I grew up in a very fortunate family; we never really had to worry about a low income, and we were able to buy extra stuff and go on other trips unlike other families. I never really understood how we were able to do this seeing as my parents did not go to college. They also rarely ever read; if they did it would be a magazine or an article online, and they never wrote. My parents would always push me to read more and always do well on my writing assignments and review them over and over again so they would be the best of my ability. Back then I never really understood why they would make me do all of this, but now that I am a bit older and understand how important these traits are, I understand why they did this. I’ll never forget my English teacher my junior year of high school, Mr. Stanizzi. He was the most inspirational teacher I have ever had in my life. He genuinely loved his job and made English class fun, and fascinating. By this time I thought for sure that no teacher was ever going to change my opinion on writing, but he proved me wrong. There was something he did while teaching and analyzing poems that really struck my interest. Every week we would have a period just focusing on either writing our own poems or analyzing them. There was one particular poem that I was extremely proud of and showed Stanizzi the poem. He was shocked that I wrote such a good poem. He liked my poem so much he read it to the class for an example and he still reads it to his classes to this day. At this moment I realized that I actually enjoyed writing poems and that people actually enjoyed reading them. Since then I have genuinely enjoyed reading, analyzing and writing poems. Before this I looked at doing all of this as almost a chore, or a punishment of some sort but now that this has happened I have a completely different perspective on poems and how much I like to write them. Granted I haven’t done anything with poems since high school, I still read them sometimes online. I find them interesting and I love to analyze them and try and figure out what the author was thinking while he was writing his poem. It fascinates me how people can think of the simplest thing and describe it with such detail and write such a beautiful poem out of it. There have been occasions where in my spare time something will motivate me to just write a poem about it, it is a pretty rare occurrence but when it does happen it’s like the world just stops and I am completely focused on writing a good poem. This was my first experience that actually made me enjoy something that had to do with English class. Seeing as books never really got my attention, but poems did. This is what kept my interest in English always hoping that we’ll get a writing assignment where we will have to write a poem.