The journey that I took to learn how to write was not a normal one.  It took me years of trial and error with different teachers and finally a move to a different school before I could ever learn to write.

Charles at his senior class dinner.

I am glad that I learned to write this way because it makes me all the more grateful to have a skill that most people take for granted.  I will never take my ability to write for granted because for many years of my education that ability did not exist.

When I was little, I did not believe that I would have this much trouble with writing or that it would cause me so much academic difficulty.  The first thing that I can ever remember writing was my version of Robin Hood which I had recently read and I wanted to create a spin off of the story.  I spent weeks on this project trying to create a story that was similar and yet distinctively different from Robin Hood.  My initial inspiration came from watching the PBS kids television show Arthur and seeing his own endeavor to write a story similar to Robin Hood.  So, using that television show as a jumping off point, I wrote a story about Robin Hood trying to rescue the beautiful princess from the evil king who had her locked in the castle tower.  Except at that point, I had no concept of showing and not telling so when I read the story back to myself it sounded incredibly boring.  This continued until I finally gave up because all my story ended up being was a plagiarized but very much shortened version of what was written in the book.  Although it ended in failure, I remember that writing the story was quite enjoyable for me.

All the way through high school I had problems with writing.  I always got mediocre grades on my papers, and teachers always recommended that I work on my writing but could never give me any advice on how to do that.  Every year I was given a new teacher that the public school believed would be better equipped to help me.  The school put me in all of their best English teacher’s classes believing that one of them would be able to help me.  I went through all of these teachers, none of whom were able to help me.  At the end of each school year, each of the teachers admitted that they had no idea how to help me.  And every year I became more and more discouraged because I did not know how to help myself.  I was able to verbalize arguments and positions for an essay but was not able to take that same argument and transfer it to paper.  There was something lost in the process and I did not know what.  Finally, for my senior year of high school I transferred to Eagle Hill School and this is where I learned to write.

I can remember distinctly as the school year progressed understanding more than I ever have about writing.  I can say positively that I learned more in that one year at Eagle Hill then I ever learned in my three years of public high school.  One of the first things that came to my mind when I really started to get writing was, “this is not your fault.”  I realized that it was not my fault that I had not learned how to write for all of those years; it was that I did not have the right instruction.  This was a huge relief to me because I had believed throughout high school that there was something wrong with me and that was why I could not learn how to write and those thoughts were very discouraging for me.  My parents and even most of my teachers told me I was smart but I continued to get bad grades on papers.  I finally got to the point where I said, “Prove to me that I am smart” because I started to doubt that I actually was.  I finally got that proof my senior year in high school when I learned how to write.

As I look back on my years of writing difficulty I can see one major problem with the way I was taught to write.  I was always told to make detailed outlines and to carefully plan out what I am writing.  I now realize that this teaching method only confused me more and is absolutely useless to me in my writing.  Now when I write I simply dive into the piece without working on the outline.  I tend to start writing by hand because I like to “manipulate” the words when I begin a paper, and I feel that the only way to do that is to write it by hand.  I tend to keep revising the first lines of the paper until they look exactly the way I want them to and then I can start typing the rest of the paper on the computer.  For me, having a good opening is the key to writing a good paper and that is why I spend so much time on it.

The path that I took to learn how to write was not an easy one, but it is one that I would not want to change.  Because of my difficulties in writing, I have met teachers and mentors that I would not have met otherwise and that are now an integral part of my life.  I also appreciate my ability to write now more than I would if it had been easy for me.  In life, it is not good to take anything for granted and I certainly do not take my ability to write for granted.

Editor’s Note: Charles, a graduate of Eagle Hill School, is currently a freshman at Hofstra University.  -SK