Seventh Grade Essays

     There are two more things I remember from seventh grade English class which I can combine here because they came from the same assignment although the second is much bigger than the first. It was a writing assignment, and I do not know what the theme was, but it was understood that Miss Armstrong would be going over them rather critically to help improve our writing skills.

     After correcting our papers, she spent at least one class period, maybe more, putting different students' essays on the overhead projector to point out areas that need corrections – not to embarrass the student, but rather to illustrate mistakes that most of us make.

     I do not think mine went on the overhead, but the thing I always remember about my assignment when it was returned was that I had written an essay about Jesus! And the sentence that needed fixing was, “He was the Son of God, but He is man on earth.” Miss Armstrong noted that my tenses were wrong, and the sentence should be, “He is the Son of God, but He was man on earth.” Since then I've been careful about my tenses (and am amazed at how often they need fixing when I proofread, and how often bad tenses still get through) – but I still wonder if I was just trying to say something like, “Well maybe He was the Son of God, but on earth he's a man”? Anyway, I can't imagine now what would have provoked in me such a topic to write about for that essay!

     One of the papers that was put on the overhead, however, still pierces me to my core to this very day. It was by a classmate who was different from the rest of us – a minority, although I won't say which one here. He was a neighbor of mine and was in many of my elementary school classes. Over those years, whenever we were in conversation at all, I would bring up his ethnicity – out of nowhere I'd make a comment that was stereotypical – and it was not to put him down, I did not dislike him nor felt I was superior – I would not even say it was gentle teasing, just something to say.

     Well his essay was on the overhead projector, and included in it was a sentence or two about how much it hurts when people say things to him because he is different. He did not mention names or even say it was just one person who did that to him. Miss Armstrong lectured the whole class about how wrong it is to treat someone that way. At first I did not recognize myself because I would never hurt this classmate! And then as the words on the projected screen sank in, I realized it – I was the one who had been so awful to him – caused him this pain. If Miss Armstrong had asked him privately who had treated him that way and he had told her, then I have to say they both showed a lot of class in how they got the message to me.

     Of course I wanted to say I was sorry, to let him know I did not mean any of it in a mean way – but I was afraid to even bring it up to him for fear of hurting him again. I don't know if we ever even exhanged words again. When I tell people this story nowadays they say that I was just a kid and what I did was more age appropiate misbehavior than pure evil. But I find it hard to forgive myself, and I still wish I could tell him how sorry I am.

     A few years ago a friend asked a question that I have given a lot of thought to ever since – she asked, “What have you ever read that has changed you?” And I opened my mouth to give a list of book titles in response – but suddenly realized that there was no list. We all read, and we read to become informed; but are there single books, papers, articles that change our opinions? Our lives? It has taken all the years since then to come up with my eventual short list – My classmate's seventh grade essay is at the top of that list.

133 20150513 Seventh Grade Essays