Reaction to Educational Autobiography

I was at first anxious to write my educational autobiography for an audience because, while I do think about the details of my formal and informal schooling often, I don’t usually share these thoughts with others. As always with my written work, I was worried that I would come off in a way that I had not intended, for which reason I opened my writing with a less formal anecdote, though in reading the essay again, I’ve found that I soon after fell into my old formalities that often accompany my writing. When speaking of my writing, my English teacher would often say that it comes across as if I am trying to impress someone, or that it is more or less pretentious, two things that I would not like my readers to feel; I simply do not know how to write in any other way. I suppose my way of writing comes partially from a need to disguise myself behind formalities, so that even while I am writing about emotional events in my life, it does not come across as so.

After writing my essay, I’d realised that I had not included many issues of how my education at school affected my culture at home; my recognition of a kinship with Richard Rodriguez in terms of feeling alienated from family and culture came a bit overdue. I did not speak of how I have learned a lot about myself simply by observing how I sometimes feel contempt for my uneducated family or upbringings. This is perhaps also why I write in the way I do: fearing a life similar to that of my family, I overcompensate by peppering my writing with uncommon words and aspire to grammar which is never anything short of proper.