I feel like throughout elementary and middle school, I as well as most of us had always been told I was a great writer. My teachers made me feel like this special little snow flake even though I wrote very generically and stuck to the same boring model I had been taught in 5^th grade.  The more I have talked to people in my class, the more I realize just how many of us were misled by our middle school teachers. The motives behind it are unclear, whether it was to lift our spirits or if they truly just thought we were awesome,  I don’t know. All I know is that it left me severely unprepared for my high school English career.

Junior year I walked into Mahr’s class cocky and ready to take home an A, but oh boy was I wrong. I thought I had this on lock because, after all, I was a genius snow flake English student and I was definitely going to have no trouble with an English class. That was the hardest class I’ve probably ever taken. Mahr snapped me back into reality and showed me what it takes to become a good writer, not a fill-in-the-blanks mold that would guarantee I sounded like a half-intelligent robot. I learned that the way I had been writing was boring, repetitive, and actually pretty stupid.

Even though having my emotions babied through middle school definitely didn’t help me prepare for high school or the difficult world of AP, I am now on my way to becoming a halfway decent writer.