English Teachers, What Personal Things Do Students Share in Essays?

english teachers have read it what sort of strange or awkward personal details have students revealed to you through essays as a first assignment to a composition class i would have students do a personal essay where they had to discuss something that happened to them earlier in their life and how their perspective on that event has changed over time it was natural that a lot of students would pick tragic events but usually it was when their grandma died or something like that they could sometimes be a bit hard to read but were generally not too bad but then i had a student tell a story about her younger sister getting sucked into the propellers of a speedboat and chopped to pieces the next semester i cut that assignment from my curriculum and have never used it again students grade three nine ish y o had to write a poem that goes like i am happy when i am excited when i am angry when i am sad when they wrote i am angry when multiple erased words but then the kicker i am sad when my mom's boyfriend comes over i saw it when she turned it in as they were being dismissed to jim i asked her to stick around i went line by line through the poem asking her to explain each point she couldn't explain why she erased the angry part just saying she couldn't find the right words she said i don't know what word fits for angry all the time what i discerned it to mean was she was angry with herself when it came to i'm sad when my mom's bf comes over she said that he makes her cry and he grabs me too hard i asked her why he grabs and she said he grabs her when she's being bad i asked her to point a weir and she pulled up her pink sleeve she had bruises on her arms i asked if she wanted some juice or a treat before jim to keep the conversation moving away from what evidence i uncovered she had a werther's hard candy and we walked to gym while she happily enjoyed it and we talked about her favorite gym game after i dropped her off i went to the gym teacher and told them that it would lift her spirits to play this game pinned down btw fkin awesome game i went right to the principal's office and told them the situation and we made notes on the conversation we had to follow protocol so child protective services were called they saw the girl half an hour later and she was taken to their day center while the mom was contacted as i heard the mother refused to leave the bf and the child was relinquished into protective services changed schools the whole bit the last time i saw her was guarding a bowling pin from being pelted by dodge balls she had a big smile mishappen only by the candy she still had tucked in her cheek my heart still hurts in all kinds of ways thinking about it i have never talked to friends or family about it this is the first time i've said anything in over a year i had a student who wrote a story for a county-wide writing contest about a kid who lived with his grandma because his mom was in prison and he had no clue who his dad was grandma couldn't work but couldn't get disability so the main character lived in a home with no electricity or running water the character was pretty resourceful he took showers at school and saved some of the items from breakfast and lunch to take home so he could eat the story ended with the grandma getting dementia and social services stepping in he got honorable mention in the contest he wasn't there to get his ribbon because it turns out the story he wrote was an autobiography and social services put him in foster care two counties over so he had to change schools this was three years ago i've tried to find an update on him but haven't had any luck also had a student write testicles instead of tentacles it was awkward i had a friend of mine giving a practice sermon he was reading some scripture aloud that was something along the lines of sexual immorality but he read it off a sexual immortality needless to say the whole class including the professor apparently lost it not the teacher but wanted to share this story in 10th grade we were assigned to write a paper about a major moment in our life at one point we had to present our rough drafts to the entire class a friend of mine started her essay with something along the lines of i remember standing there knowing he was in that room that he will change my life that he would and my teacher cut off her called her out in front of the class told her off for writing about something as unimportant as a boy my friend was shaken up the flatly announced her paper was about the day she met her biological father and what it was like to be told to never contact him or his new family again the teacher was mortified i believe she pulled her out later to apologize but there wasn't much coming back from that a writing tutor not so much a teacher but i read a girl's essay of what it was like when a close friend of hers was killed in a gang-related shooting they both went to the same high school i did he was in my class and i remembered when it happened reading how he died with his head in her lap while waiting for the ambulance was so heartbreaking that i lost my objectivity and nearly started to cry he was a good person and not involved in gangs or drugs he was attempting to de-escalate a situation but he lost his own life instead so not really awkward details just an honestly rendered perspective on a tragic event of all the papers i helped with when i worked there that is the one that stands out the most that a 16 year old male student of mine got paid to do live camp feeds to older men it was an essay on poverty and his examples were so graphic that i actually went to a guidance counselor and asked them what we should do there wasn't much that could be done he admitted to talking to people online but refused to say that anything else was done his parents chose to believe him of course this was two years ago last i heard he drives a new bmw and wears more gold than a pimp i wonder what his parents think now not an essay but two years ago i put my students through a poetry unit which involved the writing of a lot of poems i think each student probably wrote 10 to 15 poems in a month in a variety of styles and lengths with different amounts of editing at the end we produced a poetry wall where everyone's poems went up and hung there for the rest of the year one day as i was reading over the wall i realized that if you knew the kids involved you could totally follow the course of a grade 9 love triangle through the poems you could read about how happy jane had been with dong but then about how much of a dongdong had become then jane's discovery of how nice tim is and how much he liked spending time with tim meanwhile tim's poem starts off being all lonely and then observing dong and jean from a distance getting to know jane happiness with jean and finally overwhelming joy when jane leaves dong and starts to date tim dong for his part showed some understanding in his later poems his earlier stuff being mostly dark and accusatory but ultimately realized that jane was probably better off with tim and came to know that he too would be okay and was a better person for going through it of course it was all symbolic and didn't have any names attached but if you knew the kids and knew the fact they'd had this little love triangle it was almost painfully obvious what they were writing about that's cudaf i teach english as a second language in an asian country one of my students wrote her final senior speech about her older sister who died as an infant in a pile of fluff essays i really did not expect to come upon such a deep topic she wrote that they still celebrated her sister's birthday and her mom bought a cake every year she also described how sad her mom was after her sister's death and how hard it was for her to continue to have children i went up to the girl in the next class and told her if she wanted to talk more she could come to me anytime she seemed surprised i said anything but when she gave her speech to the class everyone was really respectful and she ended up placing in the top ten i was an english teacher in japan the junior high school kids can volunteer to do a speech at the regional english speech contest which means their japanese teacher volunteers one kid to do it except for taro taro volunteered my job was to translate taro's speech from broken english to proper english and help him rehearse first line of his speech some days i don't want to be alive i think it would benefit everyone if i was dead but i can't my mum won't let me i had to put it down leave the room and have a big cry the speech was about how he has autism it is difficult for him to understand people and for people to understand him ultimately he ends up doing or saying the wrong thing and he feels he hurts people around him he attempted suicide but his mum found him and begged him to never try again by the end of the speech he is asking people to try and accept people like him and if they see someone acting strange to remember they might be like him and need more understanding to ask him he will explain his autism to them to forgive him he is doing his best and to remember 10 people 10 colors it is okay to be different as it allows us to broaden our minds at 14 taro was going through what most kids do what i did autism or not his feeling of being a burden but it took me until i was 20 to accept those feelings and not hurt myself he has done it at 14 when we were practicing alone he was sure his was the speech he wanted to say i told him i was proud of him and that i understand those feelings and he can say things in a second language i couldn't even say on my first we both cried a little he asked me if i wanted a hug i asked him if he wanted to he said no but it is what people like to do when they are sad we didn't hug dang it taro you are my hero edit thanks for the pms i no longer teach taro i got transferred to a different school taro lives in a rural area and has grown up around the same friends all his life he has a solid support network but still and will find life difficult from time to time as do we all he wants to be a dinosaur expert at the tokyo metropolitan museum when he grows up i want to take this chance to just say when you come across people who joke about autism who think autistic people shouldn't have a chance at a happy life or try to take that happiness from them stand up say something even here on reddit i love taro and all the other people i have met or worked with that experience the world a differently but sometimes it's too much for them to stand up so help them call that crap out and freak you andy vaxxers man what a great kid hope his life is long and happy not a teacher but my creative composition professor once had a student write to very graphic vignette about how said professor fell down a flight of stairs and broke every bone in his body the student got an a because of how well written the piece was not an english teacher but kind of related story i was in my public address class and someone's first persuasive speech was about why you should rebel against society sounds like a cool idea right well he somehow mixed into his speech the fact that makeup causes violence because women can't afford it and go crazy killing people he also brought up the fact that his parents are swingers and tell him about their lifestyle activities regularly his conclusion ladies i'm single full finger guns and clicking sounds included you could say the speech was entertaining at least 10 stroke 10 would be persuaded again i was wondering why i get those crazy killing feelings makeup is expensive one of my students here in mexico wrote noodle fight in the middle of her written report it had nothing to do with her report and it came out of nowhere to this day i still don't know what she meant nt btw i'm an english teacher here in mexico and this happened at a university the students were learning english as a second language i'm not an english teacher but i read and advise current high schoolers on their college admissions essays and portfolios one in particular stands out in my mind this kid a boy was quiet and reserved as far as i could tell he seemed smart and had good grades he struggled a lot though with coming up with a topic for his common app essay he always seemed to fall into the tropes of an average essay talking about an average event but trying to make it sound meaningful and defining after his first few drafts i reiterated that his essay should be about something meaningful to him not to an admissions officer he agreed to write another essay this time writing from the heart with no filter as he said i was excited i have read a rare few superb college essays and so i can tell when a student is inspired a week later we meet again and he hands me his draft looking a little uneasy i expected something personal like something about his family instead as i read it i realized that i was reading a literal manifesto it started out strong talked about how he felt like an outsider because he had strong opinions but believed that nobody would agree with him but after the intro he basically outlined his entire political philosophy in detail first economics all currency should be abolished production should be controlled by the state and citizens should be given only what they need okay i thought marxism is a little unusual then he went into society all people should wear the same exact thing uniforms every day all languages besides english should be outlawed people should be sterilized at birth and permitted to breed only as the behest of the government i was absolutely freaked up at this point and this wasn't even half of the essay it went on for maybe 2000 more words way over the word limit and described a global government ruled by 12 people chosen for their iq wherein all people are assigned careers based on aptitude tests and dissenters his word are removed from society and forced to live in labor camps basically this kid spends several pages outlining a civilization somewhere between the giver and 1984 i didn't have any idea what to say or where to even begin so i just told him it was very interesting bid didn't talk about himself enough and suggested we take a look at his previous draft he got into an exceptional school and is now studying political science to dr i may have enabled the future hitler this book he has written about was actually brave new world it seems though i'm sure you noticed the parallels already i teach 9th grade ella and it being my first year wanted a fun and light get to know you poetry writing activity so many turned out beautiful but lots included fear of disappointing parents one really stood out though a girl who was generally happy wrote about feeling trapped in her grave as others and her life threw dirt down on her once it was filled she said she would finally have silence and peace that went straight to the counselor and she left school shortly after that i'm hoping she got the help she needed but they never tell us what happens i'm not a teacher but when i was in high school one of the girls in my class got up and did a presentation on a fictional kid who was mentally challenged and whose father was in the hell's angels and used to beat him on a daily basis with power cords or belt buckles the kid would tell far-fetched stories that usually revolved around his dad being some kind of superman secret agent hero type guy it took most of us just a couple of minutes to realize that the kid was actually a guy named evan at our school who lived next door to her that we all used to just basically laugh at because he was so weird in a harmless kind of way i'm not sure if anything happened to help his situation but her story woke me up to the fact that you never know what's going on in someone else's life and really shouldn't judge anyone who isn't actively causing anyone any harm i really hope things got better for him the story was heartbreaking i still remember it 25 years later for a sec i thought there was gonna be jumper cables involved here somewhere i had a girl write about how her father fought with her a lot and gave her blue arms i asked her to roll her sleeves up after class forwarded the issue to my principal who contacted cps that must be gurken worst part of teaching i'm sorry and thank you not a teacher hold on i swear i'm going somewhere with this but i've actually had the reverse happen before where an english teacher revealed a personal issue to our class through an assignment it was sixth grade my english teacher was a young peppy woman that always made time for her students and always had some sage advice for her them if you made the effort to ask as a problem child myself she was one of the few teachers i can recall being comfortable talking to about my own personal issues one day i remember the class getting a week-long assignment where we had to write a short essay about something we were struggling with be it personal something relating to school etc with the catch that it can be done anonymously over the course of the week we submitted them and she would read them out loud some people we could guess wrote what some people we couldn't as is the nature of these kinds of assignments that friday the assignment is pretty much winding down and as she finishes reading what we think is the last essay she says actually one other person submitted an essay hesitates a bit and starts reading it at first no one is really sure who it's about and i could see a few people zoning out a bit it wasn't until the words nicotine addiction popped up that people started listening and everyone noticed that our teacher was actually fighting back tears while reading it as it turns out reading our papers over the course of the week inspired her to confront her own nicotine cigarette addiction everything ended with a big class group hug and if i recall correctly she actually did manage to quit hope you're doing okay out there ms hunter wholesome af i've assigned personal experience essays to eighth graders and it was very enlightening the school i worked at was known for having wealthy kids and many teachers complain the biggest problem our students have are largely superficial this may be true for many students but definitely not all i have a set of twins a boy and a girl and she wrote about their parents recent divorce their father was already living with his new girlfriend and her kids the girl wrote about how miserable she felt and uncomfortable in her home so she preferred to stay with their mom however she missed her twin brother on the weekends she really appealed to my emotional side and i was in tears by the end of it i started noticing more during car rider duty that she and her brother would arrive separately another boy wrote about missing his mom she moved to texas and left him and his older brother with their grandparents now they see her posting pictures on facebook of her new family perhaps the most shocking essay came from a girl who informed me that her older brother is in prison for the murder of his girlfriend obligatory not a teacher but i had to very kindly explain to a high school friend that she probably should rethink her college application essay about how discovering graphic yayoi awakened her sexuality i don't know sometimes it pays to go with your gut my guidance counselor type person wanted me to rewrite my essay which was something about an anime i was obsessed with at the time i didn't combination of laziness and insecurity and ended up getting accepted to study law at oxbridge on it cool storybro student not teacher we were given an assignment to write a critical film review one of my friends is the class clown so i knew he was up to something when he innocently asked if we are allowed to write about any film as long as it is critical professor agreed not seeing anything wrong with that the assignment was due a week after it was given and my friend became secretive about his film review we were honestly scared because said professor is well known for not having a sense of humor among students deadline came by and everyone passed their papers by surname we were allowed to use the remaining time in our period to study for other subjects so she grades our papers about an hour reading and grading she suddenly calls my friend to stand in front of the class and hands in his paper to read out loud my friend wrote a film review all right a film review about his favorite p film he wrote about hating the plot and wishing he was the writer director so he could fix that minor detail said more about the casting his man crush on one of the male actors music choice and costume choice the entire class was laughing already and so was the professor when he came to the end he didn't get in trouble because he's a really good writer and since professor unknowingly agreed to let us review any film he got a decent grade out of it i asked the professor later why she made him read it in front she admitted that his essay is too good not to share and that she wanted to know if he's really serious based on his tone wished now that i asked for a copy of his essay in the name of the pee film he reviewed as i'm writing this down probably weapons of butt destruction 4 i had the same issues with it that he did i had a student reveal there uh race preferences in an essay and no it wasn't about what types of people you prefer romantically or anything it was pure blatant racism the weirdest part is that it was very well written and based strictly on my grading criteria rubric it was an a it must have killed you to give them that good of a grade i had an english teacher tell me that she used to do journals with her students that they could share to class she explained that she stopped doing it because a student had written a long entry about torturing and killing animals and happily shared it to the class casually yup she's done with personal journals now i never got to ask if he ever got counseling my first semester teaching comp 1301 i had a student write a very personal narrative in graphic detail about getting his testicles punctured and nearly ripped completely off by a bmx bicycle seat in a horrific after-school accident it was hard to look at him without wincing after reading that and it was the first paper of the semester oh frick i can feel that now not an english teacher but a history teacher seniors are taught current events and last week i was teaching about trump affair with well all of them how an affair can affect a president in bad way i had one student blurt out he can call emmy his daughter or his dang butler during sex don't care i would do it for that million dollar hush money baby so there is that i went to school for this thank you for your service i was an english student and now i'm just thinking of all the crazy crap i told my teacher in my writing i was definitely looking for help same my wife teaches ninth grade english in a small town emmys she's got a large population of white black choctaw and hispanic students they all are terrible anyways one day shredding papers about a hardship that her students had to go through and one of her hispanic students decided to write about the day he lost his favorite dong in the ring and how it really upset him because he didn't have another dong that was as good this ninth grader literally wrote about his illegal rooster fights and how he lost his prized rooster a kid i taught went into detail on how they thought 911 was an inside job and how he didn't trust government it was a little terrifying one time i wrote basically a slam essay about how much i despised my ex-girlfriend i'm a girl hadn't come out as b or anything i used a lot of inappropriate language like the word frick not sexual or anything and i basically just called her out on being a crappy person because we were together for three years and she cheated on me i figured she would just kinda skim over the essays and give us an effort great because the assignment was kind of just right about something that's been on your mind and wasn't really about technicality or anything welp she laid all the essays out and we all had to go around the room and read everyone's essay obviously she pulled mine but it was awkward explaining why my essay wasn't there i'm not a teacher and this was technically in my world geography class but my teacher asked us to write about one thing we would want to change in our lives i wrote about how i would change my mom's death it tore our family apart and made me hate middle school my principal would yell at me for being late when my dad had to make sure my mom would be okay with me and him gone i got scared that i would come home and find my mom laying in the floor from falling or maybe even dead i would stay home from school to make sure nothing happened to her this wasn't well received how do you put into words at 13 that you're scared of losing your mother i didn't care about school at all everyone knew about it and i still got yelled at for doing something halfway because my mind was somewhere else i was mentally destroyed by it i spilled everything a few days later my teacher told me it was pretty hard for him to read and that him and the other teachers were for me he has no idea how much that meant to a high schooler who wanted to die at that point in life i was 29 when i lost my mom and it basically destroyed me i can't imagine going through it as a kid i still have regular nightmares about the will it happened today roller coaster for my creative writing class our professor had us all write a funny craigslist ad for something we wanted to sell or were looking to buy some older woman i'm at a community college posted a graphic personal ad looking for a younger man to satisfy this hungry cougar she included a link to her cougar p site and everything the whackers love to post weird crap on discussion boards i'm always baffled by how they think this stuff is appropriate i had to pass on some work to our safeguarding leaders the task was simple demonstrate the use of effective punctuation and sentence structure in a short story titled my perfect holiday i got some pretty radical ideas from a kid who wrote about going to see his family in pakistan happy ending though it turned out he doesn't have family in pakistan he just thought it was funny sai why do i find this so funny not a teacher in grade nine we had to wrote about our earliest memory little did my teacher know that my earliest memory is the morning my stepfather killed himself i got called into counselling after that lol oh crap i'm sorry for you that's gotta be pretty rough several stand out one a highly detailed description of drug use sexual assault and suicidal thoughts had to report it obviously two their feelings for me see above three the details of their realization and acceptance of their significant other's transgender identity not necessarily strange by itself but this was in the middle of a lot of family drama at a very strict religious school so it was something i had to handle very carefully so as not to betray confidence at four the student's belief in white supremacy out of the blue from a very quiet very normal seeming otherwise intelligent girl could never look at her the same way and refuse to write a letter of recommendation yikes i had one student who unexpectedly went into great detail about her previously and mentioned sexual assault earlier that year by another student not in my class the essay assignment was on code switching and contact zones and she tied it back to the importance of not assuming social cues would translate across to people of different backgrounds as she thought she could have done more to prevent it and predict his intentions etc etc it was a really good essay but it was pretty jarring to read after a dozen essays from other students on talking differently to parents than friends and becoming proficient with dota 2 lingo and the like it was a few years back it had already gone through campus security and everything so i didn't have to take any action myself it was just unexpectedly heavy stuff i think she really needed to get it out is all then the next year a completely different student on a completely different assignment wrote about almost the exact same thing and i think freshman dorms are really dangerous places and side note that parents do their daughters and probably sons too no favors by treating them like children until they turn 18 and need the lessons in navigating adult situations that they were intentionally deprived of a seventh grade boy turned in an intensely erotic gay copied and pasted from some fan fiction website story where the main character had my name it's been a while but i think the character's name was changed to my name from its original internet incarnation i'll never forget the first line hot steamy miami as all good stories begin i teach english in china at an affluent school one time i was trying to teach about making lists and graphs so i asked them to write down how old they were how old their mother was how old their father was to my amazement at least the other kids had a father 30 years or more older than their mother i double checked and it was correct another time we were talking about houses and one little girl said her house has nine floors now i know her dad came to the school with three different brushes red yellow and blue just whichever one he felt like driving and a holly but i found this hard to believe but she insisted that it was true not only did she have her own bedroom she had her own dancing room and music room i asked the other kids and some of them said it was true didn't read it in an essay but one time a student of mine who went by the name queen handed me a note during a class break before she left it was a confessional of how explosive her diarrhea was the reason for her early exit i think i still have that note around here somewhere i once had a student write an essay about having to lay on top of her baby brother on the floor during a drive by shooting at her house she was trying to protect him and felt pieces of drywall snowed down on her as bullets whizzed overhead it was a hard thing to read but it was no doubt a harder life to live for a kid in eighth grade edit i once had a young lady write about her homestay experience it contained i was so happy when i tasted my host father's dong it took me a bit to understand she had meant cooking it was an esl class in japan i'm not a teacher but i was in grade 12 english university level and one of our final assignments was to write an essay about anything we wanted the kicker was we found out on the due date we had to read them out loud to the class dang to make it worse each student had to make a comment so everyone reads them one at a time we are all at your desks shaped in a squarish room we can speak sitting down nothing major doesn't take long somehow cool and funny like mine others interesting some boring etc then we get to this one kid side note in high school i was good with names and faces knew almost everyone in my school through some degree except this kid he didn't make a fuss to read it out loud he just went for it his essay was about how he hated doctor's medicine government something about his sister mother or other family relative dying in a hospital something about the doctors were racist didn't care or some conspiracy i really don't remember i'm also not trying to be funny it was a very tragic sad weird story that i felt bad about it was just very extreme and hard to believe in the moment it was sad but awkward he used hateful acid searing language that was so harsh and uncalled for he even swore a bit saying how i can never trust a freaking doctor again he didn't get emotional or mad just an assertive voice throughout angry i don't know why the teacher didn't stop him or something it was really awkward and sad no one really gave feedback the teacher chimed in or whatever and nulled it i don't know man i never reached out i hope he and his family are okay now i made an appointment with my microeconomics teacher to make up an exam that counted for about 20 of my final grade and missed it by 30 minutes i woke up still drunk and emailed him saying i was so sorry for missing the exam sir and then followed that up with cuckster he did not reply and laughed to himself when we made eye contact in class i'm a librarian but i'm teaching a creative writing workshop in middle school students were allowed to write about whatever topic they wanted and one girl turned in an essay about how her mom was on drugs drinking and partying while pregnant with her and she was immediately taken from her mom when she was born and custody was given to her grandma her mom then proceeded to have two more babies while still doing drugs drinking and partying but the grandma had her hands full with one child so the others went into foster care the self-awareness of her situation and the complete emotionless way she described every detail was absolutely heartbreaking i sent a copy of her story to the counselor and talk to her about her story directly sadly she didn't get the help she needed when she was a baby and will be dealing with the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome for the rest of her life biology teacher had a 15 15-year-old girl asking a lot of questions about stds had to have a chat with her after class about the dangers of unprotected sex and clear up a lot of misconceptions that her and her bf had including how the pull-out method isn't foolproof not an english teacher but a trans girl in my school read out loud a story about how he she grew up in a bad neighborhood was bullied for being gay and eventually lost their best friend to suicide at her father's own gun range really brought the whole class in shock and tears especially for middle schoolers not the teacher but i worked with her we are a public charter school and we tend to get various of types of kids from different districts this one family has six children and all of them are troublemakers always doing something bad mostly get into fights apparently my co-worker told me that she assigned them her essay about people they look up to and the only son of the children wrote about his friend is someone he looks up to because he has my back while we go break into cars and get into fights and we already spoke to parents but obviously they don't care we are completely sure this poor child will end up in a gang unless he changes he is only in fourth grade if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now i

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Id: OAis1CB4dkY

Length: 35min 58sec (2158 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020