph. But in the end, I agreed with Mr. Shoemaker, and I added the explanations into the food chain into my essay. After my draft got graded, I received it back. I was pretty disappointed. I found my essay to be littered with red check marks like a laser light show on my paper. On the last page was a small red inked message from Mr. Shoemaker explaining to me how the food chain synopsis drew away from the attention from the main flow of the essay. I was furious. His advice managed to somehow lose me more points than I would have had, but unfortunately, I was not as mad as my mom was. She and I both thought this was going to be the assignment that was going to save my English grade, but after seeing the grade on the draft, she was worried this was to further lower my grade. She started putting a lot of pressure on me to get out of the C range of my English class. It was exhausting. We spent every night for a week after dinner working and writing, finalizing the essay from the draft in my room under her constant control. I would sit upright in my bed with tired fingers slamming away on the black plastic keys as my mom would be spinning out constant but helpful advice from the other side of the bed. Though the advice was needed and made my essay a lot better, I was always somewhat annoyed being told what to do, but at the end of the day, no matter how annoyed I was, I just wanted to regain my mom's faith in me that I could handle these assignments and make her proud. I was so relieved when we were done. I honestly believed it was one of the best papers I've ever written, but Mr. Shoemaker didn't seem to think so. My final came, my final paper came back dipped in red ink. Me and my mom were heartbroken. I thought I wrote a fan, I thought what I wrote was fantastic and my mom played a major role in writing it too. It sucked to have the essay not appreciated, but it was worse to have my mom be disappointed in my worth ethic. I barely ended the class with a C, but I was just happy to be done with it. Though as time went on, I would get better at writing. I always felt because of this experience that I was a bad writer and that English was my weakest subject. Even in high school, I would do my best to take the least amount of English classes and when I did, I made sure they were very easy and didn't challenge me. As the years in high school went on, writing became more of this boring obstacle as an assignment, something that I felt I needed to get done in a B-grade mentality. It wasn't until my senior year of high school that I felt totally comfortable with my writing skills. In my senior year, me and my two best friends, Jack and Hayden, decided to take a class called Writing for College. At this point, we had all already completed the necessary English requirements for our high school, but we needed some filler classes on our schedule, so we decided to choose Writing for College as a class, hoping to all be in the same class. At first, I was against choosing this class because it was centered all around writing, but both my friends wanted to take it and my mom thought it would help introduce me to the type of writing assignments in college. The class was taught by a very chill new teacher named Mr. Bell. Mr. Bell was a younger guy that gave his students a lot of freedom when writing assignments. He taught his class in short lectures that we'd have typically only once or twice a week, but the rest of the class consisted of writing work time, which was the best since we didn't have to take much work home. Writing for an entire class was also so much more fun with two of your best friends. Thankfully, me, Hayden, and Jack were able to get all into the same class, something that hadn't been achieved for our entire four years of high school. The three of us would sit in this high-top, rectangular table in the back of a dimly lit classroom and mess around the whole time. Luckily for us, no matter what we did, Mr. Bell never seemed impressed by it. According to him, he used to work as a teacher in a very inner-city school with a lot of troubled students, so there was always a lot worse that he had to put up with. It must have been a lot worse there, because me and my friends were up to a lot of mischief. I remember this one time, Jack went to the bathroom, and me and Hayden used three whole Carmex tubes to cover his entire Chromebook and lip balm. It made a mess everywhere, but to our surprise, Mr. Bell saw it and thought it was pretty funny. Mr. Bell's class consisted of three main projects, one of which was a personal narrative, a writing theme I often didn't have interest in. I disliked them, because I had to do them for school pretty often, and I almost never had an interesting event to write about. Luckily, I was able to find a topic for my narrative. I decided to write about an experience I had while hunting that taught me the power of patience and a little bit about destiny. The story focused on my 18th birthday, where I was hunting for buck in Rylander, a town in northern Wisconsin where a lot of my relatives live. In the story, I made a poor decision of chasing a deer instead of being patient and trusting destiny. In the end, I lost the buck, but gained a valuable lesson in thinking before acting and trusting a set path. I was a little nervous about writing this paper. The narrative seemed to go into a deeper side of me that I didn't often write about, a kind that was descriptive and self-reflective. But nevertheless, I was very proud with what I wrote. I remember that we had turned in the paper around the time just before spring break. As me and my friends walked out of Mr. Bell's classroom to enjoy our break, I stopped for a minute in his doorway. I asked him if he had had a chance to read my narrative yet, and what he thought of it. While sitting at his desk, he looked up to utter the unexpected words that he loved it. He told me that it was one of the best ones he's read out of the class. I couldn't believe my ears when he told me that. I'd perceived I've never received that positive of feedback from an English teacher. Mr. Bell's comment completely changed the notion that I could never write anything enjoyable or good, a notion that had been hanging over my head since sixth grade, a notion that has had a huge impact on how I see not only my writing, but the worth of my creativity and work ethic. I became so self-conscious about my own writing that I would never show it to anyone, not even my own parents, in fear that they wouldn't like it. Since my writing for college class, I've started to enjoy writing more, even becoming more proud of my writing as I used class writing assignments as an opportunity to be creative and hard-working.