“I’m so bad at this,” she said, shaking her red-orange hair. Michaela was standing in the middle of the soccer field holding a ball in her hands. She was trying to juggle it off her thighs, but couldn’t do it more than three times in a row.

“No, you’re not,” I said. “Lots of the other kids are having trouble too.”

She shook her head again. Without even noticing the other kids scattering after their balls as if they were trying to capture little runaway pets, she stuck out her bottom lip.

“Listen Michaela,” I said, “When I was your age, I couldn’t even juggle the soccer ball, let alone juggle it three times.”

“But you can juggle it like a thousand times now, and I can’t even get to four. It’s not fair,” she said.

Michaela pounded her soccer ball onto the ground and sat down on it. Her elbows rested on her
knees and her chin came down on her fists. I sat down next to her.

“Michaela, how old are you?”

“Ten,” she said jutting her chin out slightly.

“Do you know how old I am?”

“No.”

“I’m seventeen. I’ve had seven years to practice my juggling and to get better at it. That’s all it takes, practice. All you have to do is try to juggle the ball five times every day, and more when you can do that. Eventually, you’ll be able to juggle more than I can,” I said, looking at her with conviction.

She was staring at the ground pulling tufts of grass up and piling little haystacks on top of her cleats. I could tell she wasn’t sure whether to believe me or not. I got up and went to help some of the other kids, to give her a chance to think. Helping them seemed to mix encouragement in equal parts with leaving them alone with the challenge. One of the boys had given up altogether and was sitting on his soccer ball trying to peel an orange he’d kept from snack time. Our coach called the kids around. Michaela got up and pouted her soccer ball up to the rest of the group. Matthew ran up to me on his way to the group and handed me his orange.

“Will you peel this for me?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

I took the orange. The skin was slippery and slightly more yellow than orange. I thought about how hard it is to peel an orange. You have to dig your fingernail in far enough to get under the peel, but not so far as to puncture the flesh. Each piece is independent and seldom do you get a piece that makes the next one easier to peel. I poised the orange on my fingertips and tried to peel the first few pieces. Those are toughest; the skin is always the hardest and won’t stay connected. I could feel bits of grainy peel under my fingernails. The kids started walking to lunch.

“Here you go,” I said handing the orange back to Matthew, with a thick peel “pull tab” rising from the top. “I got it started; you should be able to take it from here.”

Things to Notice about this Essay

1. The author chooses an appropriately focused topic: a brief moment, a short pair of conversations in a single day of summer work.

2. A sense of the writer’s talents as a writer and as a teacher are clear from this story.

3. The strategy is subtle, leaving most of the conclusions to the reader.

4. The essay is very short, banking on the reader to get to the point.

5. This essay uses a high-risk strategy. Will the reader conclude the author is coming to college to play soccer or to study child development? The author is counting on the story to carry the meaning and omits the “From this I have learned….” Conclusion. It works, but just barely.