Beginning of Essay
Memory can be so fickle. Like some great book that is slowly loosing its pages, you begin with an entire novel full of details and descriptions and, if you're not careful, you end up with nothing more than the cover and the brief synopsis on the back page. My n ....

Middle of Essay
.... the dictum “go to school or get a job”, at which point I became the world's greatest advocate of off-season learning. Besides, I was only fifteen and the workplace just wasn't ready for me. So I thumbed through the course book, singing a chorus of no's until I arrived on the Debate and Public Speaking page. There resided a large photograph of a boy confidently standing behind an ornate podium, clearly frozen in the middle of some captivating and influential argument. I read the passage describing the course and was immediately sold. How could a stuffy math class or a trivial course in art compare to “a course that teaches students the skil ....