High School Lit
Taylor, Anthony

ANTHONY: I can't say when, I just know that I really did love the way my mother wrote. She had great penmanship and I always tried to imitate her so I was always on the paper trying to do something. I guess the most impacting thing for me was literature in high school. I liked literature and I liked reading. I also always remembered, I can't remember what teacher it was and what grade, but one teacher told us how to define words that you didn't know in the text by reading before and after and that would give you an idea of what the word means and I really got good at that. I like that a lot, so that was very interesting to me and that got me interested in words. So I progressed from there to looking at and examining every word in the newspaper that I didn't know, I'd just read until I came across a word that I did know and I would stay there until death do me part to figure that word out. So I got good at that and I had an interest in words so much that I just started going through the dictionary. I guess to culminate this, there was an incident that I had with a neighborhood boy my age in the same grade where we lived in the same neighborhood but we fought all the time but was always seemed to end up around each other all the time and he was extremely illiterate to the fact that he once asked me to take his driver's test for him and I wouldn't do the written test. He was a bully and he was a little bit better at fighting than I was. He was in the in-crowd, the cool crowd, and I was on the outside of the inner circle so I always felt like I just couldn't quite get there. My mom didn't buy me shoes, they would be too much. We didn't get new clothes for every school year. I was on the outside of the inner circle and unconsciously I was not aware, I needed a vice, I needed something to make me equal. He provided with me that one day when we were in the hallway and it must have been changing class or lunch or something and he started to pick on me and I asked him to spell "cat" and "dog" and he left me alone and that gave me power and I really immersed myself in words and language then. To this day I still do the same thing with words; they always intrigued me. You'll get these buzz words on TV in the 24 hour news cycle, one word will come out as a buzz word, one person and it seemed like it would across the whole entire network on TV. It will become apparent because it would generally be something that I hadn't heard before. So that would catch my ear and I would figure out what that word is and then I'd start to use it for the next couple of days to get a working knowledge of it and I would put that in my box of toys too. That's pretty much my good recollection of words. I work in the writing center and to just tell you how really, really how well this thing is for me. I can't tell you what a post-participle, adverb, adjective, or any of those words, I can't point out one to you but I can tell you everything that's wrong and right with your paper right now. And that's the only reason I'm in the writing center. As a returning student here I had to take the access test or whatever it is and on my math questions and they give you a blank piece of paper to work out the math questions well my paper was still blank when I turned it in and got through with the test but I would pick my pencil up and I would drop it and the closest one to the math problem, I just wrote it down. I made a seventeen, a comparable seventeen on the test without working one math problem because math is my Achilles heel right now. So if that gives you any indication of how well I like the English language and words and reading and meanings and stuff like that, that's why I hang around.