SATs! Its that time of the high school career, when everyone that wants to go to college starts cramming for the SATs...that dreadful test that consists of hours on hours of multiple choice questions, and an essay that is graded on a scale of 1-6. Did not look forward to this test like any other test in high school. There were sections of math, reading, and writing. Math, of course, this part of me relates to the stereotype of being Asian. Reading, fine, I can read and talk about it alright. But writing...Lord, help me. Feelings of shuddering fear and despair tremble my spine, as if they took froms of hands, gripping the long column of bone and nerve, and jumbling it around and around, cauing my mind only the worst of stressed headaches.
So, like any other student that was worried about the SATs, I signed up for a class during the weekends. It was a writing class that intensely engages students in practing writing and reading sections of the SATs, taught by Miz Parmalee Cover. Please...she looked like a push over at first blush, and of course, I focused on other important things for the weekend: the football game the night before, the flight tomorrow morning, the homework that I should be working on, and when I was going to go swimming in the next bottle of achohol. I just ran trough the course, week by week, continually working at imporving my writing skills, and going through the motions of the practice SATs. At the end of the course, I was given a private note, and Miz Cover had said I was her favorite student. My heart shot through the ground, as if I had some responsibility to uphold the consequences of my actions of not trying my best.
The course only ended, and I find that I am staring at a horrible grade on my first essay in Honors english. Sighed...as I stared down that blood red mark, almost as if the paper were bleeding because of the pain it had to endure as I was writing the essay. Lost without options, I turned to the only help that I knew to salvage my academic progress in english, turned to Miz Cover. And every Saturday, from then on, we would meet in the ealry evening, to practice more writing and reading. Started out as private tutoring, killing two birds with one stone. I was saving my grade, and I was practicing for the SATs.
And every weekend, as I grew closer and closer to being a better writer and harnessing my inner art, we became more and more fond of one another, until meetings were more of times to hang out and read and discuss each other's writing pieces. Outside of flight training, I never had a closer mentor and tutor. She had taught me to channel my feelings outside the football field and outside the cockpit onto the paper. She had taught me that perseverence can actually lie in many aspects of life, outside of just intended goals. And she had triggered my addiction.
It is an addiction to writing pieces and works of art. It is an addiction to lighting my mind, and pourind acidic floods of emotions and experiences. It is an addiction to inhale life and blow out puffs of graphite dust.
Miz Cover...that is what a mentor is to me. Not only has she taught me how to write, but she introduced a new life, a new angle at which I live. Never has she sat me down, never has she jabbed her pointing finger at my nose, and never has she lectured me. Only through her teachings of writing. And to end this student mentor relationship is not possible, even as I am in Arizona and she in Oregon, to end with a period seems wrong, and so I break the rules of run-on sentences and proper mechanical sentence structure with this, to only signify what a mentor is
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