As a fun diversion, the below is a school assignment my mom sent me recently and which I apparently wrote when I was 11. What the exact assignment was is likely lost to time. The story itself reflects at best a medium understanding of fish biology, but I think that is compensated by an excellent showing of story structure and that certain je ne sais quoi of PatInTheWorld writing. Please enjoy:

Hi! I’m Mr. Fishy Dude! I would love to tell you a strange story of adventure and sadness. It’s a story of hard work and mayhem. Yeah, but who cares?

My story starts one nice spring day, when I and one hundred thousand other fish suddenly got this strange feeling that we should go on a mission to lay eggs and die for our offspring.

Welcome to the ocean with me and a school of one hundred thousand fish. Due to just plain instinct, we are going from this ocean into the estuaries and rivers. From there, we will go further into the streams and creeks to our spawning grounds. Exciting, huh?

When we first started migrating, nothing much was happening. We were following the distant smell of our spawning grounds, and having smaller fish for lunch – the usual. Then, out of nowhere, a school of striped bass came along! I guess I forgot to mention that I’m a herring. So striped bass are bigger than us and to them, we’re lunch! So, we dodged, we swam, but in the end, one forth [sic] of us got digested. Now, we were only 75,000 fish. We were all sad at the loss of our companions. That will always be in my mind, along with a deep fear of striped bass.

We swam on. Very soon, though, we ran into a fisherman’s net. All of us escaped through holes just big enough for us. We also saved most of the fish from another school, but they’d already lost a lot of their fish. That school swam on with us for awhile [sic], but unfortunately, we must have gotten greedy, because some more of us died because of lack of food. I’m so sorry that we were greedy.

After that, we had finally found, by following the scent of the distant spawning ground, what we had traveled the ocean for; the estuaries and rivers.

When we got to the estuaries and rivers, that other school split up from us. They asked if we would meet again, and I said it was always a possibility. After swimming around for a while, I got the feeling that something bad was going to happen. And it did. It was a horrible scene! Our fish were just being ripped apart, stomach and eyes flying. I guess I’ll always have nightmares about it. The striped bass were back! One fourth of us perished. Our school only had fifty six thousand, two hundred fifty fish left in it. After that terrible scene, we saw another poor school get caught in a gill net and choked in mud. Only a few of them survived. That will be in my nightmares too!

Next, we found strange man made objects. It had little pools that went up and up to another part of the river. I figured out that we were supposed to jump from one pool to the next until we got to the top. We did, and it worked. When we got to the top, it was the beginning of the streams and creeks, the last step to the spawning grounds!

We thought we were home free, but we were not. There was more trouble ahead. The spawning ground was within our grasp. We met the two schools we met before and they joined us. After awhile [sic], we found anther strange man-made object. It wasn’t a fish ladder, it was a flood control. It started sucking our fish in and destroying them! A lot of places to spawn were destroyed. One half of us died. Now, we only had 28,125 fish in our school. We were in bad shape.

The other schools that joined us shared our luck. Some of their eggs got covered in mud, and others got nibbled by small fish. The other school separated from us. And then, our hearts jumped! It was the spawning grounds.

We were all glad to get to the spawning grounds. We made it! I decided to leave this part out because its got a lot of love and mushy stuff you wouldn’t like. After mating, we laid eggs and died. However, my conscious self is passed on to my child most like me. I got this power from an alien species who were not so smart by human standards. They felt that we were smarter than humans, which, was, of course, right. They gave one fish, me, that power. It also made me immortal as long as I manage to spawn. Our school had 843,750 fry (baby fish). After taking some time to grow, our offspring returned to the sea.

The streams and creeks were not familiar to me. The flood control had changed them. Still, out of instinct, we knew where to go. When we were swimming, I saw something that was a strange color. Then I realized, that’s toxic sludge, also known as toxic chemicals. I told my school to go around it, but they wouldn’t listen. Half of my school swam through it. They died. Now we only had 421,875 fish left. So, the lesson of this little story is always listen to the immortal fish in the school.

We decided to put that behind us, although we were sorry for those poor fish who did not listen to their elders. We swam on. Then, we found the fish ladder – the gateway to the estuaries and rivers! In the estuaries and rivers all we really did was swim, swim, and for a change of plans, did some more swimming. We saw some striped bass, but easily got around them. Finally, we found the ocean.

In the ocean, we all swam off with the current to find lunch and grow up so that we could make the amazing journey that our fathers and mothers had made. This, my friends, is, at long last, the end of my story.