Professional Documents
Culture Documents
UWRIT 1101
Mr. Campbell
give us ample time in class to work on our project. Ms. Justice was on the chubby side,
but she was a great, humorous teacher. She would rent these huge, black laptops from our
school library for our class to work. I remember the bright classroom, filled with colorful
posters about literature and books who were reading. The classroom was a decent size,
holding around 30 desks that faced the front of the class. I remember sitting in the very
front row, because she had us sitting alphabetically, struggling on finding a website as a
source. I remember constantly looking around the classroom at all the posters instead of
finding the sources because I couldnt focus. It was one of the hardest things Ive ever
done in high school. I kept thinking to myself, Is this project really worth all this
stress? Sitting in the front row of class, I started jotting down sources I found online
onto a plain white notecard. The least amount of sources we could use was five and I
could barely find two. Once I found all my sources within a week, I had to immediately
start typing my six-page essay. The hardest thing about writing an essay for me, is
writing the introductory paragraph. The ability to start off something was very
complicated for me with writing. I tried to reflect on techniques that I learned throughout
high school to develop an introductory paragraph, but none of those worked. I started
huffing and puffing out of frustration. I remember just staring at my laptop screen,
thinking what to write and how to start off. I started typing my essay after weeks of
procrastination and having no clue what to write about using my sources. I remember
having numerous tabs opened on google chrome of different websites that contributed to
racism. It was a very stressful time for me. Finally, after two months, it was time to turn
my paper in. I finally had a sigh of relief and I felt so much better because I just knew all
of this stress would never return. I was definitely wrong about that. My teacher gave the
class our papers back with our grade and I failed it. I remember staring at the large sixtyfour score written in red at the top corner of my paper. I remember seeing all the red
commentary from my teacher in the margins of my paper about how unclear and how
disorganized my paper was. Immediately my face turned red and my stomach dropped.
My teacher also noted how I didnt follow the rubric on how many pages to write. Since
we had to include our citations, I was thinking that the citation page counted towards the
six pages, meaning I technically wrote five pages. At that very moment, I felt like a loser.
I felt like the entire graduation project was pointless and that my ability to graduate from
high school would be judged off an essay. Ive never done horrible on an essay.
Everyone that fails the first submission gets a chance to redo the paper, which is
called second submission. This time I used the commentary my teacher wrote on my
paper and spent numerous of hours rewriting my essay, attempting to make it perfect.
Finally, it was time to turn in our second submission paper. I remember the anxiety
feeling I had. I was hoping that I would pass the paper this time. Over a two-week period
my teacher gave back the second submission papers and I passed it with an 83. I had a
sigh of relief but at the same time, I still had that failure feeling from the first submission
paper. After thinking long and hard about the project, I felt like my topic was too broad
and too complicated to write an essay on. I honestly wanted to change my entire topic
and start all the way over but it was too late.
From this experience I learned that not everyone is good at everything.
People should be able to write freely, especially if they are choosing what to write about.
In my case, I couldnt write freely about something that interested me. I had to write the
way someone else wanted me to write, which was complicated for me. I never understood
the high school concept of formatted essays. Teachers wanted us to write in this
complicated way. After the research project, I had a couple more papers in high school to
write but they were not as long and as pressuring as this project was. As a college student
now, I think I am a much better writer than I was in high school.