by Walter Dean Myers

  • Monster Summary

Steve Harmon , the novel’s protagonist—and, at times, its narrator—is a sixteen-year-old African-American student from Harlem. At the beginning of the novel, the reader learns that Steve is in prison awaiting trial for his alleged involvement in a murder. He writes in his diary to pass the time, chronicling his observations and anxieties while imprisoned. As a coping mechanism, Steve records his daily life in the format of a film script. Steve’s lawyer, Kathy O’Brien, coaches him on what to expect during his court hearing. Both Steve and James King , another man allegedly involved in the murder, have entered a plea bargain and must testify in court.

Steve and James are cross-examined by Sandra Petrocelli , the State Prosecutor. In her opening statement, she brands the accused men as “monsters” for the crimes they’ve committed. The use of the word “monster” references the novel’s title and its overall thematic significance. As the trial progresses, more witnesses are called to the stand. The trial proceedings are interrupted by a series of snippets that explore the relationship between Steve and James. Some of the accounts suggest that Steve and James barely know one another, while others show James alleging that Steve was the gunman in the robbery. Osvaldo Cruz , a Latino gang member also implicated in the crime, explains that he was pressured to participate in the robbery due to threats by Richard “Bobo” Evans.

Steve begins to think about his parents and their reactions to his arrest. He feels his father’s disappointment and his mother’s anxiety. When Osvaldo is called to testify, he explains that Steve was meant to serve as the lookout for a burglary. Though the individuals indicted in the crime had no intention of killing Mr. Nesbitt, the reader learns that Mr. Nesbitt’s own gun—pulled out in self-defense—was then turned on him. During Bobo’s testimony, he asserts that James King was the individual who actually pulled the trigger, subsequently killing Mr. Nesbitt. Bobo also claims that he “barely knows” Steve, but that he was supposed to be the “lookout” at the crime scene.

A few bystanders that have been called to the stand recount that they have witnessed only two people at the scene of the crime. These two people are allegedly Bobo and Osvaldo. Using these testimonies, Asa Briggs , the lawyer for James King, argues that neither Steve nor James can be placed at the crime scene. Kathy O’Brien, Steve’s lawyer, is doubtful of her client’s innocence. However, she advises Steve to refrain from writing anything incriminating in his journal in the event that it is seized by the court. In addition, she tells Steve that he should emphasize the distance between himself and James in order to ensure his own innocence. During Steve’s testimony, he explains that he has no recollection of his whereabouts during the day of the crime. He utilizes his oblivion as evidence that he is uninvolved in the crime.

O'Brien highlights the conflicting eyewitness accounts, thus pointing to their inconclusiveness. Though some common testimonies frame Steve as the lookout during the crime, O’Brien explains that this role is highly distinct from “murderer.” O’Brien enlists George Sawicki , the advisor of Steve’s high school film club, to serve as a character witness. Mr. Sawicki paints a humane and upright image of Steve to the jury. He emphasizes Steve’s excellence in film in order to point to the defendant’s alleged sensitivity and honesty. The lawyers give their closing speeches. The final verdict finds James King guilty of the murder of Mr. Nesbitt. Steve Harmon is acquitted.

Steve, elated by his acquittal, turns to hug O’Brien. However, his attorney coldly turns away. This reaction bothers Steve, and he ponders his lawyer’s impression of his own morality.

The novel jumps five months into the future. Steve’s life has, essentially, returned to normal. He continues journaling and filmmaking, which brings him happiness and purpose. However, his dad has moved away, thus creating distance within his family. Steve finds himself haunted by O’Brien’s callous reaction. Did O’Brien genuinely believe in Steve’s innocence? Or was she merely defending a “monster” because her job depended on it?

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Monster Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Monster is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Edgar Allan Poe

This depends on what you want to comment on. Can you be more specific? Is it a specific work that he has done?

what page number is "You do the crime, you do the time. You act like garbage, they treat you like garbage" on

Page numbers differ depending on your book copy but you can find this quote in chapter 6.

Read Pgs. 58-88 then answer the questions. Post-Reading Questions 1. What is the tone of Steve’s journal entry from July 8? 2. Why do you think Steve includes the dialogue between the officers about termites? 3. What are your impressions of Osvaldo? 4. Wh

Steve's tone is hopeful.... though he feels ignored and unseen during the trial proceedings, he is also bolstered by Sunsets interest in his screenplay.

The discussion about termites serves to illustrate the unimportance of the trial itself....

Study Guide for Monster

Monster study guide contains a biography of Walter Dean Myers, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

  • About Monster
  • Character List

Essays for Monster

Monster essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Monster by Walter Dean Myers.

  • Race and Identity: 'The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian' and 'Monster'
  • A Modernist Monster: Techniques and Social Messaging in Myers' Novel

Wikipedia Entries for Monster

  • Introduction
  • Themes and format
  • Autobiographical elements

essay on monster for class 1

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Research essay: a ‘monster’ and its humanity.

essay on monster for class 1

Professor of English Susan J. Wolfson is the editor of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Longman Cultural Edition and co-editor, with Ronald Levao, of The Annotated Frankenstein.  

Published in January 1818, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus has never been out of print or out of cultural reference. “Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment: A Creature That Defies Technology’s Safeguards” was the headline on a New York Times business story Sept. 22 — 200 years on. The trope needed no footnote, although Kevin Roose’s gloss — “the scientist Victor Frankenstein realizes that his cobbled-together creature has gone rogue” — could use some adjustment: The Creature “goes rogue” only after having been abandoned and then abused by almost everyone, first and foremost that undergraduate scientist. Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and CEO Sheryl Sandberg, attending to profits, did not anticipate the rogue consequences: a Frankenberg making. 

The original Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The 1818 novel appeared anonymously by a down-market press (Princeton owns one of only 500 copies). It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. The novelist proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage concoction at London’s Royal Opera House in August. That debut ran for nearly 40 nights; it was staged by the Princeton University Players in May 2017. 

In a seminar that I taught on Frankenstein in various contexts at Princeton in the fall of 2016 — just weeks after the 200th anniversary of its conception in a nightmare visited on (then) Mary Godwin in June 1816 — we had much to consider. One subject was the rogue uses and consequences of genomic science of the 21st century. Another was the election season — in which “Frankenstein” was a touchstone in the media opinions and parodies. Students from sciences, computer technology, literature, arts, and humanities made our seminar seem like a mini-university. Learning from each other, we pondered complexities and perplexities: literary, social, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical. If you haven’t read Frankenstein (many, myself included, found the tale first on film), it’s worth your time. 

READ MORE  PAW Goes to the Movies: ‘Victor Frankenstein,’ with Professor Susan Wolfson

Scarcely a month goes by without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events. The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-selling Reflections on the French Revolution recoiled at the new government as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, excoriated “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny.

Following suit, Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was on the same page: Any aristocracy was an “artificial monster,” the monarchy a “luxurious monster,” and Europe’s despots a “race of monsters in human shape.” Frankenstein makes no direct reference to the Revolution, but its first readers would have felt the force of its setting in the 1790s, a decade that also saw polemics for (and against) the rights of men, women, and slaves. 

England would abolish its slave trade in 1807, but Colonial slavery was legal until 1833. Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Apologists regarded the Africans as subhuman, improvable perhaps by Christianity and a work ethic, but alarming if released, especially the men. “In dealing with the Negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength ... would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” He meant Frankenstein. 

Mary Shelley heard about this reference, and knew, moreover, that women (though with gilding) were a slave class, too, insofar as they were valued for bodies rather than minds, were denied participatory citizenship and most legal rights, and were systemically subjugated as “other” by the masculine world. This was the argument of her mother’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which she was rereading when she was writing Frankenstein. Unorthodox Wollstonecraft — an advocate of female intellectual education, a critic of the institution of marriage, and the mother of two daughters conceived outside of wedlock — was herself branded an “unnatural” woman, a monstrosity. 

Shelley had her own personal ordeal, which surely imprints her novel. Her parents were so ready for a son in 1797 that they had already chosen the name “William.” Even worse: When her mother died from childbirth, an awful effect was to make little Mary seem a catastrophe to her grieving father. No wonder she would write a novel about a “being” rejected from its first breath. The iconic “other” in Frankenstein is of course this horrifying Creature (he’s never a “human being”). But the deepest force of the novel is not this unique situation but its reverberation of routine judgments of beings that seem “other” to any possibility of social sympathy. In the 1823 play, the “others” (though played for comedy) are the tinker-gypsies, clad in goatskins and body paint (one is even named “Tanskin” — a racialized differential).

Victor Frankenstein greets his awakening creature as a “catastrophe,” a “wretch,” and soon a “monster.” The Creature has no name, just these epithets of contempt. The only person to address him with sympathy is blind, spared the shock of the “countenance.” Readers are blind this way, too, finding the Creature only on the page and speaking a common language. This continuity, rather than antithesis, to the human is reflected in the first illustrations: 

essay on monster for class 1

In the cover for the 1823 play, above, the Creature looks quite human, dishy even — alarming only in size and that gaze of expectation. The 1831 Creature, shown on page 29, is not a patent “monster”: It’s full-grown, remarkably ripped, human-looking, understandably dazed. The real “monster,” we could think, is the reckless student fleeing the results of an unsupervised undergraduate experiment gone rogue. 

In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein pleads sympathy for the “human nature” in his revulsion. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health ... but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.” Repelled by this betrayal of “beauty,” Frankenstein never feels responsible, let alone parental. Shelley’s genius is to understand this ethical monstrosity as a nightmare extreme of common anxiety for expectant parents: What if I can’t love a child whose physical formation is appalling (deformed, deficient, or even, as at her own birth, just female)? 

The Creature’s advent in the novel is not in this famous scene of awakening, however. It comes in the narrative that frames Frankenstein’s story: a polar expedition that has become icebound. Far on the ice plain, the ship’s crew beholds “the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature,” driving a dogsled. Three paragraphs on, another man-shape arrives off the side of the ship on a fragment of ice, alone but for one sled dog. “His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering,” the captain records; “I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.” This dreadful man focuses the first scene of “animation” in Frankenstein: “We restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen-stove. By slow degrees he recovered ... .” 

The re-animation (well before his name is given in the novel) turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. A crazed wretch of a “creature” (so he’s described) could have seemed a fearful “other,” but is cared for as a fellow human being. His subsequent tale of his despicably “monstrous” Creature is scored with this tremendous irony. The most disturbing aspect of this Creature is his “humanity”: this pathos of his hope for family and social acceptance, his intuitive benevolence, bitterness about abuse, and skill with language (which a Princeton valedictorian might envy) that solicits fellow-human attention — all denied by misfortune of physical formation. The deepest power of Frankenstein, still in force 200 years on, is not its so-called monster, but its exposure of “monster” as a contingency of human sympathy.  

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How to Write a Monsters Essay?

Look through this How to Write a Monsters Essay? created by BookWormLab!

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Writing an essay about monsters is not a walk in the park. It is a deeply creative and difficult piece of academic work in terms of cultural, psychological, and societal analyses it stipulates. Students tasked with an essay devoted to monsters need to show a thorough cultural understanding of the topic of their essay, be it about a folkloric monster character or a fantasy one.

In this article, we will tell you what makes a monster essay so special, and guide you on how to write a decent essay on monster of your choice, apart from providing some original ideas on possible topics for this kind of essay.

How to write a monster essay

An essay about these creepy creatures – monsters, is not much different from any other college essay when it comes to structural composition and other formal requirements, including length. A typical high school or college paper about monsters as the main theme is 2–3 pages long, and it is usually an open-topic type of paper, i.e., you are responsible for choosing the topic. This freedom is both good and bad news since modern and classic literature and cinema offer us a whole army of monsters to choose from. Check out the very last chapter for some original ideas on topics of essays about monsters.

Meanwhile, you can try out [Company] for immediate and high-quality help with writing your essay assignment. This is a trustworthy academic support agency capable of writing a great essay devoted to the topic of monsters, as well as providing any other academic assistance, including editing, counselling, proofreading, grammar and format check & cleanup, etc.

If you are resolved on writing an essay by yourself, however, below please review several important steps you should consider taking:

  • Define a promising topic. Unless you already have a brilliant topic idea in mind, this step may require you to conduct thorough research – recalling the latest fantasy movies you’ve watched about monsters, checking out your folk literature, going online, and generating a couple of relevant search engine results. The result should be an interesting topic, that you find inspiring and can talk about describing its cultural significance, and societal meaning.
  • Make a thesis statement. Even an essay about such a popular topic as monsters must have a clear thesis statement. It can be your personal claim, an intriguing opinion you might have about your topic or an assertion that you can prove with reasoning and logic (it would be naïve to expect facts in connection with a fantasy topic).
  • Develop a good outline. For your writing to run smoothly, you need to follow a clear plan or an outline. A monster outline essay is equally important as the text of your essay.
  • Introduction (including some background information about the topic and a clear thesis statement);
  • The main body, which consists of arguments in the form of logic or reasoning. The main body is also the place to “present” your monster, and talk about its place in the society (culture, whether global or local).
  • Conclusion – reflect on the chosen topic and its cultural significance. Talk about how you managed to prove/disprove the central point you made in the introductory paragraph.
  • Check and edit. Give some time to carefully read your essay, perhaps after a small break. Edit and proofread your text.

We cannot stress enough that your writing would be easier if you spent a little time researching the topic. Even though your favourite monster may be “famous” and you may have plenty of information about it, some background research and extra online reading would always bring additional details (often unexpected), highlight the historical context, and open up new aspects and dimensions.

Monster essay topics

Below, please find several ideas for topics of essays on monsters. You are welcome to change and modify them should you find promising topics for your essay that you’d like to adjust and improve.

  • Vampires: discuss the historical origins and cultural connection of the vampire monsters. How they came into being, and what continues to make them an interesting topic for modern book and movie plots.
  • Zombies: explore the fears that zombies represent in the global culture. If you are knowledgeable in the local cultural aspects of the zombie phenomenon – that would make up an excellent essay topic!
  • Ghosts: what makes the fear of ghosts so ubiquitous? Pick up and explore a ghost story of your choice that is different from the mainstream ghost stories often presented in Hollywood movies.
  • Bigfoot: the fictitious and non-fictitious aspects of the Bigfoot. Which cultures and nations are more susceptible to the sighting and stories about Bigfoot, and why?
  • Loch Ness Monster: what does the Loch Ness Monster represent? Is it more of a legend or a scientific phenomenon? Talk about the origins of this legend/phenomenon.
  • Sirens: what is the exact mythological symbolism of sirens, and why stories about them were so popular during the age of Great Discoveries on the Sea?

Monster essay examples

To aid your writing work, we have located a couple of great examples of essays about monsters online. Check them out below.

monster essay example 1

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I’ve Taught Monsters

Helping students slay their worst fears with nothing more than a pencil, plenty of paper, and faith in the power of storytelling

essay on monster for class 1

I’ve taught monsters—ancient, ravenous monsters. Scylla and Charybdis, Grendel and his mother, and Polyphemus hurling rocks at the sea. Their stories are best taught out loud and without irony, lest dramatic interpretation give way to camp. When Beowulf dives into the “heaving depths of the lake” in pursuit of Grendel’s mother, I let my voice slip down as well, into dramatic, low tones to convey the dire threat as “the hero observed that swamp-thing from hell, / the tarn-hag in all her terrible strength,” then pitch my voice up into a frenzied crescendo, volume rising in tandem with the stakes, as Beowulf struggles to clout the fearsome she-monster on the head with his “war-sword.”

For over a decade, I taught monsters to the compliant, privileged, and well-nourished learners of a private school. My duty was clear: to guide them through the rigors of a classical middle school education, thus ensuring acceptance at the vaunted secondary school of their parents’ choice.

No matter how earnestly I threw myself into a no-holds-barred dramatic monologue, the vast distance of Beowulf’s time, language, and culture from our own would blunt the impact of the “tarn-hag.” Yet, even when I couldn’t deliver fearsome drama, my students would toss me a few points for commitment and effort. They appreciated that I was willing to humiliate myself in service to their education and a thousand-year-old horror story.

Sure, these students knew monsters: a few of the smaller horrors slipped through the cracks in their defenses—divorce, bad grades, the death of a pet. But, like Grendel and his mother, true terror remained distant, held at bay by a carefully crafted and maintained force field of wealth and privilege, safely and neatly shelved among Tolkien, Rowling, and Paolini before darkness fell.

Yes, yes , they’d nod. We understand, Mrs. Lahey. These monsters would have been terrifying for a Geat. Yes, yes, we know , Mrs. Lahey. Grendel and his mother represent the deep, eternal fears of humankind. Yes, we wrote your assignment in our plan book. We solemnly swear to read actively and reverently—one point for imagery, two for alliteration, three for a kenning.

And then, two years ago, I bade these privileged learners a tearful goodbye and set off for a distant socioeconomic shore inhabited by a very different type of student, where the teaching methods I’d used for years no longer translated.

Now, as a writing teacher in an inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility for adolescents, I teach the walking wounded of the opioid epidemic. Most of these kids have never heard of the swirling, toothed creatures of Greek mythology, let alone Grendel’s mother. However, they know monsters: monsters as ancient as their earliest memories, as harrowing as any nightmare.

A few lucky ones have supportive families, and some have even attended great schools staffed with effective teachers. They arrive well-prepared to continue plugging away at their grade-level work. Many, however, have no families and have attended dilapidated schools riddled with educational and social cracks. These students don’t have time to waste on dactylic hexameter or archaic imagery; they need a battle plan, and they need it now. Their monsters loom large, terrible, and close.

We don’t have a lot of time together due to the rehab’s therapy-heavy schedule and the perils of inadequate insurance coverage, so expediency is the new name of my teaching game. I have traded in Beowulf and the Aeneid for the more immediate and accessible works of Jandy Nelson, Sherman Alexie, and Stephen King.

I show up to class every day with a lesson plan, but until I take the emotional temperature of my students, I can’t know what lessons will work. I arrive at school armed with plans B, C, D, and E, with F and G filed away, just in case.

School begins with a walk from my renovated farmhouse classroom on the rehab grounds to the locked adolescent unit housed in the east wing. I enter the main door, pass a security desk, and enter a key code in order to gain entrance to the facility. The rehab treats men, women, and adolescents, but these populations are kept strictly segregated because estranged spouses, broken families, and abusive partners often occupy opposite wings of the same building.

Paper covers the windows of the entrance to the adolescent wing in a vain attempt to maintain visual and symbolic distance from the mental and physical threat of the adults, but voices seep in through the thin barrier. 

As the students gather in the common room, I read their faces, take in their postures, listen to their complaints and questions. By the time my students are assembled and the alarm on the exterior door is disabled in preparation for our departure, I’ve already calculated the likely success of lesson plans A through E and have hastily cobbled together H and I in response to the emotional temperature of the group. The class changes from day to day as wary new admissions come in and trusting veteran students are discharged. A single charismatic ringleader can persuade the rest of the class to give me the benefit of their collective doubt or upend the confidence of the entire group.

On the worst days, when fuses are short and emotions are brittle, I toss my well-laid plans to the winds as we walk the short distance from the unit to the classroom and, once again, put my trust in Stephen King.

King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft has become a particular favorite among my students. My students know kids like the young Stephen King—heck, they may even be young Stephen Kings—writing stories in their beds under the eaves and playing in the Barrens of their small New England towns. Many of these kids have also lived poor—“Dogpatch with no sense of humor”—but it’s King’s struggles with addiction that give him immediate credibility in my classroom.

My copy of the book falls open to the sections I read most often in order to frame writing assignments. Sometimes, it falls open to the first section of the book, where King recounts his earliest memories, expressed as snapshots from a “herky-jerky” childhood. He writes of medical horrors, farting babysitters, and wasp-filled cinderblocks with a clarity and humor that captures the attention of even my most distractable students. In response to these scenes, I ask my students to emulate King’s style and describe their own snapshots, no matter how fragmented. Most of the time, this assignment is a hit, but for some, it’s torture. Students who’ve endured nightmarish years in group homes and foster care, or under the wrath of abusive parents, push their chairs away from the offending blank paper, proclaiming, “I don’t remember anything from my childhood.” These protests usually give way to a storytelling session in which they tell, rather than write, their histories while I take notes and guide them back toward the intimidating permanence of ink on paper.

A student may begin her essay in the first person, up close and personal with her memories, then pull back as her story begins to swerve too close to the painful territory. Her first-person “I” falls away to a second-person “you,” or even a third-person “she,” as my student struggles to distance herself from the uncle tapping on her bedroom door or her mother passed out on the hallway floor. My job is not to analyze the reasons for her distance, but to help her locate her first-person “I,” to face her monsters head-on, from the introduction all the way through to the dénouement. 

On other days, when the class needs to be swept up in the vast panorama of a narrative rather than a mere snapshot, I read the final section of On Writing , in which King recounts being run down by a negligent driver on the back roads of western Maine. Before I begin, I ask my students to raise their hands when they hear something that strikes them as great descriptive language, writing that transports them out of the classroom and onto the shoulder of Maine State Route 5 or the helipad at Central Maine Medical Center. Hands fly up as they hear about King’s leg, reduced to “so many marbles in a sock,” and the Pepsi that his wife, Tabitha, brings him,  described as, “sweet, and cold, and good.” Maybe, just maybe, a student will remark that the description of the Pepsi sounds a lot like the plums from the poem I read to them the week before, which were also “so sweet, / and so cold.” It’s only happened once, but it was glorious.

My favorite assignment, however, is one in which we name our monsters, and the excerpt I read for this assignment is a favorite among my students. In it, King recounts the moment he realized his drinking had spiraled out of control. Rather than deciding to get well, he doubled down on his addiction with the only hand he had left: lying and secrecy.

But, for the ten years when King’s conscious mind was occupied with that losing hand, King’s unconscious was hard at work, obsessively chronicling in his stories the circumstances, narratives, and, most notably, the monsters of his addiction. This was the decade of the alien-cum-cocaine protagonist in The Tommyknockers and of Annie Wilkes, the drug-pushing, psychopathic nurse in Misery . As King admits in On Writing , “Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer.”

My students get it. Even when they have not yet admitted out loud that they have a problem with drugs or alcohol, even when they have been committed to rehab against their will, even when they are fighting against the reality of their addictions with teeth and nails and tears, they get it. They know what it’s like when the monsters escape from their subconscious even as they painstakingly lock their doors and cover their windows with the thickest paper they can find.

Once Stephen King has revealed the true form of his most secret monsters, I ask my students to do the same. “If Annie Wilkes is Stephen King’s addiction incarnate, what’s yours? Journey into the dark places—the black tarn, a haunted basement, or back alley—and report back to us. Show; don’t tell. Help us see your monster’s sharp teeth or lice-infested pelt; smell its moldering rot or acidic tang; and hear the drip, drip, drip of its copious, greenish drool.”

The goal of the lesson is to help them expose, describe, and contain their private terrors on the page, to imprison them within the safe confines of ink, line, and margin. If I’ve done my job well, and have managed to infect my students with a tiny bit of the enthusiasm that I worked up during my introduction to the assignment, nine out of ten students will agree to put pen to paper. I used to let the tenth student off the hook, particularly if he’d just come off a bad detox or if she’d recently had a grueling therapy session, but not anymore.

Now, I view a 90 percent response rate as a solid starting place, a preliminary offer, if you will, and an opportunity to hone my negotiation skills. I distribute pencils and paper to the 90 percent, and while they work on their first drafts, I guide the tenth toward the creepy Barrens of his own history and hand him back the pencil he tossed at me in frustration. In the two years I’ve been teaching in the rehab, my win-loss record has improved steadily, mainly because I’ve heard all the excuses before.

I’ve already dropped out of high school, so this is bullshit is popular, usually uttered while tipping back on two chair legs and pushing my proffered pencil and paper to the far side of the desk.

I know how to write already is another perennial classic.

You can’t make me do jack shit is my favorite—and, unfortunately for the student, not strictly true. Participation in an education program is a mandatory part of graduating from rehab, and a gentle reminder usually clears up any confusion on this point. 

While I’ve learned how to respond to these protestations, I’ve also learned that the excuses which students offer are hardly ever the real cause for their reluctance to write. My job, then, is not to deflect or smack down their excuses, but to find out more about the journey they’ll have to take in order to get a glimpse of their monsters.

For many of these kids, writing can be just as frightening as conjuring the monsters of their addictions. Some of my students fell through the gaps years ago and have remained undetected or overlooked for so long that they can hardly string together a coherent paragraph. Others have undiagnosed learning disorders that render their printed work illegible—and unintelligible when read aloud. For others, the monsters are simply too big to fit on one sheet of paper. Fortunately, the team of therapists who support my efforts in the classroom and counsel the kids once they return to the safety of the ward stock plenty of paper for their use. Reams of it, if needed.

Once I’ve persuaded my students to participate, and they have begun to get those first stubborn and awkward words down, I write, too, even if it’s just my grocery list. They need me to go away for a bit, to give them time and space to establish a rhythm. As distracted as I may appear, I’m in full-on, peripheral-vision, class-monitor mode. I hold my breath as the scritch-scratch of pencils on paper begins hesitantly, then rises to a crescendo, and eventually slows as they find natural endpoints to their descriptions.

As they finish, I ask for permission to read their work and thank them when they give it.

Their monsters are as diverse as the students. Some are literal monsters lifted straight from horror films or comic books, caricatures of evil crafted under the sixteen-point, centered title, My Monster.

“My monster is green and orange. It’s something that is fun but not good for me,” one student writes in a page of simple sentences and elementary vocabulary.

Another student conjures his monster in more subtle shades: “something like impure, filthy, conspicuously unclean” that “walked on two feet, kind of dragging himself along like he was both emotionally and physically exhausted.”

Some of these monsters lie, feigning love and comfort. “My demon feeds off me making mistakes and bad decisions. It knows that when I feel bad about myself, I’m far more likely to run back into its arms, so it’s always there. Just waiting.”

Some monsters are not monsters at all but rather ordinary people or objects in situations beyond their control. One boy likens his addiction to a baseball that craves flight and the free trajectory of a home run yet knows it will crash to earth, unprotected and adrift. The ball secretly yearns for the safety and comfort of a catcher’s mitt, and thus, “My monster is a baseball game with a batter who will never miss.”

Once they have completed a preliminary description of their monster, I then ask them to imagine their monsters’ vulnerabilities, small chinks in the impenetrable armor, the soft underbelly hidden beneath the poisonous spines. The students who are just beginning their journeys through recovery often report that they don’t see any vulnerabilities. Their monsters are omniscient, omnipotent forces of nature, too big to defeat in battle. Two or three weeks in, after patient, thorough examination with their therapists and counselors, they begin to spot potential weaknesses in their addictions, small imperfections where an arrow or well-sharpened spear might find purchase.

I ask them about these weaknesses because once we’ve dragged their monsters into the light of our classroom, it’s time to muster our collective forces and form a plan of attack. Some monsters are afraid of the light; others run shrieking from a show of courage; and yet others can be vanquished with a blade thrust straight through the heart. We plan, we muster, we sharpen our weapons, and we find the surest path to victory over our addictions incarnate.

No matter the assignment, I’ve had to adjust my perception of what makes for a successful day of teaching. I used to measure successful teaching with points, grades, and handily completed units. Wins and losses were calculated in neat, orderly rows of numbers in my grade book and on report cards full of letter grades. Today, success is an independent reading book opened, an emotional bond forged, a trust extended.

On my best days, I collect a full complement of essays, and one or two of the kids thank me for class as they head back to the adolescent unit for group therapy or to the basketball court for a game of Horse. On my worst, when I’ve been called a fucking bitch or, worse, ignored for two hours straight, I drive home wondering why I subject myself to such frustrating, recalcitrant hoodlums.

The answer, as many teachers know, is that the kids who call me a fucking bitch and make a show of ignoring me for two hours are the ones who need me the most. I don’t go back week after week in order to feel good about my own teaching; I go back to feel good about their learning. I go back to help them find their first-person “I” and to help them translate their stories into a language the rest of the world can understand. But most of all, I go back because my monsters look a heck of a lot like theirs: slippery, sneaky assholes that clamber from the mouths of sweet-smelling wine bottles and drift on the air in a beckoning, sly reminder of the high life.

Sure, I miss Grendel and his mother, and I admit I can no longer recite the family lineage of Scylla and Charybdis with the ease I once did. I miss being able to go on autopilot, knowing my students will complete an assignment on their own while I get some grading done. I miss the warm glow of my students’ reflected academic glory.

My students don’t win awards, academic honors, or graduate with golden cords draped over their shoulders. They do, however, slay terrible, fearsome monsters, armed with nothing but a pencil, plenty of paper, and faith in their first person.

* Illustration by Mary Dorfner Hay

nice story nice story

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Monster Essay Examples and Topics

Steve harmon in the novel monster by walter dean myers.

In the novel Monster by Walter Dean Myers Steve Harmon is a black sixteen year old that is on trial for allegedly taking part in felony murder. However Steve is innocent or at the very least can’t be proven guilty for multiple reasons such as…

Monster by Walter Dean Myers Analysis

In the book Monster, by Walter Dean Myers, the readers explore the American legal system through the eyes of a young African American boy named Steve Harmon. The author does an impeccable job delivering the truth of the American judicial system to the readers, by…

Monster by Walter Dean Myers Literary Analysis

The US justice system brings an aura of brutalizing nature. In Walter Dean Myers’s story Monster, the main character Steve Harmon, depicted as a “monster,” fights for not just his trial, but also his true personality. He is accused of participating in a felony murder…

The Monstrosity of Sin in the Divine Comedy

Encountering Three Beasts As Dante awakes from the night of absolute terror that he’s passed in the dark wood, he looks up at the first rays of the rising sun appearing at the top of a hill in front of him. A glimmer of hope…

The Stages of Creating the First-Ever Zombie

But where did this monster of an idea come from? Many would credit the creation of the first “zombie” to the experience of Haitian slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries. The inhumanity of this time period wasn’t due to the presence of shuffling, mindless,…

The Monsters Beneath My Bed

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a petrifying fear of monsters. Whether they were really daunting terrors waiting to abduct my soul, or just swaying, lifeless shadows, I’ll never really know. My fear for monsters may be the reason why I…

Alone in the Dark: Kitchen Nightmares

To my proper, a suspicious in shape of armour, maintaining a very sharp sword. In advance, a couple of locked doorways that closed as i arrived on this ground. So i choose to go to my left, closer to the unknown. This path leads me…

Depiction of Modern Social Issues in the Frankenstein: Disability Diseases and Issue of Blending into the Society

As many many years go on and antique items and ideas become flushed with the new generations becoming technical minded and newer equipment, but problems and difficulties will remain in human lives forever. There will always be a time of misfortune, death, and conflict. Back…

Rosalee Ramer – the Youngest Female Monster-Truck Driver in America

It is quite amazing when you see new feats being accomplished in sports or hobbies. Whether it be the older person ever to do something, the fastest ever to do it, or even the youngest ever. That is what we have in this video, the…

Actions of the Monster in Frankenstein and the Responsibilities of Victor

Who’s Fault is it? In the book, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley many murders are committed by Victor Frankenstein’s monster. Because Frankenstein created the monster, he finds himself responsible for the atrocities committed throughout the novel just as a parent can be found responsible for their…

Analyzing the Character Cookie Monster in the Sesame Street Show

The Cookie Monster is a classic children’s character from the long-running show “Sesame Street”. He has spent the majority of the last 47 years on air scarfing down cookies like it’s nobody’s business. Those cookies have contributed heavily to the many awards the show has…

The Hard to Reach Loch Ness Monster’s Myth

Informative Essay: Loch Ness Monster Envision yourself, on the peaceful sea, but then you see an odd creatures’ tail. Many people claim the Loch Ness monster is real, and many have actually claimed to have actually seen it. Although some claim it is a waste…

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essay on monster for class 1

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The monster of 1st grade, class A.

essay on monster for class 1

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English Chapters (67 chs)

Multilingual chapters (57 chs), chapters by source, latest uploaded.

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Monster Essay Examples

The little green monster: analysis of the unique imagination of haruki murakami.

The unique imagination of Haruki Murakami is show through his short story, The Little Green Monster. If you were to walk into a bookstore, it is very likely that you will come across several copies of Haruki Murakami’s books. This is no surprise as the...

Examining the "Monster" Lurking Within the Wallpaper

Monster culture symbolizes what we see in ourselves. In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents a narrative where the main character represents a “monster” because of her nervous condition. The narrator, an upper-class middle-aged woman battling from postpartum depression. Her husband...

Symbolism in Monster

In the novel Monster by Walter Sean Myers, Steve Harmon, a 16 year old black boy from Harlem is put on trial for murder. Throughout the story, Myers develops not only the plot, but characterization of Steve very strongly, and within this many manners of...

Summary of the Movie the Monster

Some people talk about fighting monsters metaphorically, what if the monster was real and dangerous. The movie The Monster, was written in 2015 and filmed in Ottawa, Canada and then later released in November of 2016. The movie is staged in the woods for most...

Analysis of the Novel Monster by Walter Dean Myers

Being a teenager is a very difficult time frame in the novel “Monster. ” The theme of the novel is a central perspective. The main character Steve Harmon, a sixteen year old teenage boy who is struggling to keep his life in order, fights through...

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