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Free Things They Carried Essays: Life Lessons With Mr. Watson

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Life Lessons with Mr. Watson It was one of those days. First semester, sophomore year. I had just returned from lunch where I was playing basketball like a maniac. Now I was on the way to my my honors English class where I was most likely going to fall asleep in the first 20 minutes. I sat down, and Mr. Watson, a bulky middle aged English teacher, had a prompt on the board to write a paragraph about the symbolism in the book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This book did not have a strong impact on me since the characters remained static throughout the book and the plot was very anticlimactic. I was just about as excited about this class as I was translating the Chinese Scrolls. Jesse, my admirable basketball buddy, felt the same …show more content…

Watson. I walked into the classroom with Cole, and we both joked around with Watson about the seating chart until the 3rd period bell rung. Cole and I took our seats in the back of the classroom and the class began. Watson started by talking about the new book we were reading titled The Things They Carried, a book of war stories contrasting the difference between real and true stories. The difference between real and true removed the emotion I experienced from this book. The author, Tim O’Brien, said that not all of the stories in the book were true, which ruins the purpose of the book. I was almost crying at one point of the novel but I then realized that it didn’t actually happen so my emotion was revoked. Slightly later in the semester our class read another book called Catcher in the Rye. This book had a similar character style to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which the main character was a dynamic character who greatly changed throughout the course of the story. I was actually somewhat interested about this author who wrote this book: J.D. Salinger. And as was Mr. Watson. Here is where my real English journey had led

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