“Unleash Your Story: How Interrupted Education Can Be the Secret Ingredient to Your Writing Success!”

"Unleash Your Story: How Interrupted Education Can Be the Secret Ingredient to Your Writing Success!"

Growing up in a rural community can transform a school into a battleground rather than a place of learning, can’t it? The cracked windows and frosty glass become metaphors for resilience, revealing how a challenging environment shapes our ability to express ourselves. With a teacher like Mrs. Mickleson, who fought valiantly against the custodial sabotage of our beloved chalkboard, the classroom became a quirky landscape of rebellion and survival. I still think back to the laughter of childhood mischief—the rebellion against cursive strokes that felt more like restrictions than instructions. It’s a journey filled with humor, heartache, and an unstoppable urge to write against the odds. Join me as I delve into this reflective piece that reveals how those seemingly insurmountable challenges can foster creativity in the most unexpected ways. Want to know more? LEARN MORE.

THE RECKLESS WRITER

I grew up in a poor rural community where school was treated as “the enemy”

Image by Walter Rhein

The windows at my school had cracked paint that failed to cover the rotting wood beneath. In the winter, there would be frost on the panes. Before class started, we’d press the side of our hands to the glass and melt the ice so it would look like a baby’s foot. You create the appearance of the toes by tapping the tip of your finger across the top.

We’d make a line of footprints going up as high as we could reach. It looked like a baby walked up the wall. We knew better than to climb on the chairs or desks, but Mrs. Mickleson didn’t yell at us so long as we didn’t push too far.

On Monday morning, she was always angry because the custodians would wash the chalkboard over the weekend. It turns out, you need the chalk dust on the board in order to write. Otherwise the surface is too greasy and the lines break. Mrs. Mickleson would be grumbling until Wednesday when she finally got enough chalk on the surface to make marks again.

Every Friday, she’d write a note saying, “Please don’t wash the chalkboard.”

Every Monday, she’d come into the room and scowl because the board had been wiped clean.

Maybe it was sabotage.

It was in this environment that I learned how to read and write. I remember practicing cursive. Mrs. Mickleson handed out papers with dotted lines and we were supposed to barely touch the middle with our curves. I thought it silly that the cursive “m” had three humps and the cursive “n” had two. I rebelled against it. To this day I don’t write an “m” with three humps.

My handwriting has always been a problem. Before the popularization of computers, I even went as far as to type up some compositions. The other students looked at me with screwed up faces, “You typed it?”

“Well, look at my handwriting! Look at it!”

“I see your point.”

I found that they left me alone if my typed up paper had enough smears and sections that were blotted out. It was important to find the balance that…

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