Saved – Jelani

I remember specifically being in class, and sleeping through most of chemistry in my sophomore year of high school. The only times I would be awake were when me and my friend, Yan, were asking the teacher random questions to purposefully slow down the class. Honestly it was fun, and our teacher, Mr. Lee, would stop most of the time to answer our questions and engage with us. But that doesn’t mean I was doing well in the class, I had one of the worst grades in chemistry class, always failing tests and falling asleep most of the time, never retaining any knowledge yet somehow I still passed. Yan and I would often have lunch together, since we had the same 8th period lunch, which was right before our chemistry class together at 9th period.

For around 2 weeks military recruiters came to our school for all the lunch periods. Now I definitely do not want to join the military, but this event is important because it made me become a more sociable person, which gave me more of a reason to stay awake in my classes. At lunch period the first day the recruiters came, Yan and I ran into one of our chemistry classmates, Marvelous, who would then become one of my best friends throughout high school and actually here at city tech too. Marvelous wasn’t interested in the military recruiters just like us, but he didn’t want to join the military either, we all just wanted to do the pull up and push up challenges they presented for prizes. And we definitely did do and complete the challenges, and we’d all go together to watch other people do the challenges as well. Eventually we’d all start talking more in chemistry class, and in our 10th period.

Chemistry wasn’t the only class I was doing bad in, I was also falling asleep in both my english and history classes. I was extremely demotivated, especially coming straight from a pandemic. I also wasn’t interested those classes either, but I did know they were mandatory and I had to complete them. After spending more time talking with Yan and Marvelous I started to stay awake a lot more in my classes and started to actively take notes because of the conversations we would have. We’d talk about different conspiracies, or try to predict things in the near future which I ended up getting pretty involved in. I’d research different topics, like Nuclear Energy for example, and i’d learn the history of it and why people are against it for some odd reason. Reading various articles to gain more information to add more to our fun conversations, which got me more interested in learning about history, and learning more about how to analyze different writing styles in media and gain insight on the publishers of these articles. Ever since then i’ve been actively awake in my classes after learning the true value of how classes can all relate to each other and help you with your interests, and it’s interesting.