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Blogocentric Formulations #1097892 added September 22, 2025 at 8:03pm
Restrictions: None
The Good and The Bad
Prompt #130: Write about the moment you knew you were really good (or bad) at something.
I've been writing since the fourth grade. I distinctly remember being in a fourth and fifth grade combo class and watching the fifth graders get a chance to write fiction for the first time. One of the kids in that class wrote a superhero story about a hero called "Molecule Man" (not the one from the Marvel Comics, just his own invention), and I thought to myself, "You know what would be cooler than a guy who could control every molecule of his body? A guy who could control every atom in his body." Even back then, I was better at adaptation and revision than pure creative output!
But the point where I knew I was really good at writing was in high school. My junior year, I took an AP English class with a teacher who is still, to this day, one of my all-time favorites. He was a guy who was really good natured but also not afraid to hold kids accountable to his high expectations. Since the AP exam at the end of the year was heavily focused on essay writing, we basically practiced timed essay writing every class period, and then had essay assignments to take home and work on to improve our critical thinking skills when we weren't under pressure. Essays were scored from one to five, with one being terrible and five being technically perfect. We were told not to expect fives (or even fours) until probably the second semester.
My first in-class essay received a four. In a class of super high-achieving classmates, I was the only one. There were a handful of threes, but mostly twos. The teacher asked me to stay after class; I thought I was in trouble, but he wanted to tell me privately that he thought I was a talented writer and capable of passing the AP exam without breaking a sweat. He said he wanted to spend the semester not teaching me how to pass the test, but how to improve my writing as much as possible.
And he held me to that. Throughout the year, he routinely challenged me more than the other kids, often handing me back essays and telling me to redo them because even though he knew they'd get a four on the exam, he knew I wasn't pushing myself or was phoning it in on that particular topic. It was the first time I'd really had someone who saw potential in me and mentored me, and it gave me confidence, in a class full of overachievers where the Top 10 kids in the class all had GPAs above a 4.0, that I was at least really good at this one thing.
As far as being really bad at something? That would also be high school, except with math. Like a lot of the kids in my class, I was enrolled in advanced classes across the board, and it turns out that math is just not something I'm "advanced" at. I struggled through Geometry my freshman year, and hit a wall with Algebra II where the concepts just didn't make sense to me. It was my first time having to drop a class because I would have failed otherwise, and when I went back to take Algebra I again, everything clicked into place so that when I took Algebra II again the following year, I did much better and understood the concepts. It turns out that I needed that extra year to wrap my head around some of the concepts in the class.
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