The hopeless writer by Sarah

The hopeless writer by Sarah - October 2016 Scholarship Essay

When I was in seventh grade I had a teacher named Ms. Mackey. I only had her for one semester of seventh grade English, but that one semester changed my whole life.
Throughout all my six years of schooling I had been perfectly convinced that I was a lousy writer. See, at the young age of 12, I didn’t quite understand the concept that your ability to write well had a lot more to do with the ideas that you put down on paper than the way it looked. I cannot count the number of times a teacher wrote the note, “Try to be a little neater” or “I couldn’t read this part” on my paper. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried my writing looked more like alphabet soup than a sentence.
The first day of school my seventh grade year, I dreaded going to English. On the way to class I dragged my feet so much that someone might have thought I was holding the weight of the sky on my shoulders. I sat down sulkily in the classroom and waited for some ancient, decrepit, mothball smelling, tyrant teacher to come hobbling into the classroom and almost immediately single me out as one of the students who had no hope. To my immense relief, the teacher was quite young and perky. She had the whole class laughing within the first few minutes.
What Ms. Mackey did that day that will effect me forever. After she introduced herself she told every student in the class get out there shiny new comp books. She told us to write about whatever we wanted to, anything in the whole world. However before we started she said, “Writing is a form of self expression. It is nothing more than putting your thoughts down on a page and writing about what you are thinking.” Obediently we all began to write. As I wrote I felt something different growing inside me. A new version of myself came into being as I formed the letters and words. I didn’t try so hard to make everything perfect. I just let my thoughts flow. When I looked back over my entry, for the first time in my life, I saw that what I had written was good.
Over the next few month a whole new world was opened up to me. I was shown the power a work of literature could have over a person. I learned with zeal about tragic metaphors and glorious word choice. Words became magic. I painted breathtaking images. I described the nature of humans. I found I could tell stories with startling clarity. Words became as alive as you or me. The whole world was at my fingertips. All I had to do to make it mine, was write.
I would want to be an English teacher as powerful as Ms. Mackey. Someone who can genuinely impact their students lives for the better. An English teacher who could show that there is magic in words, and importance in finding a voice.