Back in elementary school, I wrote essays. I remember in the 4th grade I wrote a paper on chinchillas. My teacher thought it was a marvelous essay. He photocopied it and had the entire class read it together.

This was the last point in my life where my mastery of the essay matched my age.

Continuing further through my education, teachers always taught the standard essay format; introduction, three body paragraphs, then conclusion. All with the promise that these skills would be developed later on, but they never were.

In high school I took higher level courses. Through every English class I took, my teachers assumed that we knew how to write essays and therefore never assigned them. The "lower level" classes would have way more assigned to them because they were deemed in need of an education and I was not. So in place of standard essays, my teachers put a huge emphasis on creative projects that would end up substituting for 99 percent of all assignments.

So here I am in college. Once again I have magically bypassed taking any English courses for they have been substituted by honors courses which once again heavily focus on creativity. It wasn't until my second honors course did all these years of missed learning opportunities finally catch up to me. My professor would throw around these terms that were so foreign to me, yet everyone in the room understood them. In this course I wrote one large essay. Then came the time for a one-on-one essay meeting.

He loved my creativity. He hated my structure.

My professor did his best to help me, but I couldn't understand. My essay had potential, but that's where it stopped.

To this day I have gotten by with very little knowledge on how to write an essay, but maybe knowing how to write an essay isn't as important as I thought. Maybe the allowance of creativity was the most important lesson of all.