History as a writer

Journal Entry 1- My Writing History
Greg Simecek

In the past, I have generally not enjoyed English classes, specifically creating original works myself. I am currently majoring in mechanical engineering. There is a lot of math and science involved in this major, and math makes sense to me. In school, I typically do better in math classes than I do in writing classes. This does not mean that I think writing is pointless, or boring. In fact, I think that writing is very important. Learning to write well helps with communication skills, both portraying your opinion and understanding others. Creative writing is a different story, it is only for entertainment. And I do enjoy reading some of it, but not writing it. Anyway, back to my personal history as a writer.
When I think my history as a writer, one teacher comes to mind first. In the eighth grade I was put into an accelerated English class. There were only four or five other kids in this class. Needless to say, it was a very personal class in that only the teacher and a few other kids would see your writing. Therefore I lost a lot of my apprehension about writing in this class. In this class I would write stories and papers that I wanted to write. The teacher left the guidelines very vague. I do want to make it clear though that I was still writing only because I had to for school. However, this teacher did make writing a lot more enjoyable for me. I ended up nominating her as the most influential teacher in my career as a student at Avon Lake (my home town) - every Honor Graduate nominated someone.
For me, writing is not a very comfortable thing. Sometimes it does scare me that I will not be able to come up with anything to write about when an assignment is given. Until last year this was a pretty big problem for me. But in my senior year my teacher gave in-class writing assignments that forced me to just pick a stance on the topic, and write. I now think that it was very good for my writing.