Developed prompts

Week 1

Writing has never been a strong point in my schooling career. I was never creative enough to write stories or poems and it has always been a struggle for me to push out five pages for a research report on a topic that I could care less about. I would not say I am bad at writing, just not the best at it. I think writing is a great way to express not only yourself, but also your ideas and is a staple in any learning environment.

Since I was not the best writer in middle school, my parents thought that it would be a good idea to go and take a summer course on writing before high school. Ok, great, sounds like a blast. Although I was not very excited about going, I tried to stay positive and convinced myself that it would help me in the long run. I got to the first day of class on that hot June morning and the instructor begins to do her welcome and talk about the class. Turns out that it was not a class that helped teach writing; it was a class for kids who liked to write and wanted to get together with other kids and take a week out of their beautiful summer to write about dragons and zombies and shit. Nope, not having any of that. Although it was a miserable week, (due to it being one of the nicest weeks of the summer) with a bunch of weirdoes who love to write, it did help in the long run. I did get better at writing from all the feedback and tips I had received from the class.

Writing in during my high school years could be considered sub-par. I had to do the normal papers for English, essays for history tests, and some writing here or there for a science course. Then sophomore year, for my US History II class, I had to write an end of the year research paper. My teacher, Mrs. Donnegan, said to have fun with it and choose who you think had an effect on history from 1940 to present day. Having no idea what to do, I went to Barnes and Nobles hoping for some sort of divine intervention on who to write about. After about a half hour of searching every isle, I saw the answer to all my problems sitting on the shelf. There, with his shining face, was former President George W. Bush’s book Decision Points. Although I do not sway towards either party, Mrs. Donnegan did; hardcore Republican to be exact. Although I only finished half the book, I wrote a kickass essay filled with lots of knowledge on 9/11 and his early life followed by two pages of utter bullshit wrapping things up. I got a 98 on it. Is it that it was well written or that I chose someone my teacher liked? Probably the latter, but I think I did so well on the paper because it was something that interested me. The part of the book that I had actually read was great and it kept me involved in the book. As Vonnegut said in our week 1 writing assignment, write about something that interests you. This rings true even though I did not even know it at the time of writing it.

Week 3a

Now I hope you are confused from the title. No I did not actually kill a nice couple, but I thought that I did. It was a warm summer night when I was 12 or 13 and my friend, Matt, and I were absolutely ecstatic. Matt's older brother had just gotten back from a trip to Pennsylvania with something of ours: a shit ton of fireworks. We had Roman candles, sparklers, M-80s, mortars, etc. But the one thing that stuck out was the Veni Vidi Vici, a 30 shot mortar brick of pure fun and danger. We decided to walk down to the beach a few blocks from our houses to set it off. We live in Central Jersey on the shore (yes by where Jersey Shore is) so the beach was safest place for fireworks in the area. Or so we thought. It was nice out, so, there were a few people out on the beach. And boy were they in for a show. We walked about halfway down the beach, plopped the thing down and lit it. We start backing up to get away from our masterpiece and to watch it. One shot goes off in a nice green firework; the next is purple. They looked like the nice fireworks you would see on the 4th of July; it was basically something that a small town could use for fireworks if they wanted. So, instead of a nice 3rd shot going off, we see a huge flash of light and a deafening bang. It exploded. The thing fucking exploded. I do not think we could have run any faster to get away from the scene of the crime. We get back to our houses and try and piece together what had just happened. After about a half hour or so, we decided to walk back down to the beach to see the damage. When we got there, we were surprised at the magnitude of what happened. Three fire trucks, five police cars, an ambulance and a SWAT car were sitting right where we left the fireworks. I did not even know our town had a SWAT car. So we did what any two good natured kids would do and turned right around and got home as fast as we could. After a long sleepless night of guilt, we grabbed some breakfast and went back to the beach. Where our mortar brick once sat was a 4ft crater with black, charred sand all around it. We talked to one of the cops that was passing by and asked him what happened. He said two kids lit off fireworks last night and it blew up, but thankfully no one was hurt. We were more than relieved to hear there would be no legal issues nor any guilt for seriously injuring an innocent bystander. After this incident, we decided to not use the fireworks for a while and not tell anyone about what happened because the imminent fear of jail.  

Week 3b

There is one word that can describe the entire epic story that is my career of high school writing: bullshit. I am not a good writer; I am a good bullshitter. I always liked my English teachers, but nothing they said really stuck with me. You always heard “re-read your work” or “make sure you always make outlines before papers”. I personally did not do any of those things. But one teacher really did give me advice that has stuck with me, my junior English teacher at Red Bank High School, Mrs. S. Mrs. S was a wonderful little Italian lady, very nice, always helpful, interesting teacher. The class was British Literature so there is that, no real complaints. The first big assignment we had was a 5-page descriptive analysis on the epic poem Beowulf. When the project was presented, Mrs. S said that this was not a paper you can do the night before. Being the cocky, procrastinator I am, challenge accepted. The night before the paper was due I was up until the wee hour of 4 A.M. completing it. Not the best idea, but I got it done. When we got the grades back, I received an 82. Ok that works for doing the whole thing the night before. After class ended, Mrs. S called me back in to talk. We were the only two in the large empty classroom. We had a conversation about the work and how I had messed up simple details like misspelling Beowulf at points or confusing major character's names. I told her truth and she said she was disappointed and used some explicit language. During this talk, her young son had walked over from our middle school. This was hilarious because she did not realize it. We all had a good laugh when she did see him in the room. Her advice was to take my time when I write and to not try and bullshit papers. She said to find an aspect of the topic that interested me and try and focus that.

            The year continued to go on and I continued to write more papers. I thought that the papers would just magically get easier to write and would be better and I would get A+’s on every paper that I graced with my fantastic writing. Sadly, this was not the case. But I had more and more papers to write, so, I tried to put my newfound advice into them. The next paper I had to write was on A Tale of Two Cities. I did not really like the book; the end was kind of entertaining, but it just dragged on. Our final essay on the book was to choose from a series of prompts and write 5-pages on it. I decide to choose a character analysis essay. I thought about which character I should write about; it was easy to write about someone like Carton or Darnay but I thought it would be fun to try something out of the box. I ended up going with writing about Lucie Manette. I wrote about how she positively affected the growth of Dr. Manette and Carton throughout the course of the book. At about 3 and a half pages, I ran out of things to write about. I started to go back through the book to find anything stupid or useless that I could use as filler. But then Mrs. S’s words echoed in my head. I thought about what I could write about that wasn’t complete bullshit. So, I decided to write about how Lucie actually ended up screwing everyone over through the course of the book. It could be argued that it was not actually her fault; she was just doing her own things and loving whom she wanted to love. The paper still took me until approximately 1 A.M. the night before it was due, but I felt a lot more confident when I handed the paper in. I got an 88, so I mean I guess that is an improvement. As I was looking over the essay as to what I got wrong, I saw a little note that Mrs. S had written there. She said she liked my opinion on Lucie even if it was not the most positive; it was still something outside of the box, which she was proud of. All in all, I believe that Mrs. S gave me something that most teachers do not, she gave me confidence and her real opinions and I could not be more thankful.