7th grade literacy narrative
This was the first piece composed for ENGL458, and I also used it as the source for my audio essay later in the class. As such, it has received substantial revisions. Particularly, making the introduction more congruent with the tone and voice of the piece, using more appropriate dialogue, and focussing the ending in order to really focus in on the choice which my piano teacher made and why it was important. Being a 7th Grade Literacy Narrative, I tried to harness the voice of my younger self. I hope you enjoy it!
A novel way to teach piano
I didn’t like piano very much. I hated it. Maybe if I’d had Mrs. C from the beginning things would have been different, but the practicing and memorizing theory had become so dull. So ordinary. So boring. Such a waste of time, and my time was valuable. Yet once a week I still found myself walking out the front doors of my elementary school, past the towering flagpole, down the perfectly paved sidewalk, across the street, and all too soon at the house of my parent-appointed piano teacher.
I would knock, Mrs. T would let me into the blackhole, we would review what I had "practiced" over the week and we would flip the page in the music book to discover what we would be "working on" the next week. Once the session had reached it’s conclusion I would politely thank her, silently curse my parents for thinking they knew what was best for me, wish her a wonderful week, and then pop back out of the blackhole, with the promise of summer in the air and with it my ever approaching graduation from grade school meaning no more piano practice. By the time I would get home there would be the inevitable message on the answering machine for my parents. A boring old voice with a boring old message, “He doesn’t practice. He’ll never get better if he doesn’t practice.”
The end of sixth grade came and went and with it I let my less than fond memories of piano practice perdendo—fade into nothing. It wasn’t long until seventh grade would be starting, and I was excited to be moving to a new school; but mostly I was just biding my time on Internet chess sites, an early display of my affinity for strategy and intrigue. Earlier in the summer I had bested the North Dakota Youth Chess Champion at a Boy Scout camp so I knew I was on my way to becoming World Grand Master. One day, when I was particularly embroiled in an elite online chess match, my sister rapped on the doorframe and walked into the room wearing a helmet. “I’m dropping dance so I have to start taking piano again…Mom and dad said you have to come with.”
Checkmate. “You’re the WORST,” I howled.
But I never found myself at that parent-appointed blackhole across from the elementary school again. Instead, my sister drove me out of town to an area I had never been before, and pulled up to a lonely little house, saying something about how we had arrived and that, despite my apparent displeasure, everything was going to be okay. I still wasn’t talking to her. We walked up to the door and, as my sister was about to knock, the door flew open and Mrs. C was standing there, in the doorway, beaming at us.
After a few weeks of my cold shoulder, instead of calling my parents to complain of my poor performance, or giving up on my prospects as a pianist, she decided to try something else. So she gave us a tour of her house. Following her down the stairs into the basement I gleefully asked, “Are you moving?” The room was packed with all sorts of things, much of it in boxes, piled high as the house would allow and leaving no discernable path. My sister elbowed me; apparently it’s rude to ask such things of a hoarder, and especially rude to sound so downright happy about it.
But Mrs. C didn’t let that faze her, she said, “No, I’m not moving, I just wanted to show this to you.” She led us through the maze to a wall thats view had been completely blocked from the stairs by boxes. This wall wasn’t a wall wall—it was a book wall—a wall, literally, of books. Although, she said, music is one way of escaping reality, reading is another that’s “Just. As. Important,” she finished in staccato fashion, as if to drive home a point that we might have disagreed with her on. She told us that we could take a book, every week, as long as we brought the last one back (as if she couldn’t stand to lose a few). I had become disinterested in reading a few years before when Tolkien’s Return of the King put me to bed early a few too many nights in a row. Perhaps she spied my internal groan and while my sister perused the wall, Mrs. C handed me Clive Cussler’s Iceberg with a knowing smile; to this day, hundreds of books later, I still remember the plot as if I’d just read it.
Dark Pitt, a real James Bond-esque character, was on a rescue mission for my love for reading, which Tolkien had left dormant, hibernating somewhere in some dark corner of Shelob’s lair on the outskirts of Mordor; Pitt found it and stabbed it with a shot of norepinephrine. The very next week, I got another Dark Pitt book, and then another, and then another. Mrs. P saw this and she said to me, “Your mission Doug, should you decide to accept it, is to play the theme from Mission Impossible at the next piano recital.” Heh, can you imagine that, me, a lanky looking kid, up on stage on stage, wearing shades like Tom Cruise, in front of all those people. Well, I accepted the mission, and completed it.
But, despite the standing ovation, I wasn’t the real hero that day. It was Mrs. C who never gave up where others had failed. It was Mrs. P who cracked the code and found a way to connect with me. I was actually excited to play piano.
I would knock, Mrs. T would let me into the blackhole, we would review what I had "practiced" over the week and we would flip the page in the music book to discover what we would be "working on" the next week. Once the session had reached it’s conclusion I would politely thank her, silently curse my parents for thinking they knew what was best for me, wish her a wonderful week, and then pop back out of the blackhole, with the promise of summer in the air and with it my ever approaching graduation from grade school meaning no more piano practice. By the time I would get home there would be the inevitable message on the answering machine for my parents. A boring old voice with a boring old message, “He doesn’t practice. He’ll never get better if he doesn’t practice.”
The end of sixth grade came and went and with it I let my less than fond memories of piano practice perdendo—fade into nothing. It wasn’t long until seventh grade would be starting, and I was excited to be moving to a new school; but mostly I was just biding my time on Internet chess sites, an early display of my affinity for strategy and intrigue. Earlier in the summer I had bested the North Dakota Youth Chess Champion at a Boy Scout camp so I knew I was on my way to becoming World Grand Master. One day, when I was particularly embroiled in an elite online chess match, my sister rapped on the doorframe and walked into the room wearing a helmet. “I’m dropping dance so I have to start taking piano again…Mom and dad said you have to come with.”
Checkmate. “You’re the WORST,” I howled.
But I never found myself at that parent-appointed blackhole across from the elementary school again. Instead, my sister drove me out of town to an area I had never been before, and pulled up to a lonely little house, saying something about how we had arrived and that, despite my apparent displeasure, everything was going to be okay. I still wasn’t talking to her. We walked up to the door and, as my sister was about to knock, the door flew open and Mrs. C was standing there, in the doorway, beaming at us.
After a few weeks of my cold shoulder, instead of calling my parents to complain of my poor performance, or giving up on my prospects as a pianist, she decided to try something else. So she gave us a tour of her house. Following her down the stairs into the basement I gleefully asked, “Are you moving?” The room was packed with all sorts of things, much of it in boxes, piled high as the house would allow and leaving no discernable path. My sister elbowed me; apparently it’s rude to ask such things of a hoarder, and especially rude to sound so downright happy about it.
But Mrs. C didn’t let that faze her, she said, “No, I’m not moving, I just wanted to show this to you.” She led us through the maze to a wall thats view had been completely blocked from the stairs by boxes. This wall wasn’t a wall wall—it was a book wall—a wall, literally, of books. Although, she said, music is one way of escaping reality, reading is another that’s “Just. As. Important,” she finished in staccato fashion, as if to drive home a point that we might have disagreed with her on. She told us that we could take a book, every week, as long as we brought the last one back (as if she couldn’t stand to lose a few). I had become disinterested in reading a few years before when Tolkien’s Return of the King put me to bed early a few too many nights in a row. Perhaps she spied my internal groan and while my sister perused the wall, Mrs. C handed me Clive Cussler’s Iceberg with a knowing smile; to this day, hundreds of books later, I still remember the plot as if I’d just read it.
Dark Pitt, a real James Bond-esque character, was on a rescue mission for my love for reading, which Tolkien had left dormant, hibernating somewhere in some dark corner of Shelob’s lair on the outskirts of Mordor; Pitt found it and stabbed it with a shot of norepinephrine. The very next week, I got another Dark Pitt book, and then another, and then another. Mrs. P saw this and she said to me, “Your mission Doug, should you decide to accept it, is to play the theme from Mission Impossible at the next piano recital.” Heh, can you imagine that, me, a lanky looking kid, up on stage on stage, wearing shades like Tom Cruise, in front of all those people. Well, I accepted the mission, and completed it.
But, despite the standing ovation, I wasn’t the real hero that day. It was Mrs. C who never gave up where others had failed. It was Mrs. P who cracked the code and found a way to connect with me. I was actually excited to play piano.
An earlier draft of my 7th grade literacy narrative is available for download by clicking on the link to the right.
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