Today, I had the day off from work, at my job. So, I decided to work on writing my story. As I was typing away, I noticed the number count and wow! I have to tell you, it reminded me of when I was in sixth grade and my teacher, Mrs. Cherry, unknowingly, destroyed my passion for writing. I had had a passion for writing as was evidenced by my creative writing work in fifth grade, but I digress.
Mrs. Cherry, unknown to her, had destroyed my passion for
writing. I admit to my own part in this because what she did was punishments
for my acting out in class. What she had
done was to assign essays. The first essay was a 100-word essay and each new
punishment would go up by 50 words. Now these were not the kind like you see Bart
Simpson writing, I will not whatever 100 times.
These essays would be on a topic and you could just copy
word for word right out of the encyclopedia up to the number of words
necessary. So, my first one was 100 words on the zebra and then I got 150 words
on the Holstein cow and from there I don’t remember the topics I was assigned. In
her mind the point was to punish by making you write but at the sometime give
you something to learn. By the end of the school year I was up to an essay
count of 750 words. That means I got into trouble a total of 14 times for
talking or acting out in class.
Now the real kicker was that until completed, those of us who
were in this situation, were required to stay in from lunchtime recess and work
on our essays. I knew on guy who by the end of the school year owed her
something like 2250 words on one essay and I believe he was still working on
his 1250-word essay at that time. I know
when I ended the school year, I was on 500 words. I recall that there was threat
that we would have to come in everyday after school until we were done. I don’t know whether or not that was true as
I had broken my wrist on the evening before the last day of school So, I was
necessarily exempt from writing any more essays, since I obviously couldn’t do
that. Oh, since I haven’t said it, we had to hand write these essays. No typewriters or computers to help us.
Anyway, why I am talking about this. It’s not just about the idea that my passion
for writing was broken by the punishment of writing. It’s because we had to count our words and I
remember how hard it was to get anywhere with that. However, as I looked down
at my word count on today’s work, not quite 700 words but that doesn’t count number
of words in this blog post, 786, or the number of words, somewhere around 400,
in my notes, that I spent 2 hours working on, researching and organizing, this
morning before beginning to actually write the story, I remembered how hard it
was to simply copy 250 words by hand. Now I am typing over 1000 words in a day.
All I can do is hope that those thousand words a day can continue to occur and
to come out in a coherent and cohesive manner filling in all the gaps and
becoming a meaningful story.
I remember that for the most part I loved Mrs. Cherry, as a
teacher. I hated for making me write
like that and I do remember that I dreaded any writing assignment that had a
word count attached to it and there were plenty before I graduated high school
and a few in my early years of college. I quit college in my twenties. I went back in my late thirties, early
forties and finished my degree then and I never encountered the dreaded word
count any more.
I know that Mrs. Rose Cherry passed away many years ago, but
I’d like to offer her some thanks for all that she tried to do for me when I
was in her class. It wasn’t easy for her, or my parents, but she managed to do
right by me just the same. As for the rest of my teachers, stay tuned you may
very well get mentioned here as well. If not, all I can say is either you weren’t
memorable, in my stupid child brain, or I failed to be worthy of the job you
tried to do for me but thank you to all of you just the same.
Comments
Post a Comment