Jessica Simental

Transcription by Shahmeer Azmat
09/19/2012

>> LAYERED VOICES: [inaudible]

>> JESSICA SIMENTAL: I'm going to do the question about the kinds of writing you did when you were younger. And I remember when I was a kid, my mom used to buy us these really, really big pieces of paper. And they were brown with huge lines and we used to have big pencils so we actually knew how to use the writing. And she would make us go from the bottom line to the top line and we had to touch the line. And we would do circles that went from up down and then we used to do the little ones...little circles that had the lines in between that we had to do from the bottom to the middle line to bottom to the middle line. 

And we used to have big penciles like this and we had to learn how to hold it the write way and that was a really big help for me because I can write in a straight line. My writing is really, really neat and all my letters are really legible and we had to put our finger in between each word so we knew how to space each words. And after it came naturally. 

Writing was actually one of my favorite subjects because I was really good at it naturally and I was able to do it with ease and not have any trouble with it. I was a good reader, I was good at vocabulary and spelling. I always entered into the spelling bee. I didn't win any, but I always got far. And I also did the speech tournaments in which I was able to...the speech tournaments were something that...in private school because I did go to private school, we were able to go ahead and learn a piece of poetry, a piece of writing, you know, anything that we wanted to do. We could do improvistation, we could do kind of like mime, we could also do plays. I was in the Sandlot when I was younger, I did poetry when I was younger. And we were able to go ahead and do the speech tournaments. And that helped us a lot with reading as well as expressing ourselves through our writing. And we could either pick a piece that we liked or we could do our own. And we were able to do it in front of a panel of judges. And whoever did the best, or whoever had the best improvisation or piece of work, was able to go ahead and win a prize. And certain points were put to the school so that you were able to...you know, at the end the school would win a big prize if everyone got a good score. 

And I really enjoyed that because that gave me the ability to go ahead and be a free spirit and express my work and not be afraid that there's a wrong or a right. And it showed a lot of my creativity because I was a creative writer and I really do enjoy writing. And it really helped me to be creative and express what I wanted to express. And as well as all my friends did it and I thought it was really cool, but it really wasn't because it was just us doing what we liked to do and that's what made us us. 

We also...in private school we didn't get a lot of journal writing. We didn't get a lot of, you know, free time to just write, or draw, or read. We didn't get any of that. It was really extensive work and teachers would pick the topics for us and we weren't able to do what we wanted to. For example, we had what was called Pro Books. And it was basically in a composition book. And they would tell us, "OKay, this week we're going to do presidents." And we would pick a president, whichever president we wanted, and we would have to write a biography on them. And explain what they did and what their hobbies were and so on and so forth. And we weren't able to pick a topic. It was just, you had to do presidents, animals, about me. And the only one that we got to express ourselves was about me because we could put whatever we wanted. We could do, you know, oh I like dogs. I have two brothers, two sisters. But it was really straightforward curriculum, and the only way we could express ourselves was joining the speech contest or doing it on the playground. 

I mean, going to private school really did help me in school now as far as being discplined and knowing how to speak to other people and when to speak to them and the right way to speak to them. But as far as writing and reading, it wasn't really stressed. I mean, I do remember staying up until three or four in the morning studying for tests because they were extensive tests. I mean, those tests were essay writing questions and I remember that it was horrifying because I was barely in fourth or fifth grade studying to have to do this. But I mean, I really appreciated it, it really helped me in the long run. But we didn't really get to express as far as that. Thank you for listening to my narrative.