My First Edit

When I was in fourth grade, we were given an assignment to write our own legend. About how something happened, or why something is the way it is… etc.

I eventually came up with "How We Got Horses," which basically was about a boy and a donkey. Something happened and then there was a pure white horse in the world.

We had to edit these legends, though, and I ended up with one of the teachers that I think taught special education, but had ended up in Mrs. VanSkiver's room to help. He sat me down at a little table. A book about JK Rowling was there, kind of looking at me, and the table was yellow, but that's all I remember.

And he read the story, while I was kind of sitting there, and then he said, "Well, I don't like the word 'got.' So how can we change that?"

That is literally all I remember past the fact that the title was changed to How Horses Came To Be and we eliminated all use of the word 'got.'

During that assignment we also learned to read aloud— don't obstruct your mouth with the book or paper, don't tilt your head down, speak slowly and clearly and loudly.

And these two things have remained with me till now. Every time I read aloud I remember sitting on a stool in front of the class to read my legend out loud, and every time I get a weird thing like 'how we got,' I remember that man in the brown, short-sleeved, collared shirt saying, "I don't like the word 'got.'" And rewriting that thing in pencil in my terrible nine-year-old handwriting, and then typing it up and printing it out on… light blue paper with clouds, I think.