For some reason, mom & I got to talking recently about topics for English class papers and I recalled my most favorite English-paper story I have. And, for no particular reason, I have decided to share it with all of you.
So, in 8th grade, I was assigned a paper wherein I had to describe a time where I was afraid. Oh, and it had to be true. I love to write and so I thought this would be a piece of cake, but when the time came to put pen to paper (this was 1993, after all!) I couldn't think of anything good enough to write. You don't want to go baring your soul to your English teacher, after all, to give them ammunition to use against you at a later date. So, I made something up. It was quite spectacularly made up, too, something about a lake house in Wisconsin, and a boat, and a bad storm and some made up cousins(fake! fake! fake! fake!). I turned it in and thought nothing of it. When my teacher, I will call her Miss Smith(that was her name) handed them back to us, she gave us all this HUGE lecture about how some of the papers were made up and that she was SO disappointed and she could totally TELL which ones were fact and which were fiction. I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into my seat. Crap I thought, for I was a goody two-shoes at heart and a teacher's pet besides and I hated the thought that I was about to get busted. Only... I didn't. When she handed back my paper, I had an A ++ (no really. She actually gave plus pluses) and I think but I don't exactly remember that I had to read it out to the class, as a shining example of how to write true experiences or something like that. She never found me out either, and my straight As in English happily continued.
Until... My freshman year. I was in honors English and had a cute little lady called Miss Nash as my teacher. It was not a great class, we had to read some tome called The King Must Die over the summer and it SUCKED. I didn't actually read it, as such, so I couldn't tell you what it was on about except the dude, in the end, killed the minotaur or some such thing. What more do you need to know? And Miss Nash HATED my writing. She gave me Bs. This was a stunning blow to me as I had, as you noted above, always done quite well in English class.
But then... she assigned a paper on - you guessed it - a time when you were afraid. It wasn't exactly the SAME topic, but close enough to haul out me old A++ chestnut, do a little revision, and hand it in to her too. It was the same thing, fictional cousins (named "Hank" and "Michaela" from my DQMW fangirl days. How she never caught on to that one, I will never know), a lake house, boat trip, bad storm - SO SCARED!
And yes, I got the highest grade I ever got from Miss Nash on that essay. She even suggested that I submit it to our literary magazine, as the shining example of scholarship it so clearly was. It pissed me off, actually, that I should work so hard on actual essays and they were apparently crap, and then I pull something totally out of the air, and not one, but TWO teachers really loved it.
The lesson I took from this was clearly not the plot of The King Must Die, but that my ability to bullshit was developed at a very early age, and the knack for making shit up has come in very handy not only in my school career, but also in my work as well!
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