Autobiography of Self as a Writer

Autobiography of Myself as a Writer

Leighton McAlpin

The beginning of my journey as a writer began when I was two years old when I learned how to sing the alphabet. At this point in my life, my parents were constantly reading to me. I began to pick up on the sounds that each of the letters made. Once I reached kindergarten, learning each letter and their sounds became expectation that I had to meet. I can still remember that I had to be able to say each of them to my teacher Mrs. Muntifering and I couldn't remember some of the sounds that I had to say. I was so disappointed when she told me what I had to work on.  When I came home from school, I spent time working on my letters and sounds, and slowly but surely, I got to the point where I could express anything that I wanted to.

Writing is one of the essential communication systems that makes human beings stand out from other animals on Earth. Your journey on the path of writing begins once you learn the alphabet. Once you have mastered the alphabet, you begin putting letters together and forming what we know as words. Words display our emotions and the thoughts that we have as humans. People learn words from reading and listening, they become important though, when you can put them together to express yourself.

On my first day of going to school all day long, I transferred to Discovery Elementary. My first grade year, I was quite the teachers pet. By saying that,I mean that I would meet with people and talk about their writing and reading. We would read "stage 1" books together and we thought that by reading them we were so cool.  When I spent my time reading, I became aware to the world around me. I learned how different people wrote and how they built their sentences. I had Ms. Baumbach as a teacher and she helped me achieve excellence in spelling. By the end of my second grade year, I had finished the 5th grade spelling curriculum at my school. I had learned many different words and definitions to add to the “intricate” stories that I  was writing at the time. There was a para named Char that taught me tricks and reviewed all of my words with me. At one point, I had gotten a list of words that had parts of speech written on them and I was dumbfounded.

At Discovery Elementary, you have one teacher for your kindergarten to second grade years and one for your third through fifth grade years. When I was in third grade, I had Mrs. Koopman as a teacher. She encouraged people to read more and write a lot.  My most fond memory of my days spent in her classroom was when our class would meet up with the Senior Writers of Buffalo. We always had fun things to talk about and interesting prompts to write poetry about. We would write about the seasons, sports, and even turn newspaper articles into poems. Every time that we would write with the Senior Writers, everyone would choose one poem to publish in our poem books. By the end of the year we had accumulated large poem books that we could share with the world.

When I entered my last year at elementary school, I spent most of my time doing an independent study. This meant that while the rest of my class was in the classroom learning, I was hard at work in the computer lab with two of my other classmates. My teacher had created an ePortfolio for me to share my work on the internet. I had the freedom to learn about whatever I wanted to. I published all of my discoveries on the ePortfolio that I had.This included art projects; for each art project, I would write a poem and display both of them on my website.

Several years had past and I entered my final year at Buffalo Community Middle School. I joined the Quest enrichment program. The English class that I was a part of, challenged me to think beyond anything I had ever experienced. My teacher, Mr. McCallum, taught how to explain my feelings for anything that I wanted to write about and to have support from other resources such as books, people, and  other quotes. This was another year where I wrote in a blog. I  pushed myself and tried to write logical things that struck home to me.

No matter how hard you work at writing though, nobody ever completely masters it. You get good and you work towards perfection. Mastery comes when you are successful  as a writer. Success comes when you sell books, make money, and live happily. If this is what you have achieved in life, then you have mastered writing in a personal sense.