Audra’s

ENG 319-023

Dr. Allen

Just For Me

“When Reginald was home with flu, uh-huh-huh,
The doctor knew just what to do-hoo.
He cured the infection
With one small injection
While Reginald uttered some interjections...

Hey! That smarts!
Ouch! That hurts!
Yow! That's not fair givin' a guy a shot down there!

Interjections (Hey!) show excitement (Yow!) or emotion (Ouch!).
They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong.”

Simply enough…my love for English and for writing began with this easy to remember song from School House Rock. My entire childhood I knew that I either wanted to grow up and become an actress or a teacher. An actress seemed to be the norm for an adolescent girl with big dreams in a small town. But a teacher…well it runs in the family. English on the other hand was something that appealed to me with just the simple words of ‘interjections show excitement’ and ‘conjunction junction, what’s your function”. Throughout my life I had many terrible experiences with school and especially with English. One day I’d love it and the next day I’d hate it.

 I used to make straight A’s but it was around this time that I simply quit caring. My grades dropped quickly.  My parents said that puberty kicked in and that I had become ‘too cool’ for grades. I had become ‘too cool’ for books, or homework or even my parent’s authority. When I reached 7^th grade I didn’t think it was possible, but I cared less about schooling. My 7^th grade English teacher was the one that brought me back. Her name was Mrs. Ryder. She was new and young, but she made English interesting for me. She started the long process of re-kindling my love for English and for literature and for writing. Mrs. Ryder was later on named teacher of the year in Colorado in 2007. 

When I entered high school as a freshman I was thrilled because I was to be taking an English Honors class. We would be discussing Shakespeare, especially the comparisons between Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, as well as covering one of my favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird. I was excited and enthralled in the lessons and the books until the realization hit me that my teacher was the reincarnate of Hitler, but was also somehow rather boring unless she was yelling at me or somebody else in the class about something irrelevant. It was heart breaking for me that she ruined English once again. I always found books and writing in journals as a way to escape and English just always made sense to me, but this teacher trampled it all once again.

I soon stopped reading again…I hated being told what to read and I hated being forced to read something I didn’t want to. If I read at all it was books that I wanted to read on my own time by my own choice. When sophomore year rolled around I had become excellent at making things up about stories I had never read. I was scraping by with the bare minimum when it came to quizzes or tests over the books.

When my junior year began I’ll admit my excitement increased when I thought about the English teacher I was going to have. His name was Mr. Fridrich. I had heard wonderful things about him and I was hoping that he would not crush what was left of my love for English, but would instead renew that passion again. My hopes were thin, but they were present, which was something I hadn’t felt in many years. I’ll never forget that first day of class. No syllabus, no rules. He brought a bag of Hershey kisses to class and asked us questions. Questions like, ‘who had the worst job this summer’ or ‘who has the most embarrassing story to tell’ and the winner was given a Hershey kiss. For the first day of school, which is always rules and regulations, this class was out of the ordinary. At least that’s how I felt until the end of the period when Mr. Fridrich made the statement, “Everybody is starting off with an F in this class. If you want a grade, you’ll have to earn it.” That was one of the worst statements possible in my opinion at the time. Yet somehow I wasn’t panicked or scared, but I felt ready for a challenge. As the weeks passed I quickly realized that Mr. Fridrich was eccentric and random and completely crazy. It was great! He actually drew pictures on our graded papers. Often there were drawings of squirrels running into trees or jumping off of cliffs donning the tops and sides of my papers. Mr. Fridrich showed that we could have fun in class.

Often Mr. Fridrich and I would pick on each other in class, not over anything mean or hurtful, but just over silly things like who had more power and why we should have certain assignments and not others. Every few weeks we had to turn in portfolios, but the trick was that each portfolio had to have a different theme that we created on our own. My favorite portfolio was one with the theme of fairy tales. This particular portfolio focused mainly on the books, The Old Man and the Sea, Of Mice and Men and Fallen Angels. I compared the three books with three different fairy tale characters. The Old Man and the Sea became the wicked witch from Snow White, Fallen Angels became Aladdin and Of Mice and Men became Alice in Wonderland. I put so much effort into this portfolio. It took me awhile to understand why, but I know now that it was because I chose something I absolutely love, fairy tales, and applied it to something I was really interested in, English. Mr. Fridrich was the complete and final turning point for me when it came to English. He showed me a whole new side to writing and reading. He became the best teacher I ever had, not because he was a complete screwball and not because he would draw pictures on our papers and not because he treated his students like equals, but because he cared. He knew the mentality of high school students and knew how to reach them on a different level. Mr. Fridrich, in a way, forced his students to succeed but he did it with a gentle push here and there.

This was the first year ever in my school history that I actually read all of the assigned books.  Mr. Fridrich even made reading responses entertaining. For The Crucible, we had to write a type of sermon in a similar style as the time period of the plot of The Crucible. We used the same word choice and when we read it aloud in class we even had to use the proper ‘priest’ voice. It was little assignments like this that once again showed me a much more amusing and exciting side of English.

We did a creative writing unit during second semester. The papers we had to write ranged from a horror paper to sonnets to an autobiography. I love to write poetry so that was my absolute favorite part. In-between papers, we were allowed to write whatever we wanted, just as long as we were writing something.  I never wanted to stop writing when the bell rang for the end of class. I often continued with my writing into the next class period. I slowly realized that I loved to free write. I loved to write on my own and for myself. It didn’t matter to me that nobody would probably ever read my stories or that I would probably never finish it, but I didn’t care. I remembered how great it felt to simply just let the words flow from my brain to the end of my pencil and onto a clean sheet of paper that was there just for me.