From a very young age I was always told by my parents that you need an education to be successful. They stressed the need for me to utilize my time in school and value my opportunities. My mom, as I’m sure many other people’s parents have, would sometimes make examples out of homeless people or drugged up people; and tell me there at that point because they didn’t stay in school and you don’t want to be like them. Me, being as young as I was, took this very seriously because I really didn’t want to end up like those people. If somehow doing well in school could ensure that everything went right me for me, that’s what I wanted.
I went hard for good grades until about 8th grade, that’s when I started to not care as much for the high scores and just did what I needed to do. By the end of 9th is when I want to say my views on education started to change. I think it was the fact that when you get into high school and time passes, you start to realize how much closer you are to actually being an adult and having different responsibilities. You have to start thinking about your plans for after high school, getting a job and probably even moving out for example. You are also introduced to many new things that you’ve never done or seen before. When you start to realize all the things the world has in store for you and what you want to do with your life, you start to wonder what quadratic formula or radioactive isotopes has to do with your life, unless of course you aspire to be something having to do with those things. It was even apparent to my guidance counselor that I was no longer interested in high school as she would always tell me something like “I know you want to be done, but you have to bring your grade back up if you still want to graduate early” or “You’re too smart to have your grades looking like this”. When you get into high school you start to learn about things such as taxes, credit/debit cards and resumes just to name a few, but why is it that not even a small portion of any of the information that is certain to be useful and applicable to us when we get older is not taught in high school normally and isn’t taught in college? Realizing just how many useful things you have to learn on your own when I’m in a learning environment for 8 hours getting taught information that I’m not going to have recollection of in the next year; definitely contributes to the change of view.
The classes and grades in general also contributed to the fact as well. Another thing you realize as you get older in school is that grades don’t have anything to do with how smart someone actually is, even though many people seem to believe that. In school you’re given material and then you are tested to see how well you retain and/or present that information you retained. This ruined the rewarding feeling of high marks for me in a way; and for a class like chemistry that doesn’t appeal to me at all, I couldn’t care less for a 90+ grade. Even from the beginning of high school it was apparent to me that many people do the bare minimum to get a passing grade; and regardless of that fact for the most part in classes your just memorizing things for that one test that you need to pass in the long run.
In many cases a lot of the classes were boring or weren’t taught by the right teachers which changed my views as well. For example, throughout middle school English was my favorite subject and all my teachers knew what time it was when it came to English. I used to always do well in my English classes love to get my points/thoughts across, have debates and discuss the different topics with all my friends. I even took the English regents in 8th grade and managed to get a 91 on it. When I got into high school, I realized that we were doing the same things I was doing in middle school and the flow of the class was nothing like how my old one was; because of this I started despising English there was just nothing interesting about the class. Thankfully, in the AP English class I got we were talking about real world things and analyzing them so I got back into English. On the other hand, adding those bad classes to online learning made things a whole lot worse due to the fact that many of the teachers didn’t know what they were doing or let online learning change their teaching. This made me ready to leave high school as there was just nothing worth being there for.
From a young age I always thought staying in school was imperative to my success but as I’ve gone through school my views on education have changed in different ways. I was often led to believe that without the qualifications that come with school you were bound to fail. High school was where many of the realizations I’ve had were made and I’ve been showed that there are so many important things you need to know in life that you’ll never see in a school’s curriculum.
