Ashley Myers English 1102-004 Ms.

Germain 27 September 2013

Crazy Kinsey High school can be great or it can be dreadful. It can quickly move from one extreme to the other without a moments notice and leave you reeling in its quake. Everyone who has experienced high school has things that they would change no matter how minor. Me, I would definitely change a lot of the things I went through my senior year of high school. I realize now that I made my life so much more difficult than it had to be. I had someone who wanted to help me grow and mature, someone to push me to greatness, and instead of embracing that I cracked under the pressure. I had the perfect opportunity at a young age and while I did learn from it, I did so the hard way. Ring ring ring... You have reached the voicemail box of Marian Myers. Please leave a message at the beep. BEEEEP!!! Ummm hey Ma, its me. I just called to tell you that I probably wont be graduating with my class next week. I have to go to summer school for English. Call me back when you get my message. I hang up the phone and realize that leaving this news in a voicemail probably wasnt the best idea. UGH what am I going to do now?!? I drop to the floor and cry even harder because knowing my mother, she is going to be so pissed at me. How did I even get here? Id had the same English teacher for two years in a row, thanks to the Advanced Placement track that I was on my junior and senior years of high school. Dr. Kinsey was as crazy as they come. We had a ridiculous summer reading list and an even longer list when school started in the fall. We wrote essays more often than we were allowed to even breathe in his class. He pushed and pushed us to write perfect senior exit papers and we spent two whole weeks presenting them in class. We even had a spring break reading list both years. He would rant and rave, jumping from left to right flinging his arms in the air when one of us would write a bad essay full of comma splices and incorrect punctuation.

Dr. Kinsey and I had a sort of love/hate relationship. I love English so naturally I secretly enjoyed his class, but I wasnt very fond of his teaching methods. He wasnt very fond of the fact that I often took it upon myself to sleep through his lectures. I can hear him now, banging on the desk next to mine and screaming, UP AND AT EM MISS MYERS!!! We will not sleep in this class! Really it wasnt that his class bored me, but 7:15am is awfully early to be reading Earnest Hemingway and analyzing Edgar Allen Poe. Im sure he also hated that I challenged what he thought the author wanted the reader to understand. We often times had disagreements on the meaning behind a Shakespeare piece or what Jane Austen was thinking as she wrote. I appreciated that he respected me enough to really listen to what I thought. Id never had a teacher that interested or willing to listen to my opinion. He would sometimes come back the next day and say that he understood what I was saying and that he would consider changing the way he taught the material in the future. However it wasnt all roses. He was a brutal teacher and was relentless with his methods. Junior year I pulled out of his class with a well-deserved B. Id worked hard and was extremely happy with my grade. That gave me the confidence to walk into his class again, knowing his expectations and ready to meet him for round two. But senior year was a completely different story. Crazy Kinsey kicked into full gear and was in high swing from the first day of school to the last. He worked us like a task master in an attempt to prepare us for college, even having us meet him at UNCCs library on Saturdays for an entire month!! I could never forget him making the same 10 people write our mistakes on the board for the entire class to see. Standing up there with chalk in hand writing out every extra comma, misspelled word, run-on sentence, and failed attempt at a successful paragraph was certainly not the highlight of my senior year. Even now, as I write this, I look back over every couple sentences to see what Kinsey would pick out and correct. Ive done that with every single assignment that Ive had to turn in here at the University and it drives me totally insane.

Finally I gave up. It was just too much for me so I stopped caring about punctuation marks and misspelled words and I decided to just quit. I refused any more embarrassing trips to the board and stopped turning papers in all together. I had decided that I wouldnt play his game anymore. And that is how I end up leaving the worst ever voicemail for my mother. Dr. Kinsey had failed me. And even though I knew why, I was still shocked and beyond upset when the reality finally hit me. I would not be graduating with my class and all because my teacher pushed me to my breaking point. At the time I wanted to hate him, call him the worst teacher ever, an evil man who was personally out to get me. And I would like to say that now I realize what an amazing teacher he was for me. However I still dont feel that way, though I can honestly admit that he taught me a lot about writing, analyzing, and great grammar skills. Use a conjunction instead of a comma. No comma splices. Make sure sentences are complete thoughts. Do I have a subject? Do I have a verb? The reader should always know the purpose of my paper. Is it clear? Did I go into enough detail? Read the work as the author wrote it. Dont add or take away from it. Read it in its entirety before you analyze it. That way you know what the authors idea is. Then take it piece by piece and decide what the author is telling you, what he wants you to know. This is what it all boils down to. Two whole years of listening to the infamous Dr. Kinsey and this is what I can away with. But when I think about it, did I learn more than I realized? Was it Dr. Kinsey who taught me to push through the hard times? Id have to say that it was. I had gotten so used to the feeling of teachers who just passed me through to keep their job that I had stopped putting forth any effort. It was a foreign feeling for someone to actually put forth an effort to prepare me for my future. If I could go back I would definitely be more appreciative of that fact that, while Dr. Kinsey wasnt interested in my future plans, he did everything that he knew to do to prepare me for whatever was to come. There were no days spent talking about my dreams and goals

but instead teaching me how to write professional emails. That is a skill that I will always need that I didnt pay much attention to and certainly didnt appreciate at the time. I can remember spending that day laughing with my best friend while Dr. Kinsey went over the proper procedure. Once I was faced with sending a professional email I realized the opportunity that I had squandered. I struggled with how to properly address the recipient and was humbled by the experience. I think if I could go back I would definitely push harder. At the time I took Dr. Kinseys criticism personally and that is part of the reason that I gave up. I felt like he was just out to embarrass me and I secretly hated him for that. However, if I had been mature enough to stop thinking with my feelings I could have taken the time to see that Dr. Kinsey was trying to propel me into adulthood the best way that he knew how. Knowing that, I think I could have pushed through the embarrassment because I would have known it was for my benefit and was not to be my downfall. Even though I spent my senior year secretly hating having to enter Dr. Kinseys classroom, I realize that I didnt have to. He didnt want me to fail, he didnt want me to quit, and it certainly wasnt his intention to push me to my limit. He was attempting to be a real teacher, attempting to actually teach me some things. I wish I could go back and lose my know-it-all attitude and really listen to what he was telling me. I honestly believe that I would be further along in life than I am now, had I accepted his lessons instead of leaning them on my own the hard way. So, yes Dr. Kinsey pushed me to my breaking point, but I have to admit that even my breaking point was further away than Id recognized. If it was up to just me, I would have never made it an entire first year, and certainly not as far as I did into the second year. School had always come easy to me. I had gotten used to never having to study, last minute papers that received As, and procrastinating assignments were later used as class examples of what was done correctly. All of this had made me a lazy student and I didnt even know it. I had become comfortable with work that was (in my mind)

mediocre. Dr. Kinsey saw that I could do so much more and produce a higher quality of work. He took it upon himself to remind me of that and pushed me to put forth a greater effort. By doing this he actually restored my love for learning. While I did learn a lot about how to write, analyze and be a critical reader, Dr. Kinsey reminded of something so much greater. He reminded me how great it is to really have a teacher. Not a babysitter who gives out homework, but someone who can reignite a passion that had been long forgotten. Through all his horrible techniques, Dr. Kinsey reminded me to learn; it wouldnt always be easy, but that I could push through it, way further than I thought I could.