Abdul Moaeed

English 110

Literacy Narrative           

                            The peanuts movie: Cursive or failure

  “ Will you start writing cursive before I fail you? “ These are the words that have haunted me since my last year of elementary school. Charlie Brown was seen on tv as an amiable person , but this Charlie Brown was my teacher, who was a harsh person, who used to yell at kids to write cursive. The day he yelled at me to write cursive brought waterfalls to my eyes. This day transformed me and made me comprehend the importance of failure. No matter how much you fail, push yourself to do it even without an ultimatum being given or not.

      Once I reached 5th grade the thoughts that ran into my mind didn’t exactly match my perception of how I thought it’ll be like.As everybody is seated in class, we get a long introduction on the man himself, Mr.Charlie Brown. The point that scared 10 year old me was his obligatory rule of having students write nothing but cursive in his class. The day that was said in class, a packet was given out based on the script alphabet, as I look more into it I get nervous and scared. My first attempts to try and write cursive was a complete failure but, at the same time I’m trying to convince myself of the benefits for learning cursive, for one being a signature. As time goes on I am Practicing and practicing,and I have a hard time learning cursive. I practiced at home everyday after school,because there was a certain deadline and as he said “ I will be checking your notebooks in class next week,and I better see no print writing. “ I slowly started giving up and what I decided to do was write in print,but make the lines and letters touch like it was cursive. As time came closer to the deadline, I started panicking and started asking my family for help,and well it was not working,so at that point I decided to give up and just hopefully go for it without anything being said to me in class about it,but boy was I wrong.

    The day has come,the day of the glorious notebook check,I walk in the class nervous,and just trying to get to my seat. As I get to my seat I started practicing my writing before Mr. Brown started looking at notebooks. Pencil to paper, still nothing cursive written on my paper,just sloppy print writing.” Everybody today is the day,today is the day I will be checking notebooks to make sure everybody is writing cursive in the class. “ Those words gave me the anxiety of a lifetime,sitting down sweating looking around the room as names were being called for the notebook check. “Mr.Moaeed could you come up for a notebook check” Uh-Oh I thought to myself, I get up and go as I am doing that ,I kept praying and praying. Mr. Brown was known for having the same name as a cartoon character,but he was also known for his famous yelling,which whenever it did happen the whole floor would hear it. Standing besides his desk,he finally opens my notebook,and looks at my sloppy “pri-ursive” I didn’t know what to call it,but a mixture of print and cursive. One minute into the notebook check,Mr.Brown’s voice gets loud “What kind of nonsense is this writing,I gave you so much time to learn it” nervous and shaky i say “ I-I-I-I uh-uh” in utter disappointment and with a full red face filled with pique he told me “ In my class print is not acceptable in my classroom,either you learn how to write cursive or I will do whatever it takes to fail you.” As I hear that my eyes start tearing up ,and I get my notebook back and head back to my seat in complete waterfalls coming from my eyes. That was the day I told myself , enough is enough I will learn, and write cursive.

       School was over, it was time to go home ,and as I got home I threw my bookbag on my bed and said “ I am not getting out of this bed until I know how to write cursive.” Pencil in my hand, notebook on the bed, and my brother’s laptop next to me with a youtube video playing on how to write cursive. I watched the video over ,and over as I kept writing and writing the alphabet in cursive. My hands started getting tired but finally I got the hang of it,I wrote my name in cursive and was staring at it for 10 minutes because of how proud I was for learning how to write cursive. Happy as ever I ran out of my room and started showing my parents and siblings what I had written ,and my mom had told me “ I am so proud of you.” Excitement flowed all throughout my body,happy to be just wanting to go to class to show my teacher.The next school day , Mr.Brown had told me “ After you copy the notes for this section,I want to see if you are writing cursive.” Knowing I know how to write cursive now , even if it was not that good of a handwriting , my cursive was there , surely after he checked it he told me that my cursive is good in place and that I should be proud of myself for the work I did.One thing I learned was,you’ll never learn something if you don’t put the effort needed to fix the problems you have.

      So,from hard work and dedication I got what was needed to get done and the story leading up to how I did it Amazes me in everyday life as I think back to a moment when I gave up,but got right back and finished my job.  After learning how to write cursive and doing all of the classwork for the year,I passed and graduated from “The impossible class of Charlie Brown.”No matter if there is an Ultimatum or not ,always do what you have to do,no matter how tough it may be,never give up you’ll get better with every failure you take. This moment always pushed me to do good in every single class after,it pushed my writing skills above and it proved to me a symbol of never giving up and the greatness of it.