Rivers of Rhetoric
I can feel the eyes of my peers on my neck and my cheeks are burning bright red. The buzzing from the fluorescent lights fog my thoughts as I squirm in my seat, not used to being confined to a typical elementary school desk. I can’t stop getting chills, not because of the incoming blast of fog chilled north coast air, but because I’m nervous of what Ms. Morton will say. Her lips are pursed as she looks my scrawny sixth grade self up and down before she blithely asks, “what is a comma anyway?” I pause, look up, and say “I don’t know,” but here’s the thing: I didn 't need to yet.
One could say that I didn’t go to primary school in the most traditional environment. Located in the tiny coastal crossroad of Caspar, with a population of four hundred and surrounded by Pygmy and Redwood forest in all directions, I wasn’t exposed to the same educational life as the average five through eleven year old. For almost …show more content…
While I didn’t feel comfortable with basic grammatical rules until well through high school, Joanna made me comfortable with my ideas and what I had to say. It may be a stretch to think she was using natural metaphors to inspire her fourth grade students to be better writers, however, assuming this connection is what helped me improve my writing ability as I tried to grow as a student. Although I still often struggle with the confidence of comma use, or repeating my ideas, I hope to incorporate this naturalistic flow of writing into my work. Now I know that a comma is a “punctuation mark indicating a pause between parts of a sentence”, but to me it will always represent the change in direction of a stream, or the hesitation of the breeze that guides a falling leaf. For that, I will always fondly remember my time under the trees, with
I can feel the eyes of my peers on my neck and my cheeks are burning bright red. The buzzing from the fluorescent lights fog my thoughts as I squirm in my seat, not used to being confined to a typical elementary school desk. I can’t stop getting chills, not because of the incoming blast of fog chilled north coast air, but because I’m nervous of what Ms. Morton will say. Her lips are pursed as she looks my scrawny sixth grade self up and down before she blithely asks, “what is a comma anyway?” I pause, look up, and say “I don’t know,” but here’s the thing: I didn 't need to yet.
One could say that I didn’t go to primary school in the most traditional environment. Located in the tiny coastal crossroad of Caspar, with a population of four hundred and surrounded by Pygmy and Redwood forest in all directions, I wasn’t exposed to the same educational life as the average five through eleven year old. For almost …show more content…
While I didn’t feel comfortable with basic grammatical rules until well through high school, Joanna made me comfortable with my ideas and what I had to say. It may be a stretch to think she was using natural metaphors to inspire her fourth grade students to be better writers, however, assuming this connection is what helped me improve my writing ability as I tried to grow as a student. Although I still often struggle with the confidence of comma use, or repeating my ideas, I hope to incorporate this naturalistic flow of writing into my work. Now I know that a comma is a “punctuation mark indicating a pause between parts of a sentence”, but to me it will always represent the change in direction of a stream, or the hesitation of the breeze that guides a falling leaf. For that, I will always fondly remember my time under the trees, with