Something I've discovered over the years is that a surprising number of adults remember one (or more) of the compositions they wrote in school. They may not be able to recall the name of a single teacher or classmate, but sometimes with extraordinary clarity (and variously with pride, anger, or embarrassment), they remember their youthful essays.

After reading these diverse recollections, see if there's a school composition that you can't forget--whether you wrote it last year or a half-century ago.

• Brian Moore on Ambitions
  When I was 14 we were asked to write an essay about our ambitions in life. I wrote all night. I was, for the first time in my life, inspired. . . . I wrote that I would become a great poet, that I would devote my life to the composition of a masterpiece and that, at the age of 30, coughing blood in a last consumptive frenzy, I hoped to die, my gift still clear and unmuddled. This essay I submitted to my English master who, the following day, came to my desk, took my ear between his nicotined thumb and forefinger and led me before the class to read my essay aloud. Oh, what a fine foil I must have seemed for the exercise of his lumpish, pedagogic wit, what a perfect victim with which to win amusement from a class of captive boys!
  
  But he is dead now, my master. I can no longer hate him for his use of me as a hunchback for his sallies.
  (Brian Moore, "Preliminary Pages for a Work of Revenge." Ploughshares, 1974)
   
• G. C. Harcourt and the Beginning of Wisdom
  In the matter of faith as in my then political views, I was a carbon copy of particularly my father's views, even up to my sixth form (university entrance) years. I remember writing an essay on the illegality of coal miners striking (because coal was an essential commodity for us all), clearing the arguments with my father, and getting a very rude shock when it was returned with a low mark because the teacher wrote, correctly, that it was so intolerant and one-sided--the beginning of wisdom indeed!
  (Geoff Harcourt, "Political Economy, Politics and Religion: Intertwined and Indissoluble Passions," 1998. On Skidelsky's Keynes and Other Essays: Selected Essays of G. C. Harcourt. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
   

• Mary Ellyn Sandford's Summer Vacation
  I opened my black and white composition book. I tried to ignore the huge red U for "unsatisfactory" that partly covered the title, "My Summer Vacation." I remembered Mrs. Kelly's comments without even looking at them.

  It has been brought to my attention that this composition is about your last year's summer vacation, and you have already written about the same trip for a composition last year during the fourth grade. Therefore, this assignment is unsatisfactory. Your penmanship is also unsatisfactory.

  I didn't care about the penmanship comment. That was on every assignment I turned in. What bothered me was that Mrs. Kelly would not accept my composition about my train trip to Denver. The only trip I had ever gone on in my whole life had been the trip to Denver. In the fourth grade, my composition had been about all the things I had seen from the train windows on the way to Denver. For the fifth grade, I wrote a whole new composition about the hotel in Denver with the glass elevators.
  (Mary Ellyn Sandford, "The Back of David's Head." Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul, ed. by Jack Canfield et al. Open Road Media, 2012)
   
• Margaret Cho in the Principal's Office
  The essay that made me realize I was a writer was handwritten. It was a scathing criticism of the teacher and the values held by the school. It was personal and it was nasty and it was sarcastic, and I wish that I could print here what was written there, but the essay was handed in and then sent directly to the principal's office along with yours truly some hours later.
  
  The principal, a Nervous Nellie of a woman, breathed hard as she read my essay aloud back to me. She read passages, which I cannot remember now (I wish I did) and then said, "I must admit this is good writing, but . . ." and then proceeded to try to punish me verbally, but not having anything really to say except compliments, she couldn't really go anywhere with the insults. She knew I was smart and she couldn't punish me for it. She knew what I had produced was satire, but she didn't understand it and she didn't know what to do with it and so she just kind of sputtered out. I left the principal's office and wandered in the weird space between the classrooms and the teachers' lounge. I took the long way back because I treasured the silence of the hallways and the kids all in their desks and me free to roam without even a heavy wooden hall pass or a need to go to the bathroom.
  (Margaret Cho, Foreword to Breakfast on Mars and 37 Other Delectable Essays, edited by Rebecca Stern and Brad Wolfe. Roaring Book Press, 2013)
   
• Kurosawa on the Composition He Should Have Written
  Because I understood and enjoyed reading descriptions of natural settings so much at this time, I was influenced by them. Later I wrote a composition that my grammar teacher Ohara Yoichi praised as the best since the founding of Keika Middle School. But when I read it over now, it's precious and pretentious enough to make me blush.
  
  As I think back, I wonder why I didn't write about that long red wall I walked along as if being carried in a stream, on my left in the morning and my right in the afternoon. That wall protected me from the wind in the wintertime, but in summer it made me suffer with the heat it reflected from the blazing sun. It's too bad. When I try to write about that wall today, I cannot do it. And when the Great Kanto earthquake came, the wall fell down; not a single brick of it remains.
  (Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, 1981. Translated by Audie E. Bock. Vintage Books, 1983)
   
• Kierkegaard's Composition on the Immortality of the Soul
  From my school days, I especially recall that a composition of mine on the immortality of the soul was extravagantly praised and read aloud by the teacher because of the excellence of language as well as the content. Alas, alas, alas! I threw away this composition long ago. How unfortunate! My doubting soul perhaps would have been captivated by it, by the language as well as by the content. So this is my advice to parents, superiors, and teachers--that they urge the children in their charge to keep the Danish compositions written in the fifteenth year. To give this advice is the only thing I can do for the benefit of the human race.
  (Søren Kierkegaard, "Diapsalmata" in Either/Or, 1843. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1987)