Tyra Heckstall

UWRIT 1101
Mr. Campbell

Hardest Project in the World

Throughout my years of being in school, writing a paper was always an issue for
me. Some people are natural born writers but as for me, I never enjoyed writing. I figured
it was one of the most complicated subjects in school. Every year in high school, I took
English honors classes. Honors classes are thought to be more challenging than regular
classes. My freshmen and sophomore year of high school were more about reading
European literature, analyzing descriptive but yet confusing poetry, and memorizing
Shakespeare and Greek plays. My junior and senior year was focused more on writing.
In the state of North Carolina, some schools make students do the graduation
project, which consists of a 5-page research paper and a physical product based off your
topic. New Bern High School, which was my school, made students write their research
paper their junior year, and work on the product their senior year. Being the fact that I
took English honors, I had to write a 6-page, fully detailed, argumentative essay versus a
5-page paper. I figured the essay would be easy to write since we could choose our own
topic. I just knew that the project would be simple and I would do excellent on it. My
topic was racism and how it affected children in an education environment. The reason I
chose this topic was because I could relate to it. My argument was that racism had a
negative effect, so I had to research articles based off this argument. Looking for sources
online was one of the hardest things in the world. At first, my teacher, Ms. Justice, would

give us ample time in class to work on our project. Ms. Justice was on the chubby side,
but she was a great, humorous teacher. She would rent these huge, black laptops from our
school library for our class to work. I remember the bright classroom, filled with colorful
posters about literature and books who were reading. The classroom was a decent size,
holding around 30 desks that faced the front of the class. I remember sitting in the very
front row, because she had us sitting alphabetically, struggling on finding a website as a
source. I remember constantly looking around the classroom at all the posters instead of
finding the sources because I couldnt focus. It was one of the hardest things Ive ever
done in high school. I kept thinking to myself, Is this project really worth all this
stress? Sitting in the front row of class, I started jotting down sources I found online
onto a plain white notecard. The least amount of sources we could use was five and I
could barely find two. Once I found all my sources within a week, I had to immediately
start typing my six-page essay. The hardest thing about writing an essay for me, is
writing the introductory paragraph. I remember just staring at my laptop screen, thinking
what to write and how to start off. I started typing my essay after weeks of
procrastination and having no clue what to write about using my sources. Finally, after
two months, it was time to turn my paper in. I finally had a sigh of relief and I felt so
much better because I just knew all of this stress would never return. I was definitely
wrong about that. My teacher gave the class our papers back with our grade and I failed
it. I remember staring at the large sixty-four score written in red at the top corner of my
paper. I remember seeing all the red commentary from my teacher in the margins of my
paper about how unclear and how disorganized my paper was. My teacher also noted
how I didnt follow the rubric on how many pages to write. Since we had to include our

citations, I was thinking that the citation page counted towards the six pages, meaning I
technically wrote five pages. At that very moment, I felt like a loser. I felt like the entire
graduation project was pointless and that my ability to graduate from high school would
be judged off an essay. Ive never done horrible on an essay.
Everyone that fails the first submission gets a chance to redo the paper, which is
called second submission. This time I used the commentary my teacher wrote on my
paper and spent numerous of hours rewriting my essay, attempting to make it perfect.
Finally, it was time to turn in our second submission paper. I remember the anxiety
feeling I had. I was hoping that I would pass the paper this time. Over a two-week period
my teacher gave back the second submission papers and I passed it with an 83. I had a
sigh of relief but at the same time, I still had that failure feeling from the first submission
paper. After thinking long and hard about the project, I felt like my topic was too broad
and too complicated to write an essay on. I honestly wanted to change my entire topic
and start all the way over but it was too late.
From this experience I learned that not everyone is good at everything.
People should be able to write freely, especially if they are choosing what to write about.
In my case, I couldnt write freely about something that interested me. I had to write the
way someone else wanted me to write, which was complicated for me. I never understood
the high school concept of formatted essays. Teachers wanted us to write in this
complicated way. After the research project, I had a couple more papers in high school to
write but they were not as long and as pressuring as this project was. As a college student
now, I think I am a much better writer than I was in high school.