Plaza College 2010 Writing Competition

WINNER: 1st place, LL60 Division

Question: How has studying English changed your life?

By Matthew LaSalle

Studying English is much more than grammatical rules and structure. It is learning how to take the technical parts of the language to use them for creating and expressing thoughts, ideas, and feelings to one another. Learning about the language you speak is a giant step into a person’s culture and who he or she is as an individual. However, many are uninterested in learning how to use their language. To them it’s just a boring subject you’re forced to take in school. I will never understand that idea because learning English has played such an integral role in how I see the world and express my feelings and observations on what I see every day.

Studying English has been big a part of my life since a very early age. I started reading at two years old. Though the memories have mostly faded, I can still recall the flash cards that my parents and grandmother would show me. I developed a strong love of books growing up because I was fascinated with the stories authors could create and how they made the stories come alive through their words. It was in junior high school, though, that I learned the most about English and gained a deeper appreciation for what I could do with it. My 7th grade teacher, Ms. Aronson, taught me how to expand my thinking. She taught me the power of words and the variety of ways they can be used. For example, I remember two specific assignments she had given. One was about the book The Lord of the Flies. Very basically, the book is about a group of kids who have to fend for themselves on an isolated island after their plane crashes. Our assignment was to write a newspaper consisting of different kinds of essays. We had to write one in the viewpoint of one of the protagonists, one as an antagonist, another describing the rescue of the children and others about different aspects of the same situation. It forced me to see things in a different way. Through that assignment I learned that nothing can be looked at in just one way. There are so many sides to a story that you must see it from every side to know what the truth is or to make an opinion of your own.

The other assignment Ms. Aronson gave was about the importance of our possessions. We had to examine pictures that an artist had put together of families from different countries who placed their possessions in order of importance. Then, we had to examine ourselves and our possessions and write about what we found. She made my classmates and me examine ourselves, probably deeper than we ever had to and put it all in writing. Examining the world and being able to see it through different angles helped me to start forming my own opinions and gain my own personality. So for me, studying English was a method of self discovery—looking at the world and using words to express my feelings about it. That’s why my dream is to become an English teacher.

I feel that what I learned is so important to a person’s development that I have to share it. That’s why when I attended my first college I was majoring in English, with a minor in secondary education. In a world where society is so eager to tell kids what to do, how to be, and what to think of themselves, I feel it’s important to teach them how to make up their own minds and not be afraid to express themselves in a responsible and creative manner. With English they can learn how others have done it in the past and how they can do it during their lifetime, whether it is in a novel, short story, speech, or even a simple journal entry. The goal is to get each student to develop an identity—one that he or she will be comfortable with. Not only will studying English give them a different way of seeing what’s around them, but it’ll be fun. Songwriters, playwrights and scriptwriters, for example, bring fun to their audiences. I hope to give my students the belief in themselves that by studying English, in its entirety, they can do the same as well as get more joy out of what other writers do because of their understanding of English.