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My First Writer’s Block
After 53 years of writing
My first big writing assignment happened in Grade 7. It started on a Sunday evening.
Dave’s mother: “Do you have any homework tomorrow?”
Dave: “I have to write a report on bats for Mr. Beardsley’s science class tomorrow morning.”
Dave mother: “Is it done?”
Dave: “I haven’t started it.”
Dave’s mother: “Well, get to work.”
So I grabbed the B volume of our World Book Encyclopedia — and spent the next two hours transcribing the ideas around bats (the flying mammals) into a Grade 7 science report. I had no trouble finding the words to put on the paper. I got to stay up until 10:00! And I got an A-!
Our junior high school English teacher, Dan Ireland, made us write a paragraph almost every day. As much as we hated this man for making us write so much, I never had a problem fulfilling his requests. Skills learned from Mr. Ireland have lasted this lifetime.
No problem with writer’s block throughout senior high school. I always got my English and social studies assignments completed in time.
My days in the engineering school put me in less writing than my high school. But for the fewer writing assignments, I had more trouble finding a working…
