Cole Tomlinson: My First ever Party

    When I was thinking about what story to tell, I had the moral being a growing up moment in mind. I thought of this kind of story because some of the best I've heard before followed this format. Since this was part of the rules, it worked out well. My story was about the first time I went to a party which was in 2017. Before, I always didn't like the idea of them because I thought they were "dangerous". The growing up moment was when I made the decision to go since I was finally taking a chance to see what parties were all about.

    I practiced public speaking by telling my story to some classmates. Since I think it's a skill everyone should have, I've been working on it ever since middle school. Today, I'm much more confident with myself when speaking in front of a crowd and times like these help me with that. I enjoyed the storytelling project because of how diverse the stories I heard were. They spanned from one's about taking a risk to one's essentially about finding yourself. 

    I learned that a lot of my classmates have had similar experiences to me. Many of the stories my partners had I could relate to, whether it be through experiencing the same thing or recognizing what they were talking about. I learned that something I saw as insignificant in my life actually had a large impact on it because of the way some people wrote about that certain event. This could mean that I take certain things for granted and don't really look back on what I actually learned from it if it wasn't very significant to me, but that changes among different students.