(no subject)
My Teacher - Mr. Prestwood
A mentor, friend, football coach, and official "moron"
The day was August 26, 2001. I was a nervous freshman heading off to my Block E Literature class. I had never been a very strong writer and 8th grade at Chaminade Middle School with Mrs. Horton had proved this to me, so it was quite obvious why I felt so apprehensive. I hesitantly walked down the overcrowded 500 level buildings, full of the sounds of freshman just as lost as I was, scanning above the room doors looking for “505”. I stopped, I had found it. I took a deep breath and walked in, afraid of what the next nine months would hold for me. I was greeted by a musty smell and a booming male voice, “Sit down freshman!” I was stunned. This man, who called himself Prestwood, a Chaminade football coach from Texas, was going to be my freshman WRITING TEACHER, during my most critical year to learn proper writing techniques. I couldn’t believe it. At the time I thought this would be a good way to start off my high school career, but only later did I realize how much it would negatively affect my writing capabilities. Class periods were spent writing “Daily Journals”, which were very much similar to the journal I had kept since age 5. They included such facts as “What I did today” “What I ate today” and “Who I was mad at today”, definitely childish. These “DJ’s” took up an hour of our class time. This was one hour spent writing about how my brother locked me out of the car or how I saw a cute boy in the car next to me this morning. One hour of my life wasted every other day on silly nonsense and yet, I was completely stoked (keep in mind I was only a FRESHMAN, therefore I didn’t know any better.) Meanwhile, this “Prestwood” character would be spending HIS time doing very important “teacherly” things, such as, researching the F-150 he wanted to buy but couldn’t afford and reading football magazines to catch up on the latest stats. The day finally came when he announced that we, Block E, were going to have a term paper. We groaned at the fact that we were going to do something besides write about our lives and draw cartoons of the Greek gods. Here were his exact directions, “Umm, write about Greek mythology and stuff. Ready? Go.” I took this as my chance to make my first term paper a good one. The first few classes we were given to start, I took the opportunity to brainstorm and come up with an in-depth outline. So far so good. I spent hours revising and even more hours having my parents check for simple grammatical errors. I wanted this paper to be perfect, all the time hoping I could overcome my apparent lack of skills in the “writing area”. The day finally came to turn in our papers and, low and behold, he was absent that day. I had felt so confident about my paper, only to find out that it would be due next class. A month went by and he still never collected our term papers, but by this time we had all forgotten about them.
I still have that term paper, sitting in a cherry red folder labeled “Freshman Literature” in my desk. This folder has only been opened twice-once to put the term paper in and once again two months ago when I discovered it and opened it out of curiosity.