Memoir

             It seemed as if time was frozen. Everything was moving too slow, feeling too slow. People were loud all around me, yet it was like their voices were muffled. I couldn’t hear anything anyone was saying. It was strange. I’d never felt this way. My chest felt tight and my whole body was shaking. My vision was blurred from crying. There were no mirrors but I knew if I saw my reflection I’d be pale. As I walked down the hall towards the lecture hall it occurred to me, I didn’t want to go in there. If I went in there it would make this all real and it couldn’t be really. I didn’t want it to be real. But part of me is afraid to stop walking. Afraid to go back to that classroom where this started.

            Why wasn’t she at school? Was she on her way when it happened? Probably not, heard she was skipping. Why couldn’t she have just come straight here? This can’t be real. Please don’t be real. I can’t breathe, this hurts too much.

            I enter the lecture hall, and suddenly it’s like the world turns on again. All the voices are loud and sobbing. Everything is suddenly sped up again and it’s suddenly too real. Looking around, desperate for someone I know, I see my best friend Amanda. She runs to me and hugs me…and I completely break. I’m shaking and crying harder than ever. I’m not use to this. I always comfort others. More and more people enter the large room. Sounds of sobbing fills the air. No one has a dry eye. Amanda goes around to others, doing her best to help others and not focus on herself. Alone on the floor, I cradle my little black phone in my hands. I need to call my parents. She was like another daughter to them; they should hear it from me. But it’s like my fingers don’t work, so sitting by myself I stare at my phone. Eventually I push the speed dial and hold my phone to my ear; the ringing is sort of a relief to all the crying.

            “Honey, why are you calling? What’s up? Are you crying?!?!” questioned my mother.

            “……mommy.” I replied.

            “What happened? Did something happen? Pete, be quiet! Something’s wrong at the school! Baby, talk to me. What happened? Are you hurt?”

            “………she’s gone.” I whisper, barely believing those words actually left my mouth.

            “What did you say? I can’t hear you baby, speak up. Tell me what’s wrong. Peter be quiet! I can’t hear her.”

            “….she’s gone….Sara is gone. Goose is gone…..” the words are barely more than a whisper but I can tell my mom heard them. The line is silent; she must be taking it in. Probably hoping she heard wrong.

            “…What? How do you know that? Baby, talk to me what happened?”

            I’m crying too hard now, can barely get any words out.

            “….car accident…..announcement......mommy she’s gone! They said she’s gone!” My sobbing took over and I could say anymore. Mom was freaking out and explaining to my dad what I said. I could tell she was crying now.

            “Honey do you want us to get you? We can be right there. You shouldn’t be alone. Where are you? Are you by yourself? Are you with Amanda?”

            “…..ok. Yeah.” The only words I could manage to get out.

            I hang the phone up and just sit there. Watching everyone else crying, more and more people enter the room. Every now and then a few would leave, heading home I imagine. To me, things like this only happened on TV. Nothing truly bad had ever happened like this before, at least not to me or any of my friends. It never occurred to me that things like this happened in real life. Well, that’s not true. I’ve seen the news; I’ve heard heartbreaking stories from other people. I guess, I just never really thought something this horrible could happen to me.

            My father always taught me that you can learn something new every day. He never told me some of those lessons would be ones I never wanted to learn.

Write an Application Essay

Sara Gove

523 Brown Avenue

Taunton, MA 02780

650-326-6790/sgove17@gmail.com

 

October 14, 2012

 

Mr. Price Hicks

Principal of East Taunton of Elementary School

215 Harris Street,
Taunton, MA 02780

 

 

Dear Mr. Hicks

 

I am a graduate from Bridgewater State University. I graduated there with a 3.7 grade point average and I got my master’s degree in education. Also, I minored in history which will greatly help me with this position. Having looked at the job description I feel I would be a great candidate for the position you are looking for. I am confident that the skills and experience I have will make me successful in this career. My goal is to be a great teacher and be able to help all my students succeed. One of my greatest strengths is that I’m good at listening and being able to understand what the student needs or wants me to do.

I have many experiences teaching. I was a substitute teacher at four different schools, including this one, for about two years. From those experiences, I learned about all different types of classrooms and students. In college, I interned with many history teachers who taught me a lot of good tips on being a great history teacher. I have a good work ethic which can be seen from all the internships and substitute jobs I have had. There was never a negative response or review from any of the places I worked at.

 

Being a teacher has always been my dream job. If you accept my application and choose me for this job I will do my very best to do this job right. I will work hard like I always do and I promise I will be a great addition to your school.

 

Thank you for taking the time to read my application and to look at my résumé. I look forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about my qualifications or my references. My email is the best and most reliable way to get in touch with me.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Sara Gove

Writing for the World to See

                Having this blog has made me see my writing in a new and different way. Normally my writing is read by only me and whatever teacher had assigned me the paper. With a blog however, I am writing for me and anyone who follows me. My writing has always been written simply to please my teachers and to earn a good grade. I just focused on doing what they wanted. It’s a new thing for me to be writing for literally anyone to possibly see.

                For me, writing for this blog has been both interesting and a challenge. I try very hard to write in a way I enjoy, but also in a way that others may enjoy reading. Writing something I like is easy. Writing for others on the other hand is not as easy. Seeing as I have never written for more than a couple people, it has been tricky for me. Another tricky thing about writing this blog is that not only do I need to please an audience; I also have to write well and good enough for my teacher. Juggling these two tasks is difficult. In blog I want to sound friendly and conversational, but since it is also an assignment for class I need to write it how my teacher wants it.

                This blog has also made me a bit more aware of my writing. I do a lot more checking and double checking before I post something. I was never really one to go over my work after I had written it. After having spellcheck fix all my spelling errors I would just save and print my paper. For some reason, writing assignments for class just didn’t seem worth looking over and revising or editing. It was mostly work that I just wanted to be finished and down with. But it’s not really like that with my blog. I really want people to like what I write so I spend more time on it.

                Blog writing is so different from any other kinds of writing. At least, in my opinion it is. There are so many people out there that can read it. That makes you question everything you type or want to type. Writing for this blog has really made me see my writing in a whole other light.

My writing history

           Writing has never been my strong suit but it’s always been something that fascinated me. The idea of putting words together to make a story or to tell one seemed impossible to me. It still seems impossible to me.

            I, like most children, learned to write around the time of kindergarten and first grade. Before that, I learned to read. Reading is one of my favorite things to do. Being able to enter a different world just by opening a book was amazing to me. My love of reading is what made me really want to learn to write. I wanted to be able to write a story like all the stories I enjoyed reading so much. Every day I would come up with some story and try to get it down on paper. Most of them were silly or didn’t make sense, but at the time I thought they were so good.

            When I got older and higher up into school, there were more and more writing assignments for class. Some were to write about yourself or a vacation you have taken. Others would sometimes be to come up with a short story. These assignments would get harder and harder as the years went on. The more I had to write and the longer the assignment had to be, the worse I felt my writing was. It just always seemed that whatever I wanted to say didn’t come out right on the paper. I could spend hours and hours simply on one paragraph alone. One assignment would take me so long that I’d eventually give up and would stop trying to do my best on that assignment. Eventually I started asking for teachers to help me and explain to me what I could do to make my writing assignments better. Even though my writing got a bit better, I had discovered that I no longer enjoyed writing as much as I had when I was little.

            There has been very few writing that I have been proud of during my school years. Since I always considered writing to be the thing I was worst at, there was rarely a paper that I felt was worthy of me being proud of. The only few papers I did feel proud of were a short story and two research papers I’d written. All of these were written in my last two years of high school. At the end of junior and senior year we have to write a research paper on topics of our choice. Being able to choose the topic made those two papers a lot easier and more enjoyable to me. I was able to pick a topic I knew for a fact I could write pages and pages about. The short story was for a test where we had to write a scary story with certain vocabulary words. It was a bit tricky, but I can be pretty good at coming up with stories on the spot.

            It took me years to be able to write the way I write today. I’ve always worked hard in my writing classes. My writing may not be perfect, but it is always the best I can do.

Lady Gaga Article

Lady Gaga is a star like no other stars today. At her concert at Radio City Music Hall, which was sold out, she delighted her many loving fans.  Her performances always give her fans something spectacular to see. With her flashy stage, interesting costumes and catchy songs Lady Gaga has sold out many concerts and has won a lot of awards, such as a Grammy. Her musical talent isn’t just limited to just singing, she writes her songs, and can also play the piano very well and uses it to accompany some of her songs. She is so talented on her piano that she has been called a female Elton John when performing her song “Speechless”. During her concerts, her stage is designed to look out of this world and extremely complicated to her viewers. As do her many crazy outfits that she always loves to wear.

The author of this article does a good job of describing Lady Gaga and her unique way of performing. He describes everything from her music to the sometimes crazy way she dresses. It is really a good review because he focuses on all the different aspects of her career. For example, he talks about one of her hit songs “Poker Face” and her charity to the Haiti relief. He even mentions a comment from Lady Gaga when she was asked why she puts so much money into her shows she replied, “Because my fans are sexy”(Pareles 19). There is so much more to Lady Gaga than just her music and the author captured that wonderfully.

When people read this article, some may be very interested in it because they are the targeted audience for the article and others may not be as interested. The targeted audience would mostly be fans of the singer Lady Gaga, but any music lover may enjoy reading it as well. I believe that the targeted audience would be under the age of 50 and interested in pop music. The author focused on the things that would appeal to the fans of Lady Gaga, like her unique performance style and songs.  

 

 

To Introduce myself...

Well, to start this is off, my name is Sara. I am a freshman at Bridgewater State University and I am 18 years old. There really isn't any major I am leaning toward at the moment so I am mostly taking classes that will fulfill my requirements. Even though I have only been at Bridgewater State University for a week, I truly love it here. The campus is wonderful and everyone here is nice. All of the classes I have are good and don’t seem to be too hard. Hopefully that won’t change in the weeks to come. I know that one of my classes, play production, will take a lot of work because we are required to work and help out with the school play but that won’t be too bad. I absolutely love theatre and will probably really enjoy doing that.

To know me is to know that I love reading more than anything else in the world. Ever since I was little I’ve always had my nose in a book. I’ll read just about anything. There have only been a couple of books that I have read that I didn’t enjoy. All my spare time is usually dedicated to reading whatever book I have at the time. My guess is that this year most of my time will probably be used for homework though. Other hobbies of mine include coloring, teaching myself to draw and crocheting. All of these things I’m not particularly good at, especially the drawing one, but are the things that I really enjoy doing. A new thing I have been doing is writing. Now, writing is the one thing I think I am the worst at. I have never been confident in my writing skills and lately have been trying very hard to improve on them. One last thing I think people should know about me is that I procrastinate…..a lot. Like this assignment for example. It was assigned Wednesday and here I am on Sunday night writing it. These are just a few quick things about myself that I think people would like to know.