Being in school wasn’t really something I liked, but I remember everyday when I woke up at every weekday at 6:30 in the morning still tired as hell to get up for school and get on my PS4 before I left for school at 7:45 to go for breakfast, never missing a day of school. Throughout middle school I would rarely pay attention in class, I always looked at the clock they had in class, and I was always drawing stick figures in my notebook, or just straight up falling asleep. I used to fail all my math and english classes every marking period and semester. I would always get 65 and 55 on them, but they just weren’t enough for my father’s approval. When we had parent teacher conferences in the afternoon, my father sat down with my teachers to ask them about how I was failing and they usually told him that I was just being lazy, falling asleep, drawing, overall not paying attention. Of course, my father was understandably displeased knowing that his son is failing middle school so I was getting (disciplinary) beatings which I hated at the time. I guess it’s a cultural thing since I’m Jamaican. At our last day of school the entire eight grade students were in the school auditorium. This is the day everyone gets there letter to find out whether they were going to highschool or getting left back and have to restart the grade again. Honestly, from the work that I shown I wasn’t expecting to pass, I genuinely thought I was gonna have to repeat again. I looked around seeing everyone getting hyped after opening their letters saying that they got accepted to there high schools and that they passed. I was very worried that i was going to fail and I did expect that. I got my letter and opened it and it told me that I got accepted to Gotham Professional Arts Academy. I was so happy, I really couldn’t believe it. I passed! I starting jumping with my friends, hyped, telling them that I passed too. It was very unexpected considering how little I thought I worked. to this day I still can’t believe it. But that doesn’t matter anymore because I’m here now and I’m not messing it up. thinking back to it now, all of that really affected who and what I am today. A respectful, humble kid who just loves playing video games.

In my high school senior year there was a lot of things I did at that time, I had to do a lot of research papers to pass my classes but this one was just one of my favorite experiences, I remember a paper I had to write and present, an argumentative research paper that I had to do for my social studies class. I was able to write about anything I wanted. As you may already know I am a sucker for video games, so I chose video games and how people believed that it causes violence. I made this paper because I believed that we let these old people tell everyone what the deal is on certain topics when they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Hearing people say that video games causes always made me frustrated because they think that the younger generation is so fragile to cause people harm because of a game. How foolish. I was very excited and I wanted to make this my best paper I have ever made in my life and I think that’s exactly what happened. I remember exactly how I presented it. It was when covid was still around. I was in my kitchen, I had to do a presentation on my computer and present to two of my teachers. I talked about how people, including the former president of the United States, Donald Trump believed that video games caused real world violence like mass shootings and fights for the younger generations and my research paper was made to disprove that. I talked about the weak proof of video game violence and how statistics shows how real world violence lessens when a new games comes out. I talked about articles that claimed that video games were linked to some crimes that happened at the time. I also talked about how you can even make profit from playing video games and how it can actually bring people together and help people than to hurt others. My teachers asked me some questions on it and I had to answer them and they were really surprised with this paper and I passed the class. This was my best paper I have ever made and I was glad that they made us choose what we wanted to talk about because I never done anything like that before. It was quite the experience.