Draft – Kenyan Allen

Could you imagine going to school and being so bored and disinterested that teaching yourself would yield better results? Most of my time there felt wasted and pointless, I realized that anything people would attempt to teach me there I could learn far easier and faster on my own. School never hardly helped me academically, the only real use I’ve found from it is building bonds through social interactions.

School never really felt useful to me, anything educational I could learn there I could teach myself better at home. I learn best from hands-on activities, but only 1 or 2 out of  5 teachers ever taught like that so I’d always end up falling behind due to lack of engagement. I would always end up doing better in my engineering or science classes than anything else, there might be the occasional one-off assignment in another class that required us to construct an object or was a research paper. Those were the only things that would guarantee me to try my best, probably because those were things I was geared towards. That lack of focus and interest showed more than I would like to admit and the only thing that ever worked to mitigate or get rid of entirely was teaching myself, I succeeded in garnering my own attention and directing it into passing my classes but just barely, I only ever did enough work to get an 80.

School moved too slow for most of my classes to interest me in any real way. Classes were dangerously boring and moved at a pace I had grown too comfortable with, I would put in almost no effort and get decent grades so I stopped caring, up until I saw that I was on a track towards failure. One of my teachers would always come up to me and ask why I was falling behind because she knew I could do better, she had previously seen me get engaged and end just below the top of my class. I struggled to force myself to pass these lackluster classes so that I wouldn’t have to retake them, but that I just ended up in more of the same, the only classes that moved at a pace that taught me anything were the ones in which the teachers split the students by learning pace. 

I did however meet some really great people throughout my past school years. I made some friends with students and teachers alike who have each helped me in various ways outside of school. One prime example is a few of my teachers who helped me to get into one of my first jobs. The friends I made helped mitigate the boredom, they also helped me challenge myself into attempting to fight through the boredom, though that hardly ever worked for me. They at least made the days more lively and just became a part of my day-to-day life. This itself is probably what made school worth it in the end, but it definitely wasn’t enough to make up for the lack of use school served for me academically.

School had next to no academic value to me, but it did help me meet some great people. I always ended up learning the subjects on my own rather than in classes. I was never very receptive to the way most teachers taught. The boredom I felt from the ease of the work was enough to demoralize me, which is why the effort I put in waned over time. I am however glad I made friends with a few of the people I went to school with, I made some very worthwhile connections. After going over the pros and cons, I honestly think they’re even, I’m still at the same standstill on whether or not it was worth it that I’ve always been in.