Writing an essay in Chinese

I've been studying with a new Chinese teacher for the past few months.  We are working hard at improving my practical Chinese skills instead of just memorizing new words.  I've asked her to assign me homework to force me to spend considerable time on my self-study.  It's easy to procrastinate when there are no specific objectives to learning.

My most recent homework was to write an essay in Chinese to describe what I did last Sunday.  She instructed me to be sure to use some of the new grammar we had just learnt.  In the following class I handed in my homework and felt pretty good about it. I knew there would be errors of course but I thought my overall work was solid.

She brought back the corrected text to the next class.  I met her in the morning, a few hours before my class and she said..

her: 'David, 我得告诉你凶讯‘   - 'I need to give you some bad news'

 me:  'shit'

her: '你的作业需要很很多错漏'  - Your homework has many mistakes

me: 'shit'

She handed it back to me when I came to class.  We've all joked about homework that has more corrections than actual original text.  In this case, it was true.

I had originally jotted down notes in English of what I wanted to say in Chinese before translating but not only does that let you examine my boring Sunday events but also makes my text look more significant.  I removed the English parts to highlight the ratio of text to corrections.

Note: The first sentence is 100% correct (all 9 syllables of it)

In the end, she told me not to worry.  All students do this poorly on their first essay since they are thinking like an English person and trying to directly translate English sentences.  To improve, in her words, I need to start thinking like a Chinese person.