My 7th Grade Poems

In seventh grade I remember my block teacher telling us about this book of poems we had to make. There were going to be 20 different poems by the time we were done with it, stapled together nicely inside a beautiful binding that would be laminated and each poem would have unique pictures and drawings specific to that poem, sounds fun right? How about not...in truth, I absolutely hated this project! I never had liked poems, and it didn't help that I was no good at them anyways. To have to do 20 of them was torture for me! On top of that, we had to make each poem creative, you know, with the pictures and stuff.....again, that's not really my thing. But one persons opinion can't change a teacher's curriculum and I knew that, so I went along with everything and did the first few poems to the best of my ability (with a little grumbling and complaining but you know, at least I was doing it...).

I made it about halfway through all the poems we had to do, and then I pretty much stopped trying. I did enough on the poem to get a good grade, and that was it. I stopped being an over-achiever for that one moment, I stopped being a perfectionist, and just let go. That's when the weirdest thing happened....my poems actually got better! The last few I did were perfect in my mind! I was extremely proud and surprised, I just couldn't believe it! Wasn't I supposed to suck at these things? My teacher even used my poems as an example for the rest of the class, putting it up on the overhead for everyone to see...that's when I knew that they were good. After that incident, poems stopped being hard. I stopped hating them and began to enjoy creating them. I've written poem after poem since (teachers seem to really have a thing for them) and I don't think I've hated any of them. Maybe I'll even make a book of them when I grow up! Ya, probably shouldn't push my luck on that one....