The Magical Organ by Stella

The Magical Organ by Stella - August 2017 Scholarship Essay

I call the brain a magical organ. In the school system, I call the freedom of expression the key to using this magical organ to your advantage. The vast majority of classes fail to teach their students to do work with expressions and to use their thoughts as a connection to their work. During the time that I was in grade school, I didn't understand this and ended up learning this the hard way.
For the entirety of my life, my specialty was writing. In middle school, I was the kid that knew all the fancy words and always got A’s on all the tests. When we would have discussions in english class, I was always the spoken one and was always commended by teachers for it. However, when it was time to reflect my thoughts on paper, I only got average scores. Over and over again, my work continued to get shut down by teachers despite me wholeheartedly believing in them.
When I went to highschool, I got a new set of teachers and a new opportunity to reinvent myself and my english work. I decided that I would bump it up on all the big words and word my sentences differently. Needless to say, this did not work either and I continued to get average grades. Eventually I was so hurt that I decided to reflect my hurt into one of my papers. I remember crying the entire time I was writing the paper because I knew that I would never be good enough for my favorite subject. I unconfidently handed in the paper and later on that week, to my surprise I got my first A+. My teacher pulled me aside and told me that he saw a big difference in how I was writing. He told me that my paper sounded like I was speaking to him instead of speaking at him. This confused me because middle school taught me to strictly follow the format and to never put yourself into a paper. In reality, when you show your true self in a paper, readers feel a connection to you and are naturally more interested in what the writer is saying.
By the middle of the semester my teacher assigned me as the class tutor. Every afternoon I would stay after school and help my peers with their papers. Upon this request, I realized how easy it was to get bored at reading work that you just do not connect with. I decided to start a system that would help all my peers. I would tell each person to have a conversation with me about whatever the book was about and record them so that they knew their true feelings about them. For example, I would say “This paper is about a novel of a boy dealing with the death of his parents. Tell me how you feel about the book.” They would respond “I feel like the book was morbid. But I cannot say that in this paper”. So I will say that the book was sad.” I would exclaim “Don't do that.” When they asked why not, I would respond with “Because that's not how you feel. Be honest and put your feelings into the paper. You can still be proper and grammatically correct but make sure to be genuine. It's more fun and coherent way.”
The next couple months in this class was amazing! My teacher came up to the front of the classroom and let us all know that the only way to have a good paper is to be relatable and that was exactly what we were doing. The time that I was tutoring, I felt like my opinion mattered and belonged. I wanted to teach all my peers that their opinions are golden too. During my senior year of high school a close friend of mine wrote an essay to a very huge scholarship called the Gates Millennium scholarship. She ended up winning and told me that I was the one that taught her years ago that her opinion mattered. This is why If I were ever a college professor I would teach an english class.