Eden Creamer Professor Rothwell ENGL 1103 4.

October 2011 With my fate resting in my own hands coordination ability, I stood alone against the back wall of the classroom, staring at him. Bobby, a soon-to-be baseball player with steel eyes and a hard jaw stood against the white board, his fingers tracing the stitching in the small, blue foam ball in his hands. My heart stopped as he prepared to throw the ball. And so my first semester of sixth grade began, and launched me on a path that would soon shape me into the writer, and the person, that I am today. My sixth grade English teacher was a man named Mr. Deloma. He was tall, with broad shoulders, dark hair, and always the slickest black and gray suits. He always looked perfectly ironed and primped, and wore a class ring everyday. I thought he was in the mafia. Mr. Deloma was a wonderful, but unconventional teacher. We played fastball everyday in class. I was terrible at fastball, because the game required you to be able to catch the small ball as it flew toward you. We also had a rule against allowing the ball to hit the ceiling, and I always had trouble throwing it without hitting the low, tiled ceiling. One day in class, we were asked to turn in a short essay about ourselves. As we played fastball that day, we learned that whenever someone got out, that person had to read their paper aloud to the class. I was quaking in my boots. Reading aloud to my class petrified me, and I knew that I had to survive in the game until class ended. My fear of reading aloud motivated me as the game began. People in Charlotte were so mean, so uncaring. My family moved here halfway through the school year when I was in third grade. When I entered that Elizabeth Lane Elementary School classroom halfway through the year, cliques had already been established, friendships had already been solidified, and I was left secluded out of all of that. The isolation was soon met with animosity from my peers, name-calling during recess, insulting slurs during lunch, and never once a friendly face. Charlotte became like a Hell to me.

When I moved on to middle school, I was glad to leave that elementary school. My hopes were high, as I daydreamed the night before my first day of sixth grade about making friends. As I entered my homeroom the next day, I was horrified to find that I recognized the faces of three fourths of the people in the room, and the other fraction of my peers had already integrated into that depressing group. South Charlotte Middle School was soon to become another Hell for me. I knew that reading my paper in front of this class would lead to my utmost embarrassment. I had my best fastball performance that day. I was one of the final two people standing. As I stood, alone against the back wall of the classroom while Bobby stood against the white board, I knew I had to catch the ball. In my head, I could hear the baseball announcers. Here comes the windup. And the pitch! A heavy curve ball from the right, flying at Creamer. Shes watching it as it approaches, and she swings! The ball bounces off the bat, only to be caught in the outfield by Ground. Thats what happened in fantasy land. In reality, Bobby threw the ball straight at me, and I caught it. Temporarily. A few milliseconds after I caught it, the little bugger bounced out of my arms, off my chest, and onto the ground. My heart sank, as I realized I would now have to read my paper. Heart racing, hands trembling, and forehead beginning to perspire, I went to my desk and lifted my paper off the top of my binder. I played with the staple at the top of the page until I was told to read the paper. I could feel my face burning as I got to the last paragraph. I hated reading this personal piece to my class. Bobby didnt have to read his paper, and he smugly smiled at me as we both approached the front of the room to turn in our papers. Two weeks later, Mr. Deloma handed back our papers, which he had made notes on in his scrawling handwriting. As people around me compared the notes he had written, I looked down at my paper with a blank expression, my entire body motionless. See me after class was the only thing written on my paper, whereas my classmates had papers that were bleeding with red ink. I wanted to cry. I wanted to go to the nurses office and go home. I felt like I was going to throw up all class.

As class finally ended, I approached Mr. Delomas desk with a queasy stomach, supported by quivering legs. He sat at his desk, looking at an email on the monitor of his computer. Impatiently, I waited. I wanted to slip away, become invisible, disappear into oblivion, and never return to his class. He looked up at me and smiled. His hard, mafia face became soft and warm. Immediately, the overwhelming need to pee my pants subsided. You, the word came out as a mumble and I cleared my throat. You wanted to see me about my paper? I did. His smile broadened to include his row of pearly whites as he took my paper from my still shaking hands. This was incredibly well done. What are your thoughts about your writing ability? I was taken aback. Writing was never something I thought I was particularly good at. I had a tendency to merely write the first words that came to mind, and never go back and edit. That is still what I do today. I didnt think that what I was doing was actually correct, or eloquent, or even half-way decent. I stuttered for a few moments, staring into his eyes, taking in the crows feet at the corners as he smiled at me. You should look into pursuing writing more closely. Id like to see you really develop your writing through my assignments in this class. His words of praise brought my heart to skip a beat, and I couldnt restrain the smile that had come to my face. He dismissed me from the room after that, and I walked to lunch with a different sort of nausea. I was good at something. Somebody who wasnt obligated to think I was talented did. For the rest of the year, Mr. Deloma picked on me to read freewrites, and always added extra constructive criticism to papers I turned in. He encouraged me to enter a short story contest, and later implored me to write a sequel to that original story, just for the sake of writing it. I havent seen him since that year, as he moved to a different state. He has stuck with me as the teacher who brought writing into the forefront of my life. That same year, another teacher, Mr. Harrison, accelerated my writing in a more passive way. Mr. Harrison, my Exploring Career Decisions teacher, was an elderly man who had worked at South Charlotte

since the beginning. It had been his first teaching job, and he was sure that it would be his last. When the school first opened, he taught Woodshop. The tip of his middle finger had been cut off years ago in a table-saw accident. That was always his favorite story to tell. Exploring Career Decisions was a relatively useless class, and mostly served as an easy A. During class, we did numerous activities involving job hunting, and finding that career to last you your whole life. Most of the information we learned in that class was completely lost on me. Most, but not all. Near the end of the semester, we had a final project which required us to go on a database of most careers people today are able to hold, pick one, and complete a five part presentation about it. At random, I selected journalism from the towering list . Throughout the course of the project, I fell in love with newspaper, and everything that journalism involved. It was like love at first sight, but with a career. From that semester on, I knew that I wanted to be a journalist when I was older, and I began doing everything that I could to push myself closer to that goal. These moments became the center of gravity for my writing growth.