Jade Wearing

Eng 1101-0L10

Professor Edelson

Unit 1 project

Educational Narrative

Education is very important and is a key aspect in everybody’s lives whether you realize it or not. Us people learn something new every day even if we intend to or not. Learning something new and learning different things is a part of life and is something you can’t just avoid. We are able to start learning and processing new things from young, like when we are babies. We start using our senses and start to process everything we are experiencing, like what we are hearing and seeing. We start using what we are experiencing and start to incorporate it in our everyday lives, like what we fear, what caused us pain, and what makes us happy. Education is with us throughout our journey, step-by-step, and It is up to us on how we choose to really educate ourselves and how we use the knowledge we obtain. There are many ways people can gain some sort of education, but the two main forms are through school and a person’s experiences. Most people start going to school or school related programs at a really young age, like around three to four years old, and then continue to stay in school for the rest of their childhood’s. Most people are in school for at least about fourteen plus years and it’s not even our choice to be made. Most of our childhood is basically just going to school and trying to learn and pickup new things we are being taught whether we find it to be important in our lives or not. As time goes, people will start to know which stuff of what we learn will be most important for them to know like for what they want to do with their lives, like a career they are striving for. Education now can be the difference of succeeding and failing where higher education gets the upper hand. Although education can be important, a person’s experiences can play a major role on how education is being obtained and viewed. Many people will have different experiences, like where they come from, their background, their culture, and their beliefs where all these factors can be the difference of obtaining good education or poor education. To me, I always viewed education to be important as in knowledge is power. I think all kids should go to grade school but I don’t think everything they teach in school from high school and up is important and relevant to everybody lives. I personally believe that almost most of the classes we are taking are just like waste of time to people unless people want to go in a route that requires you to know all that information. So, one can see that my overall view of education can both been seen as positive and negative.

The school education system can be a chaotic thing that everybody that goes to school have to deal with that can help shape a person’s experiences for the better or worse. Personally, I never really liked going to school and just wanted to be completely done with it. Throughout middle school and high school, my performance was always up and down where I will do really good in some of my classes and got good grades while for the other classes, I’ve performed to the bare minimum, not giving any care to those classes which put me at risk of failing all those classes. I think what really made me perform so poorly in some of my classes was my negative mindset going into it and also the fact that those classes meant nothing to me. The classes I were performing poorly in were classes like chemistry and physics where I knew I will most likely never use anything they will teach in my life because it is just stuff that I don’t enjoy doing and something that doesn’t have to do with what I truly want to do. Some of my poor performances was due to me not paying attention in class and just falling asleep in the middle of it. According to Jose Olivarez, “Maybe I Could Save Myself by Writing”, he was kind of going through the same things I was going through and it states, “After I started writing, I stopped being interested in models of education that didn’t consider me an active participant.” One can see that even though the reasons why me and him were acting this way were different, we still had the same feelings towards certain classes which was that “I don’t care” attitude that we both had to deal with. It was our personal experiences that both lead us up to this point even though our personal experiences weren’t the same. A person’s personal experience can be the major factor on how a person’s education is viewed. In elementary school, I used to really never enjoy coming to school, mostly due to the fact that I used to be teased a lot and me having to work. I always used to be teased for my appearance, the things I did, the way I acted, and mainly the fact that I didn’t fit In. So, to help me get through this, I played a lot of video games and watched a lot of television that helped me get my mind off it. Finding something I will always love doing really helped me get through all the teasing and school work. Ever Since, I gravitated to doing things that were mostly fun for me do which can also be the reason why I viewed education this way. According to Jose Olivarez, “Mexican American Disambiguation”, he also didn’t really fit in and it states, “everything in me is diverse even when I eat American foods like hamburgers, which to clarify, are American when a white person eats them & diverse when my family eats them.” This shows that he didn’t really fit in and was looked at differently. Me and him were being looked at differently from everybody else which has shaped our personal experiences a lot.

One can see that It was the cause of negative experiences that has shaped the way I viewed school and education, with a bit of positive things in between. This shows that any experience a person is put through, it can change the way they view and see things that can be for the better or worse. My mindset and viewpoint on education is getting better as time progresses where I am taking it a lot more seriously and seeing every class I take as Important. I still kind of have the viewpoint that not all classes are important and that I see them as irrelevant but, it is not having as much of a negative impact as before. No matter what though, education will always be important and will always be a necessity at some point of time.