I had the great pleasure of taking English 225 on the Syntax of Sports with Mr. Patrick Barry. Not only does he care about the progress about his students as writers, but of his students as people. I always looked forward to go going to class, and while there, what new writer technique I would have the opportunity to learn that day. Mr. Barry has a great way of naming things, like the word “Kanka counting” for why we like even numbers for lists or in general, and “chonging” for when we take two words and mash them together to make a new word like spork or pinkberry. One day in March he had us talk about our favorite teachers and professors and what made them so, to get a sense of what is it that made them good. He said he would like to have a classroom environment where a student excitedly asks themselves every day, “what’s going to happen to my brain today?” In his class, it was being filled with what can I do to improve my writing, making it pop off the page.

The other great part about his course was weekly mandatory office hours meetings, where we had to sit down with that week’s paper and read aloud to him our words. While the first time was rather awkward, each time it got easier and at the end of the term I was sad to have to end them. In one of his “life advice” moments when talking about how to pick our classes for next semester, he said the best thing we can do is follow the teacher----not the subject, and to have a course where we write every week and get to talk to others about our writing.

Since the topic of the class was the Syntax of Sports, the main theme that guided us through readings and our papers was, “The words we choose change the world that people see.” Every week we had a new paper assignment to the tune of a “warm-up,” “scrimmage” and “game day,” where we used writer’s templates to flesh ideas out, produced a rough draft paper and then a final draft paper on a Thursday-Saturday-Monday schedule. Every part of the course was tailored to our success, and more importantly, got me more and more excited to write.

The grading system was not a traditional scale just like the Gateway course. Instead, we had categories like “Gratitude” and “Transfer” that had tasks that would amount to a B, B+ or A- grade. The more levels you do within the category, the higher your grade would be. As someone who greatly respected the opinion of Mr. Barry, I wanted to get all of it done and make him proud. Below are just a few examples of what I’ve produced for the class. My favorite writing ever has come out of the assignments in this subject, and I feel so lucky I got to take this course with Mr. Barry on a beautiful passion of mine; sport.