Writing

One time writing went particularly bad for me was when I was in 8th grade. The writing assignment was to take any song and somehow relate it to your life. I toke the song Jesus of Suburbia by Greenday and tried to relate it to my life. The results were devastating. I received a poor grade on the paper for a number of reasons. The first being that the song I had chosen was not said to be “school appropriate” so I lost 15 points right away. I also didn’t even try to relate the song to my life, simply because I couldn’t find a song that fit my life very well. So, I simply choose a song that I liked and I choose Jesus of Suburbia. For part of the assignment we had to read our completed draft out loud in front of the class. Back in 8th grade I had a pretty bad speech impediment, and standing up in front of the class made me extremely nervous. While I was trying to read the assignment I got extremely nervous and lost my place and had to start over at least 3 times. Also, what bothered me in 8th grade was that the teachers, didn’t do much teacher revision, all of the editing before the final draft of the paper was turned in was done in a peer to peer setting. Now, I didn’t mind the teacher reading my paper but having a bunch of people whom I didn’t like knowing and reading my life story, as I tried to relate it to a song was a little embarrassing. However, for some reason 8th graders do not edit as hard as college educated teacher’s grade, so I lost quite a few points on the paper due to grammar problems, sentence structure, and a plethora of other areas of seemingly little interest to the average middle school student.