How Language Arts Changed the Development of My Mind by Emily

How Language Arts Changed the Development of My Mind by Emily - August 2016 Scholarship Essay

I remember the first time reading “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe in Honors English class and being completely perplexed and at the same time filled with awe at the complex creepiness and symbolic meanings of each of the rooms by the genius Poe. By that time, I’d read plenty of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s witchcraft, Henry David Thoreau’s transcendence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s violent romance in The Great Gatsby. It was in Honors English where I was introduced to symbolism and searching for deeper meanings, and I was absolutely captivated.

In addition to Honors English, other language arts classes, including Creative Writing and College Prep, were the most memorable because I learned what it meant to explore my own creativity and my own mind. Rarely did it involve memorization like the other subjects, and the teachers led me through lessons, but language arts classes forced me, as a student, to step out and manage the majority of the work on my own.

Through Honors English, I realized how to think for myself when interpreting a piece of work instead of always being fed the answer. This helped me as a student become more independent, altering the way I thought into a more complex and critical process.

Creative Writing taught me discipline. We had to write daily journals of at least a page long and at the same time had different writing prompts each class session. Therefore, I learned to sit down and focus on my projects, pushing my thoughts to spontaneously generate a story on a daily basis. Creative Writing also taught me self-confidence in my work. I learned to be proud of what I created because it was my very own, and as a student, the stories became more than just homework. I discovered the importance of discipline, hard work, and creativity.

As for College Prep, I learned about different perspectives from varying cultures and experiences, which allowed me to be more open-minded about the world but also towards what I learned in school. Especially after my experience in College Prep, I realized that I enjoyed gobbling up everything the teacher taught me. I was able to take advantage of this and nourish my love of learning to gain as much as I could from every class from thereon after.

Another factor that College Prep taught me was organizing my ideas. We had to write a seven page paper – the longest I’d written at the time – and the teacher guided us through each step of the research. However, the night before the final paper was due, I realized that I’d been thinking about my paper all wrong. The paper wasn’t focused and the ideas didn’t tie together. I stayed up to reorganize and basically rewrite the entire paper, and although I didn’t get the best grade due to small grammar errors, my teacher was impressed with the content. From that paper, I learned not only that procrastination is a dangerous thing but that papers take more than just throwing a bunch of ideas together about one topic. This paper was the beginning of how my mind works today when I’m about to write an essay because, through that experience, I discovered the recursive process that it takes to form a paper and also the deeper meaning that a paper takes on its own as it develops.

Through all of these experiences in my language arts classes in high school, I obtained many skills that helped me in my college years. Language arts was what brought me out of my box of thinking that school was just the grade or just the “memorize and forget” cycle. Language arts changed the way I thought, developing my mind and allowing it to create its own work.