Isadora vs. Education

Class and education are both super important in my opinion. I’ve always had the image in my head of graduating from high school, then college to go on and start my career. Of course, I knew there were other options and other people may feel as though there are better off on a different education path or feel they don’t need an education at all, which is okay. However, I couldn’t picture my future going the way I wanted to without a college degree. “The thought of me not going to college was never entertained”, Barack Obama states. Although I did have troubling times in school, it was mandatory that I get a higher education for the career I wanted to pursue and that I knew for a fact.

I loved everything about school by the end of fifth grade and when I came out, I was definitely a changed student. It sounds weird, being that I was only ten and school wasn’t even hard, but I assure you that if Ms. Caines was your teacher, at any age for that matter, you, too, would feel the impact that she had on the way you behave and view things. I wasn’t a bad kid per se, however, I had more brains than I showed sometimes. I was silly, very talkative, and just wanted to befriend everybody, which I did. In the beginning, it just felt as though she was always on top of everyone and she seemed to be really strict. Sooner enough I was lucky to be one of her favorite students by listening and absorbing the school and life lessons Ms. Caines was trying to teach our class. She’d tell us stories about not letting where and how she grew up determine her future. The more privileged students were allowed to connect with her a little more and it reflected. We were able to go and do little things with and for her during our lunch period, free time, or even in the middle of class. I visited her every school year after 2012 until I graduated from the eighth grade.

High school was a completely different story.  Freshman year wasn’t too bad. I came home with decent grades ranging from 75’s to 90’s. But mid sophomore year was when things took a turn for the worse. I fell into a really deep hole between my family and depression. I couldn’t get to school, put my feelings aside, and focus. I later met two of my best friends and all of us began cutting and skipping class towards the end of my tenth-grade year.  We were just a group of unmotivated, stubborn,  friends who did nothing but enable each other to make our school situations worst.

The year after that, I did no better, which was worse because junior year is the most important year of high school. I was already used to cutting class from the previous semester that it just continued. I remember rarely ever going to my English,  Spanish, Math, or U.S. History classes week after week. I eventually stopped going to school. I’d rather stay at my friend’s or at my grandmother’s house since nobody was ever there. My attendance just depleted. It had gotten so bad that I was suspended and couldn’t return to school until my parent came up to the school for a meeting with my guidance counselor.  However, it became clear to me that I decided to flunk out of school at the wrong time.  Every year, each junior takes their SATs that’ll help determine your readiness for college and can also mean going to your dream college or not. Unfortunately, my score wasn’t too great on it which was 1100. I had summer school for the first time in my entire life that year.

I did good in summer school going into my senior year and I was on a new path. I earned both of the credits for each class I took and was excited for the beginning of the semester. The friends I used to cut with were no longer in the same school as me and that wasn’t a bad thing. My senior yet went by smoothly. All my days consisted of was go to class, go to work, home, then repeat. I didn’t hang out much or do any of the senior activities which included senior pictures, senior breakfast, senior trip, and senior dance because I had so much work to make up and in very little time. I had 33 credits, which was just enough to be a senior but I need 44 to graduate. My entire senior year I struggled to get those 11 credits and luckily I did just in time for graduation.

Genuinely, I didn’t like class if I didn’t like the teacher. It took me all of middle and high school to understand what my problem with school was and it was personal. These teachers weren’t going to determine my future, I was, and not liking them didn’t give me the good grades I needed. Overall, like Stephon Hobson, I noticed that the environment that I had so badly wanted to remove my safe from wasn’t going to change until I changed and became more dedicated to school. Hobson said ” … my environment, and my introspection has helped me develop the tools needed to pursue higher education at City Tech… Books… the environment I was living in and how to extricate myself from it. With positive influence, he realized that his negative ways wouldn’t produce the outcome that he desired'” and I couldn’t relate more.