Personal Narrative: A Midsummer Night's Dream

I “hunkered down” to brainstorm a list of my experiences in English, a bit skeptical that I could think of many. After all, by sophomore year of high school I had convinced myself that I was going to pursue engineering as a career. I even wrote a tenth-grade English paper on my aspirations to attend Worcester Polytechnic Institute, like many of my cousins had done, and fall in love with all forms of mathematics. This brainstormed list of English experiences, though, started coming to mind in mass quantities. I hope this autobiography can show how thrilled I was to fall in love with English, and how I have not once looked back on my shift away from WPI.
My earliest English memories are from classes in third grade, when I began my first year

in the Grafton Public Schools system where I would later graduate high school. Mrs. Morrison detected my hatred of reading. Up until that year, I had report cards that noted reading comprehension as my biggest hurdle. Mrs. Morrison, though, also saw my huge love of writing creatively. I often wrote short stories and little poems in notebooks and chose these forms to communicate myself for in-class assignments. My parents, after meeting with Mrs. Morrison in person, informed me that she called me a “backdoor reader,” someone who would learn to love reading because I would eventually see the vital connection between great writing and deep reading. She was right. Still, English classes in elementary school were challenging for me. I constantly felt that my peers were better readers, since I often struggled with pronunciation and interpreting meaning. Once, after finishing a fantasy-genre text, I made the comment, “Wait, that couldn’t happen,” with a genuinely confused look on my face. I continuously thought all texts had to be real.
Fourth and fifth grade were the years where I began to enjoy all of my school subjects. Until this point I had enjoyed science almost exclusively. These two years introduced me to teachers who embraced hands-on learning in the humanities. Under Ms. Trainor in fourth grade, we collaborated with another class to put on an English/social studies class play on Mesopotamia. I enjoyed acting out the parts and seeing the connections to Babylonian literature, for one. This was more social studies than English, but acting out texts was something I embraced. After all, I had an audience of parents to create an authentic experience. We never read our textbooks aloud to parents! Everything else we read seemed stuck on the page and I thus continued struggling with my comprehension skills. Not to mention I seemed a slower reader than many others.
Then middle school, a time equally awkward and enlightening. Sixth grade gave me not one, but two English classes: English Language Arts (ELA) and English Language Arts Extension (ELA-X). ELA was something I loved, for once, as Ms. Morocco went against the wishes of the administration and gave us Shakespeare to read. All of us—and I do mean everyone I can remember—loved the texts because we felt we were doing forbidden reading. Ms. Mo, as we called her, was a twenty-something-year-old dynamo who let us choose between Shakespeare, Poe, and a bunch of honestly-written Young Adult novels. My favorite part of classes with her was our dialoguing. Ms. Morocco had us talk to one another and encouraged conversation about books. She genuinely wanted to know, and we felt it. ELA-X, on the other hand, was one of my worst memories of English classes ever. I don’t fault Mrs. Lijoi. I fault the material. It was required to be rote grammar study and line-by-line close readings. There was little choice, much unnecessary group work, and an abundance of grammar worksheets. It was hardly learning grammar in context. It was highly inauthentic work. I could not see any value in yawning over antecedents and pronouns foregrounded on plain, white paper. Worksheets frustrated me, since the sentences were not even my writing!
Seventh-grade was a gift that I did not realize until college. Mrs. Peden could easily be one of my biggest role models, but since ELA-X had ruined English for me the previous year, I felt little motivation in seventh-grade. Mrs. Peden, though, was amazing. She constantly read aloud to us (there is one story about a duck that I am to this day still trying to find—I remember it so vividly…everything except the title and author!). Mrs. Peden was in her late fifties, sassy and kind, and truly in love with her job. She was apparently fifthly rich, but never showed it and came to school 180 days a year ready with something to read to us. I found the reading to be helpful, since her reading-aloud gave me different perspectives on texts. She always picked out texts we were not reading in class, which interested me because she never put pressure on us to give comprehensive analyses on what she read to us. It was low-stakes listening, instead.
Mrs. Conlon in eighth grade was a self-described hippie. We did a lot of creative writing with her, which I loved. She had us create myriad poems. We created ones about what we liked about ourselves, about our names, and about our families. I enjoyed the work because it made me proud. I still have these poems, to remind myself of her empowering lessons. I think good teachers allow students to take pride in their work. She was also a great teacher because she was able to connect with all students. I would describe her first as down-to-earth. She made connections between books like The Outsiders or The Giver and what was going on in the world.
High school English took some odd turns.

There was my freshman year when I required extra help for grammar quite often, which frustrated and embarrassed me. I felt at times as though I was back to the worksheets of sixth grade ELA-X. Ms. Rossetti, though, gave us some amazing assignments. We had to create Holden Caulfield’s diary and film the extended scenes to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, for instance. Sophomore year is a blur, but Ms. Prestileo did keep my attention with letting us create original poetry summarizing pieces of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Junior year, though, is where everything swung towards English, and stayed. Mrs. Evers, who I always write about as my “best teacher ever,” transformed my English experience. She gave me freedom to write a novella about my family (this later became my college honors thesis that earned highest honors). Mrs. Evers introduced me to Herman Melville through “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a literally life-altering experience (read that whole story here: www.theworcesterjournal.com/magazine/more-than-a-fish-story). She let me choose to write about loneliness in Frankenstein and always encouraged student choice in writing. My year with her, as well as my senior year with Mrs. Lambert, convinced me to go to Clark, to major in English, and to be a teacher. I felt “sure” for the first time with

them.
Mrs. Lambert during senior year AP English literature perhaps gave me the most tools for success. She required a “poem-a-week” from us through Poetry 180, gave me the freedom to make a complex visual display of The Awakening using the contrasts of water and fire, and let each of her students teach a class with a chosen text. Teaching The Jilting of Granny Weatherall showed me how fun it could be to share texts with (other) students. Mrs. Lambert provided a very authentic environment in letting us take charge of classes and giving us flexibility to write about whatever we wanted in the memoir unit. Eleventh and twelfth grade, in fact, continued to encourage my interest in writing. I spent more time looking at rap music, puns, and word play. I really took to writing poetry. Today I have over 200 poems written in the time between middle school and, tellingly, last week. These experiences absolutely carried with me into college.