Narrative Story

Kayla DiRoma

English 101

Dr. Sonia Begert

Narrative Story

 I have never been too fond of writing before, mostly because I just don’t think I am too great at it. With knowing that English classes were never my favorite, I still took AP Lit my senior year not knowing really what I was getting myself into.

I have never been into writing, I liked science classes and history and math, just every subject over English classes. I never knew the right words to use, or how to conveniently put in rhetorical devices. I like the hands on kind of stuff, science labs like playing with fire, looking at cells through microscopes, and just have always thought that my writing was never really good. AP Lit at the beginning of my final year of high school seemed a lot easier than I would of thought. We read books as a class and did weekly rhetorical device paragraphs on them, didn’t seem too hard. Ms. Boss was my teacher and she is the funniest teacher when the class is going good, but very strict when it comes to the class not getting stuff done. I have never had her before my senior year but I have always heard of her and how hilarious and such a great teacher she is. She loved to tell us her life stories of her dad “Dick Boss” and just everything funny that happened in her life, which there seems to be a lot of. With all of the class books we read we always got to watch the movie when we finished the book, or at least watch certain good parts of just little clips, when we didn’t have anything to do we watched movies then too. So AP Lit really isn’t as hard as I thought… Sweet! Until the class heard about the end of the year author research essay which was 10-15 pages long, oh no. How are we supposed to write about someone for 10-15 pages and we have never met them. This paper will be the biggest and longest paper I have written.

Ms. Boss brought in a cart of books from several different authors and we spent a whole class period exchanging through all the books to find an author that really interested us. We all had to pick own author and we had to research everything about them and incorporate it into our essays. The author Toni Morrison caught my eye, an African American Nobel Prize writer and professor who mainly focused her writing on African American females, and the horrors they had to live through back when slavery was happening and the overall situations of their lives. The book that I started to read in that class period was called Beloved. I only read the first 6 or 7 pages but it seemed really intriguing to me, so I decided I would choose to focus on her work. On our own time we had to get at least two books from our authors and read the whole books while writing down and marking pages and devices we see to help us with our essays. After we read the books, or even during us still reading them the whole class had to get pre-arranged absence forms to take off a spring day to take a trip to the University of Washington, I had only ever been there once and honestly it was the only college campus I had ever been to, I went my sophomore year because for my ASL class I went to watch a comedian.

“Be at the school at 6:30 in the morning tomorrow” Ms. Boss tells the AP Lit class.

“No way, that is way too early!” The class complains back.

“Well if you would like to catch the ferry then I suggest you get there that early.”

The day before our spring break the AP Lit class got to go to the University of Washington to use their enormous library. The smells of vanilla caught my nose which lingered the endless rows of old and new books, it really does look like a maze in there. It sure was confusing to find the right books we were looking for, but thankfully we found everything about our authors in one spot. We had to go through all the numerous books that have been written by others regarding our author, to try to see which pages and paragraphs will help us the most to grasp our knowledge of our authors’ writing ways. We photocopied the book pages and saved them onto our flash drives, once we got it done we were able to walk around and go get food. But I remember Ms. Boss saying:

“Be back at the bus at 1:30 or you are getting left here!” Jokingly, but not really at the same time…

When 1:30 came around we all huddled into the yellow school bus and sat back into our ugly brown seats. The fun part was all over, now we have to start the dreadful essay. If anyone knows me they would know that I sure do not like to get much of a head start on my school work in high school, I loved to wait last minute on it and hope it was good enough. A couple of the school days Ms. Boss brought in “C.O.W.S.” Or “Computers On Wheels, so we got to do some of our writing in the class, we could ask Ms. Boss questions and use our other classmates as helpers to see what needs a little tweak on it. I came to do my essay and brought out my flash drive that was supposed to have a bunch of photocopied pages on it, but of course just my luck, only about ¼ of my pages saved onto my flash drive, I had a lot less research now than I should have had.

 Once the last week came that it was due I thought “oh yeah there’s an essay due huh?” I had already started it but I really needed to finish it up. I sit in my room busting out my essay writing everything anyone would need to know about Toni Morrison, when and where she was born, what college she graduated from and why she uses the particular writing styles she does.

I hear everyone in class saying “Did you finish your essay?”

“Yeah I finished it like two weeks ago.”                                                     

While I was still working on mine, oh well it is I get for taking so long. I get a good first few pages filled with information about the exceptional writer Toni Morrison, but it is so hard to write 10-15 pages worth. I search the internet with the smell and warmth of a cup of Joe sitting by my side hopelessly looking for more to write about.

I can honestly say I was a great procrastinator in high school, and I think AP Lit taught me to throw that away and do all my work on time, not the day/night before it was due. This is one of the most important pieces of writing that has impacted my life because it was the biggest and most time consuming essay I ever had to do and it was for a final grade for my AP Lit class. I didn’t get the best grade but I passed and was okay with whatever I ended up getting. This essay took so long and was very difficult to get into because it was 15 pages of a person we have never met and just having to learn and type into our own words what these authors like to write about and how they do it. I have always thought that my writing was not good enough, and the grades I always got on my essays showed that too, I always tried my best to incorporate the right words and to make my sentences flow into a fluid new paragraph but I have never been good at it.  Once I finally finish my paper I turn it in the last day of school, the last thing I do before I never sit in one of the Kingston High School uncomfortable chairs. Now onto graduation, goodbye high school.