Writing task: Single story – Dylan Merchant

Outline

1. Intro: Back to school 

2. Slacking in school 

3. Winter Scene 

4. Teacher confrontation 

5. Studying 

6. When hard work paid off 

The beginning of my junior year of high school was a very weird time for me. Coming from such heavy isolation, it was weird to be thrown back into class like that. The first- and only-time school ever felt awkward. Classrooms were completely silent; you couldn’t see anyone’s faces from the masks, and it seemed like everyone was just out of rhythm. Including me, I was slacking for about the first three months of my junior year even though I knew how important it was. I wasn’t motivated and I couldn’t focus on anything I was learning. I was also frustrated because Covid robbed me of a year of High School while I was finally beginning to get used to it. It took me until right before the first semester ended for me to really focus, I knew that I couldn’t cruise through high school without caring. I knew that this was the year colleges were looking at.  

My teachers were losing faith in me, starting to believe that I would never care enough to try and keep my grades up. Even though I was passing their classes, the lack of effort showed whether it was me being late, me not paying attention in class. Being on my phone or talking to classmates.  

One cold winter day, I woke up to the screams of my mom after sleeping through my alarm again. She’s extra mad because she knows that I have a test coming up for my first period class Us Government. It is now 6:35 AM and I have to be in school by 7:15 so I don’t miss the lesson. But I’m struggling to get out of bed, I’m cold and tired, and completely over school. I rush out of the house and as I leave, I see the bus that I was supposed to take to school driving past my stop. Then, I checked the transit app and saw that another bus wasn’t coming for the next 12 minutes. I know that if I wait in the house, I’ll probably miss the bus again, so I decided to walk to the stop. I was freezing, and it felt like I would be out there forever, but the bus finally came and 50 minutes later I arrived at school.  

By the time I got there it was 7:45 and Mrs. Grant, my US Government teacher, was finishing with the lesson. When class ended, I walked up to her and I said “Excuse me Mrs. Grant what did I miss today?” she then says, “Now you care?” while chuckling. I stand quietly and she continues saying “It’s too late to start caring now, you failed already.” I walked out with a smile on my face prepared to cram everything that I was supposed to have learned into a few nights of studying. 

I begin texting classmates and getting their notes, asking them for old homework and where the teacher posts the things she goes over in class. I received multiple different links & pictures and began studying. I wanted to prove her wrong and I knew I would have to work in order to do it. After a few nights of cramming a unit of information into my brain, test day is finally here. I came to school on time for maybe the fifth time in the whole school year. Ready to take this test, I had been reviewing my notes on the bus to when she handed me the test. I get handed my test and I go through the questions fairly easily; I see things that I just finished reviewing and the test just gets easier as I go on. I am one of the first to hand her back the test and I do it confidently, she is shocked and probably just assumed that I blindly answered all the questions to be done fast. 

After two weeks of anticipation, she is finally handing out the tests, and I’m waiting eagerly for mine. I receive my paper face down, which instantly makes me second guess myself, but when I flip the test, I see an 85 on the top right corner. I instantly feel fulfilled and like I accomplished something major because I knew that if I failed this test, I would’ve failed the class. I had succeeded in proving the teacher wrong.