Lesson Today, Appreciation Later

 

In my last entry, I talked about one of the who contributed to my enjoying reading and writing, Mr. Przygocki. The other was my 8th grade literature teacher, Ms. DeLong. I talked about them in the foreword to my book POMSILv2, but it was pointed out to me I never mentioned them here. Today, I fix that.

Ms. DeLong, my eighth-grade Literature teacher, introduced me to my favorite kind of written storytelling––the short story. I was attending Central Junior High in Lawton, Oklahoma (Go Cougars!) and like most 8th graders I was gradually turning into the human I’d be versus the kid I’d been until now. As I mentioned before, I had no great athletic talent, but I had a love of reading.

We spent a lot of time in Literature class reading passages aloud from our anthology. Since I was good at sight-reading, I’d get bored waiting on my turn and thumbed ahead through the book, looking at the other titles. Because of the short time between having to read segments and waiting for others, I sought titles that were not overly long.

The book contained an extensive mix of literary types, including excerpts from novels, poems, plays, newspaper articles. I focused on the short stories because I could skim a couple of pages and get away with it. I tore through the macabre and suspense stories first and then on to humor. When the Scholastic Books flyers came around every month, I sought short stories and soon had a dogeared collection on my bookshelf. I also read the unwritten required novel of my generation, The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton. Throughout my life I’ve spent thousands of hours discovering in each a new world and finding myself immersed in the joy of reading, thanks to Ms. Delong. 

Harold Przygocki was my high school English teacher at Denbigh High School in Denbigh, Virginia (Go Patriots!). On the first day of class, he made us learn to spell and pronounce his name properly, then he assigned a weekly 500-word original essay. This met with much moaning and groaning from the student side of the room. After all, we are being told we needed to write an essay the same length as War and Peace every week. In truth, 500 words are about five or six paragraphs of three or four sentences each. Not even close to the number of words Tolstoy wrote. 587,287 words to be exact.

After a few weeks, the initial shock went away, and I got into the routine. It gradually came to like the assignment. I figured out that an essay could be a story and sometimes could be longer. I enjoyed writing stories and trying to fit them into a 500-word container. Some were good, and some weren’t, but it didn’t matter. The assignment taught me that if you were going to write; you needed to write. Writing is a muscle that needs exercise to use it optimally.

Before I wrote my first novella, I prepared myself by writing 500 words a week to get my writing skills in shape. It was one of those lessons you don’t appreciate at the time, but you realize its value years later.

Both teachers affected the reader and writer I am today. I appreciate both.

NOTE:   One other teacher I wrote about was Charlotte Naffin who I had for four years of Latin. Last year, Mr. Przygocki celebrated his 100th birthday. He’s still going strong. I used his name for one of the characters in my book Ferdinand's Gold.

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