Education or What? It’s going on three years that I’ve been dedicating my precious time, hard work and patience to the most crappy school known to man, New Dawn High. If the beige prison walls weren’t enough to drive me insane my teachers definitely passed that with flying colors. As you can probably guess this was not my favorite place to be. For starters, everyone began at 7 AM and left at 4 PM which is awfully long for a school day and the fact that this didn’t bother anyone else bothered me some more. The students there were grown I’m talking early 20’s, baby- mothers, mostly baby-fathers, expecting mothers, dropouts and drop back ins, thugs and being across from tons of 400 foot projects buildings made the violence more interesting. All the kids were either sleeping or sleeping, exactly. I hated it there. For three years I felt misunderstood like no one including the teachers got what my “problem” was. They had no clue that I simply didn’t find the things they taught valuable to my life, I couldn’t focus because I didn’t want to and because I didn’t want too I had zero intent on doing so. I grew tired of what was expected of me and so I made myself more available to other areas of life, which included getting a job. That was the beginning of my lonesomeness. After dropping out, disobeying my parent’s wishes of what I should have turned out to be and being cut off from their finances I eagerly thought to myself “you gotta make quitting school count for something” and that’s what I tried to do. Everyday at 7 in the morning I pushed myself to wake up in hopes of getting a great check every week and when I did receive that check I wonder how it would make me feel. My first Friday came around sooner than anything else and believe me the anticipation I felt to read my pay-stub was driving me insane. “New clothes, chipotle and weed” were the three things that played out continuously in my head as I cracked open the envelope with “shauntai smith” on it. I’ve never seen my name on anything regarding to money, just turning 17 I had no idea what to expect but I knew whatever came out of that envelope was mine, all mine. Not my parents or my grandparents, my own. As I opened the letter roughly and without a care for putting the paper back inside I see my pay. It wasn’t a good one. A total of $296.75, a total disappointment. I yelled to the top of my lungs “MY CHECK, somebody better fix this I’m not playing”. When my boss Mr. Bradford heard my screams he calmly sat me down and said “ Shauntai please go over the paystub” I was new to all of this work stuff so maybe I did read it wrong but turns out the paper was right. Sadly, I had only earned the amount I was looking at.
