Category: Unit 1 (Page 2 of 26)

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.

It’s the third grade and we are preparing for the state tests. There are students surrounding me in almost every direction, all of them with notebooks and pencils out. The teacher is going of the structure of the state test and what things we should work on first. The smell of coffee filled the room. While I wasn’t a big fan of it, it did remind me of pancakes for some reason. The lights on the ceiling flickered sometimes. My desk would screech across the floor when I moved even slightly. The sun shined brightly through the window near me, so I remember it being hard to see my paper. All these different things bothered me little by little, but the thing that upset me the most was the state test. The state test seemed like the only thing on everyone’s mind, even the teacher’s. Everything we learned was just thrown out the window just for this one test. Even the other subjects like science and social studies were paused in favor of state test prep. Seeing as science was my favorite subject at the time, that really pissed me off.

The enjoyment of my school life diminished as school shifted its focus to the State Test. All the fun activities that we used to do were replaced with concentrated study on test structure. I never enjoyed learning how to take a test. I would rather just learn about the material on it. It’s not like I don’t get it. Test scores are important for schools, but it’s a different story if you are more concerned with that then the student’s education themselves. Being forced to take countless practice tests while reading and writing everyday fueled my hate for the English subject. I will never forget the stress I felt while preparing for the state tests, asit is stress that I felt every other school year after that. I know all schools don’t do this, but if it is a school that does, then you are going to burn out your students faster than the tests will, especially at a young age. If you want better test scores, then actually teach the children subjects.

I really hate it when schools don’t take the students into consideration. Not everything should be about having good test scores to make yourself look better. I wouldn’t even be surprised if some schools purposefully encourage people to apply so that they can reject them and make their acceptance rate look good so people can think they are a good school. At this point students just seem like tools to better the school instead of the other way around. I can still remember how big the celebration was when my elementary school became a Blue Ribbon school. That is a big achievement, but at the cost of so much stress to children who haven’t even hit their pre-teens yet. I also remember how things were like after the state test. Learning felt so lackluster, like the main story was completed so the rest of it is just filler. I was so bored of just sitting there, listening to unenthusiastic teachers who aren;t even trying to appeal to the students anymore. That time of my life was truly unfortunate.

The whole idea of a test is to evaluate the student, to see what they know and what they’ve learned. You kind of ruin the point of a test when you purposefully teach us its contents and how to pass it. If I get a good score on a test without actually learning anything then what is the point? Im basically just cheating at that point. It won’t even feel like I progressed in school. My elementary school had a great building that looked like a great place to learn, but I feel like I didn’t learn as much as I should have. I feel like most of my learning was outside of school or in my extracurriculars. My middle school wasn’t a good one either, but I feel like I learned way more in that school, like they wanted us to know as much as possible, but in its own way that wasn’t fun either. That one felt more like they were trying to cramp all the information down my throat before I left the school and if I didn’t understand it then there was something wrong with me. But some of the teachers did realize that they were going too fast and did slow down for us, so that was kinda nice. The test scores weren;t the best or anything but it felt like I came out knowing more of what I should have.

I’m not one to go on a tangent like this about school, but I never really had fun with school after the early stages. It just felt boring having to read a lot of boring stories or do homework when I could be doing something much more enjoyable. That mindset turned me into a not ok student. But I believe things could have been different if I had a different learning experience. I’ve had classes that were fun, where we did fun activities or had really fun teachers. it made me want to participate, made me want to interact more so I could have more fun. But most of my learning experience seems to be the same old uninterested teachers either working for the money or just trying to make the school look better. If only things were different, I could be enjoying school and learning way more than I am now. I wouldn’t have this feeling of worry or this growing disinterest for anything related to school. My perspective on education could’ve been a complete 180, and that seems to interest me more than school.

Every time I got detention, I was put in the same crowded classroom that smelled of plastic burning on a super-hot radiator and reeked of my own guilt, regret and shame but mostly that plastic smell. I remember it so vividly that now every time the heat comes on in my apartment or in a classroom, I feel like a reprimand is right around the corner. I was in detention for a lot of my middle school years. To me, doing something I knew I was going to get in trouble for later was like me enjoying plugging my fingers into the electrical sockets even though I knew I was going to get shocked. I knew the bad consequences of my actions but that never stopped me. Just sweaty hands waiting to get electrocuted. But getting in trouble wasn’t worth the aftershock, until I was in the 7th grade. 7th grade is where I actually gained something from detention. I had a teacher that, to my benefit, had the same beliefs on the students in detention as I did. I believe that all crimes are crimes of passion. You don’t do something wrong without a reason or a motive. Mr. Molinari believed in this too. He knew I wasn’t just a helpless bad kid. He saw that there was a motive to my “badness”. But at the time I never understood why he took pity on me or why he treated me with such kindness. Why did he take me in instead of letting me sit in a quiet room, replaying my mistakes in my head until I promised too never do it again. I now like to believe that he saw my potential. He knew about my interest in social studies before I did. He knew that I could be a much better student than I was then. His kindness changed my attitude towards school and made me value the education I was receiving. 

Instead of my well-deserved detention, he would take me to his drafty classroom with those warm yellow long overhead lights and openly defy child labor laws by making me file all of his students paperwork. Only way he’d get me to cooperate was if he played Pandora’s “Disney Station” and bought me a slice of pizza. A pizza with a stench so strong, it masked the smell of those plastic burning radiators. This went on for most of winter. We would sing along to The Little Mermaid, or change our voices for each of the townspeople in Beauty in the Beasts’ “Belle” while munching on delicious pizza. I realized that as I tried to hit Ariel’s high notes, I also began to simultaneously read his social studies essays that I was just supposed to be organizing. I found myself grading them in my head, trying to think of ways I could explain the prompt better or what words I would’ve added or taken out. I started to like detention, or at least the detention that involved Mr.Molinari and his essays. I realized that every time I removed and reinstalled the sloppy staples from his paperwork, and read the Times New Roman written essays, I was inching closer to discovering that I had a passion for social studies and a possible interest in teaching.

The beginning of spring is where I had my big epiphany moment, which I like to give credit to Mr. Molinari for. Detention was always at 3pm after school- prime time for kids to play tag. Molinari’s room was on the 6th floor and filled with tall windows that overlooked our school’s playground. I could hear the laughter of kids whose essay I was probably grading, running around and enjoying the cold but soft spring wind and I noticed that I didn’t feel an ounce of envy. Even though I was sitting in a cramped desk with my 6’2 teacher, having to tuck my feet under my chair so I wouldn’t kick him, I knew I would rather be here than anywhere else.  I loved listening to Mr. Molinari speak about the reason why thought the cold war was still considered to be going on, and hear him speak about why he loved what he was doing even though he had to drive and take an hour-long train ride to get to school. His passion was slowly rubbing off on me. I don’t think I was copying him; I just think I finally found someone I could look up to. Someone I hoped to be like. I wasn’t helping to grade his work for the chance at some smelly pizza, I was grading it because it made the adrenaline rush of getting in trouble suddenly feel like an itch I had satisfyingly already scratched.  I didn’t want to be like those kids I watched from the 6th floor, I wanted to be someone who could relate to Mr. Molinari. 

So, I turned away from the distracting windows and turned my attention to the empty desk behind me, neatly organized in strategically placed rows. I dreamed of the day I would be standing in front of those desk, teaching a subject I was so passionate about that I wouldn’t even mind the lingering smell Mr.Molinari’s pizza always left. I was thankful for the detention that Mr. Molinari introduced me to. It helped me realize that my days of sticking my fingers into electrical sockets were behind me and I could finally focus on something more fulfilling: the hope that one day I too would be teaching social studies. I thank Mr.Molinari for showing me a different side to the education system, a side that I one day would like to be a part of.