My Writing Experiences

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My experiences with reading and writing My earliest recollections of both my reading and writing experiences are not pleasant and to date these experiences have not changed. Prior to my kindergarden days my mother would teach me at home the letters of the alphabet in the hope that my entry into school life would me smoother. I am not too sure that she succeeded. I recall my first day in the kindergarden class, the teacher started off with figures; I thought to myself smooth sailing. I thought that all day this is what I would doing, little did I know that reading would be next. I immediately became anxious and felt a headache coming on. I disliked reading then and still do. My teacher in kindergarden recognized my discomfort very early…show more content…
Every writing assignment in primary school brought its share of frustration and resentment. My mother and sister tried their best to pull me along or haul me along whenever I had a writing project to complete. My sister said that I mutilated language. How could one stretch one’s imagination to “a trip to the moon”? I had never been to the moon how could I know what happens there? There were no two ways about it. My writing was awful. My style could be described as simplistic, dull and unimaginative. I lacked the interest and was too afraid to put imagination and any part of myself into my writing. My writing lacked identity. In my country, Trinidad and Tobago in order to move on to Secondary school students are required to sit and pass an examination at the age of ten. The examination carries a writing component, an essay. It is said that the quality of the student’s essay determines the school that he gets into. The better the essay, the better chance the student has of securing a place in one of the prestige schools. Students are drilled for hours a day in the art of writing essays. This has been one of the most torturous periods of my life. I have tried to erase these memories from my…show more content…
I worked on this for three sessions before getting it to perfection. She moved from level to level, complexity to complexity and I moved from frustration to frustration until I noticed there was actually some progress. My sentences moved from simple sentences to compound and on the rare occasion to even compound complex ones. The writing was slow; I worked carefully and strived for perfection as best as I could. My tutor never accepted my essays until she found them to be perfect. They were then filed away. They were brought out two weeks before the examination and I was made to memorize these essays. It was a different approach. It was almost scientific. I remember as if it were yesterday, I had written an essay on “The day I rescued someone” Could you imagine my utter delight when on the examination day one of the topics was “The day someone rescued me”. I switched my essay that I had memorized and did not look up until I had put my final full stop. My labor was not in vain I passed the National examination for my first choice school. On moving from Primary school to Secondary I thought that I had conquered the art of writing. I carried the skills and style that I had developed at the Primary level. Again my frustration level reared its head. The teachers at the secondary level were not impressed with either my writing or reading. My list of books read was unacceptable. I struggled.
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