Author: Christopher Gonzalez

On my chair, behind my desk in a classroom dedicated to the dreadful studies of AP Statistics during another day of my junior year of high school, I was beginning to ponder so many things.  The first of those things was if I was going to make it to lunch since this class was always the one before us students when to the lunchroom and I was always being driven mad with hunger during that hour and a half that I always sat there waiting.  The second, was when it was all going to be over for good.  I was a boy of many mistakes, and this particular one was probably the most terrible blunder of them all.  I had signed up for AP Statistics and a few other advanced placement courses the during the end of the sophomore year, thinking I could handle the workload and more advanced material to learn, but I was wrong.  So dreadfully wrong in fact, that I would be spending the entirety of my junior year of high school in so much pain from this error, that it  completely changed everything I felt about my education and what I was supposed to be doing with my future.

I has grown up with very high expectations of myself, believing I would one day become someone great and knowledgable.  My pride growing up as a kid came from getting good grades and making my parents proud of me, but I hated school, and the process of getting those good grades was not good to put it bluntly.  I was a massive procrastinator, constantly putting my homework off until the last minute, which I still got done, but made me always work until late into the night.  I was also a terribly introverted and anxiety ridden mess of a kid, things as simple as homework and projects just made me sweat because I was a perfectionist who wanted to get everything right and would not stop working until it was.  Things had been this way for as long as I could remember, but it wasn’t until junior year of high school that I truly reached the limits of what I could handle; and when that happened, everything just collapsed.

For my Unit 1 assignment, one event from my life that I can use and changed my views on education was back in my junior and senior year of high school.  They were very difficult years of my life and it profoundly changed everything I thought I was supposed to be doing as a student trying to learn and be the best that I could be.  The reasons for what and why I was studying so hard for changed drastically and it changed my perspective on life itself and what I was living for past being a student in school.

One topic I can think of for the Unit 1 assignment is how to keep yourself together through times of significant change.  From childhood, through our teenage years, and then finally to the beginning of our adult lives we go through such drastic changes in ourselves both within us and around us.  Having the mental skills to cope with those changes can allow us to better comprehend ourselves in truly understanding what we want to do in order to achieve as close to the most ideal life as possible that is the best for our individual needs both in school and outside of it.

One idea that can be used for the Unit 1 assignment is that you don’t have to aim big in order to feel like your are successful. A lot of people from the moment they enter school believe that this is where they have to give it all they have or else they won’t be able to live a happy life when that is simply not true.  You don’t have to go to Harvard or Columbia University and accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt in order to feel like you succeeded. You don’t have to be the top of your class in order to feel like you won and you did what you were supposed to do.  Everything should be based on what you believe your needs are and not what institutions and society deem you should do in order to have the best chance at living.  There are an endless number of ways to live and whether you are the CEO of a major corporation or just a simple sanitation worker, you can have a chance at being happy.

The conventions of the education narrative genre is, for one, that it teaches you something.  Whether it’s about racism, or identity, the genre is always trying to teach you something through the eyes of how another person experienced it.  It takes a subject and expands on it, asking questions relating to it such as: why do these things exist, what is wrong or right about them, how does this affect me or other like me, what can I do to change this and make it better?  It’s about asking the overarching questions that challenge the foundational existence of something and teaching you what you can do with it.

A place to get started in my own education narrative could maybe be about finding oneself. I related to the story of Jose Olivarez a lot, and I might wish to do something in relation to the discovery of your own personal identity.  I could write about the chaos of life and how nothing is within our control other than what we do with ourselves, and even then self-control is something many people including myself lack.

My concern with writing an education narrative of my own is that I don’t really know where to go with it. I don’t know what it’s supposed to lead into or what the lesson I’m supposed to teach is.  I’m not old enough to have experienced everything so I can’t say that I am good at giving advice or teach anyone about anything.  I guess all I can do is speak from my own personal experiences and how I’ve dealt with them and hope a like minded individual understands where I am coming from.