Autobiography help

THIS IS AN OLD POST I UPDATED BECAUSE IT USED TO INCLUDE THE NAME OF WHERE I WORK. THIS IS FROM LAST YEAR. NO WORRIES, EVERYBODY. SORRY ABOUT THE CONFUSION.

I'm working on my autobiography for Disney. The deadline is tomorrow. Anybody want to go through this long thing and make some suggestions?


Emily's Autobiography:

I let things slide off me like water off a duck’s back. It helps in my line of work. I’m a high school teacher at MY SCHOOL, the now one-year-old high school in the heart of Los Angeles gang territory. I have Salvi MS-13s in the room with Mexican 18th street kids, all working together to write persuasive essays and read Julius Cesar. It’s a job that requires a little political finesse.
It’s all fairly new to me. A year ago I was teaching high school in rural North Carolina, an hour south of my hometown of Raleigh. There, the big event came when the seniors on the football team put a spraypainted-blue goat on the roof the week of Homecoming. Here, people get shot. These kids have no idea what it’s like to walk around barefoot in the woods. It’s a different world.
The kids always ask me why I came to LA. At first, I didn’t want to tell them because I didn’t think they’d understand. Back home, everybody thinks producers hang around on street corners looking for the next big movie, and it should be another month or two before I’m a household name. They don’t really get it. Here, though, the kids know. They may not live in Beverly Hills, but they’re just as moved as anybody else by the industry around them. One of my students just proofread my script and found a mistake. I was so proud.
Because it’s tough for them. People hear about the difficult trials of teaching in Downtown LA. I’ve lost a student to a gang shooting. Several of my boys get shot at or jumped on a weekly basis. Almost none of them can read or write at nearly the level they should. But they’re just as smart as any country kid from rich white stock, and I think the world should know.
That’s the kind of thing that drives me to write. When I was a reporter for The Washington Daily News in Washington, North Carolina, I was miserable. Everybody hates reporters, and I hated calling people who hated me, so that didn’t work out. Five months there and I was ready to split, so I decided to teach. My mother was a teacher. I just grew up knowing how.
But while I try to turn out better readers and writers and sudoku puzzlers, I’ve been missing my own true love. I write. I have written since that time I won a contest with a story I wrote for a class, a story about my lousy dad and his lousy house boat. I got a BA in 1999 and an MA in 2000, both in creative writing from East Carolina University. When I started teaching, I just always assumed I’d get back to the writing when I had time. I make as much of it as I can, but it’s difficult when you have essays to grade and yearbook pages to edit.
All I really want to do is tell stories. Like Dickens, who spread his tales out over magazines, one chapter a week to make sure people kept coming back. So I tell them to my kids, and they listen enraptured.
When I was in my mom’s class in middle school I used to help other people with their essays. When I was in high school, I was always the leader on group projects. My favorite was the time I made The Song of Roland into a play with a painted cardboard backdrop and sock puppets. Some would consider that nerdy; I call that the only project our teacher still remembers from that class.
I’m a leader, an educator, a writer. I have to be a showrunner. Heck, I run a show right now. You should see the alternate scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire my eleventh-graders created. Hilarious. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a seventeen-year-old Latina fake a crazy Blanche DuBois with a “Southern” accent that sounds more like a drunk exotic dancer. The kind of things I’ve seen these kids do are priceless character moments. I plan to put them to good use.