A Reflection Of My Experience In High School

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths,” (Walt Disney). The overview of my Junior year in high school was, I believe, the best school year so far both in academic and my personal achievements. As a person I had a major growth, I become more active in school in which was a huge step for me, and academically, well I’ve never seen so many A’s since Freshmen year, well that is if I examine only second semester but overall I felt that my grades were better than last year. This year I became a person who is more open-minded, one who sees the outside world, my mind has opened a door which helped me find the inner me that was stuck in for the past 2 years of high school like if I were a bud that has finally opened. I shockley impressed at myself, willing to accept any new challenges this year which truly helped me become a better person in education and personally.

My experience in high school had been rather amusing. I had a lot of friends and really considered myself one of the ‘cool kids’. I had tried so hard to fit in. The most difficult part of high school was not the rigorous AP classes or the immense amount of homework- it was ignoring others’ perception of you. I did not realize this until the middle of my junior year. My grades and relationship with my own family reflected upon my commitment to being the most popular kid in school.

I remember the first day I started high school I was so nervous. As a kid I always remember I would had an anxiety problem for almost every little thing. I wake ever morning nauseated, even though there was nothing to worry about because I mean after all it was just school. I remember thinking damn I just got out of middle school here goes another 4 long school years. But what I didn’t know was that those years would go by so fast. After all like everyone says, a lot happens in 4years. On my first day everything was amazing. I had made new friends, so far I liked all my teachers, and I got into this Culinary Arts class that I didn’t even know I liked. I learned so much in Culinary, Everyday I would go in excited to see what I would learn the next.it amazed me so much I even started to help my mom cook, I learned so much in so little so that’s when I discovered I had a passion for learning how to cook and for food. I can honestly say I’m so glad I got into that class because now I know how to cook a little bit of Italian thanks to my culinary class and to wonderful godfather who is an excellent chef in New York City. I learn a lot from my mother who I’m forever thankful I just don’t tell her as much. Thanks to her I learn how to cook almost all kind of Mexican food, I learn how to be a little more responsible, I got into finishing my Diploma.

I would like to pretend that the bridge between elementary school and high school did not exist for me—that junior high just did not happen. I was a seemingly thoughtless kid, determined to make it out of school entirely and live in my own world where nobody could tell me what to do. I was awkward, irrational, and rebellious, three qualities I cannot thank my parents enough for dealing with. But the experiences and people I encountered in my junior high years almost made that whole chapter of my life worth reliving. I went through a lot in junior high, and have many memories of ridiculous instances that make it easy to make fun of myself.

People tend to believe that high school is what defines your life. It is where you create who you are and what your future will be, but that isn’t the truth. In high school, I was a person that I didn’t want to be. I was the shy new girl that no one would talk to. On the first day of school I was lucky that someone invited me to lunch. By the end of my first year I had less friends than the fingers on my hands. The few people that knew me in the large school either thought I was mean and rude or they were my friend. I went through the first half of high school not knowing who I was. Eventually I had to move schools and I was tired of being the new girl. I wanted to make people know my name and not be just some face. Unfortunately, my hopes

It was the beginning of a new cycle. Every year was similar to the last. I would wake up Monday through Friday at 7:30am despising my past self for staying up so late playing video games or watching videos. Then I would take a shower, eat breakfast, and be driven to school. Once summer break would begin and I would stay up all night and sleep during the day. Then near the beginning of the school year my anxiety would strike, from me thinking of meeting new teachers and knowing if I would have any friends in my classes. This day changed all of that in the blink of an eye. It was May 14th, 2017, the day of graduation.

I moved into residence at The University of Waterloo exactly 25 days ago. When I was starting High School, going to university was something I was sure I would never do; not because I thought I wouldn’t have adequate grades to get accepted, but because I thought it would be boring. This notion is rather atypical of a 12-year-old kid. As a high-schooler, it was ingrained into my mind at every possible opportunity that after High School I would go to university, and after graduating, I would start working for an employer. This is what everyone in my family, and everyone else that I grew up around did. Those around me who were successful made it there by getting an education. It’s what I believed I would do too, until I had a profound moment of realization on a family vacation in the 8th grade.

Starting in my eleventh-grade year of high school I never knew all the changes I would go through. I attended Chickasaw High School in Chickasaw, AL. It was a little school, which had about five hundred students in total. I did not live in Chickasaw like all the other kids. I lived about twenty minutes away in Mobile, AL with my dad and stepmom. I went to this school because my stepmom (LaRae) was a teacher there. Also, I was like most girls in high school, I had a high school sweetheart named Michael Matthews. I thought my eleventh-grade year of high school was going to be a great and memorable experience until I found out some horrible news.

Walking into the Stem Academy I didn't know what to expect. I met my friends Olivia, Makaila, London, Rebecca, and Shya. I had Mr. Jain as my homeroom teacher, he was a very good teacher just hard to understand sometimes. This whole year I passed all of my classes, this year was kind of easy to me. My behavior was really good this year I got an E for conduct the second quarter and then the rest were S, but I didn't really get into much trouble this year. I liked the way that our schedules were set up because we got to kind of explore the school and if we knew some of the older kids we would be able to socialize with them. I also liked the fact that we were able to get Ipads instead of having books to carry around. It's really neat to be able to communicate with teachers and turn in work electronically. This is how my six grade school year went as far as the school work. With social and extracurricular activities I had a lot of fun with these. We had fights, party's, dress downs, and also more fights. I went to basketball tryouts but I was so bad at basketball, that I didn't make it. It didn't really matter that I didn't make the team because I still played AAU basketball. I went out for soccer but that wasn't really for me, I only tried because my friends did. The fights were really childish and stupid. The only fight we really had this year is when Kejuan body slammed Toriano onto the ground by his head. There wasn't really too many party’s but when there were some

By High school, my friend group had competently changed. I sat at a different lunch table every day and some days would eat lunch with a teacher. Making lasting friendships was hard for me partly because I was shy. I had hoped my freshman year of making new friends on the soccer team. I faced my first real disappointment in my life when I did not make varsity and I made JV. The friends I was trying to make all played on varsity and I increasingly felt more alone and not worthy. My first three years of high school were pretty bleak. I did not have a social life outside of school. My happy place was going home and binge-watching Netflix after soccer practice. My junior year of high school was the toughest. I am dyslexic and have dyscalculia, so basically that means school is really hard for me. Junior year destroyed me in the classroom and to make matters worse, I also hurt my ankle taking me out of soccer the one outlet I had. I was angry because I was finally starting to play on varsity and score. I was heading to a bad place in my mind thinking the world had a personal vendetta against me. I knew I had to do something to change the path I was on because I could not keep living as a shell of a person. I decided in an act of desperation to sign up for church camp. I did not go to church anymore and my view of God was quite skewed. I believed there was a God because believing he created the world made the most logical sense to me, but I thought he had abandoned us on earth. I

At the beginning of semester, I was not sure if the course was going to be enjoyable. There were some classes where I thought I had already learned some of the lectures in High School. I asked myself many times, “Why is this course required?” However, as the semester went by, I sort of started to understand the reason for the course. I had never attended college before, and I didn’t really know what certain things were,for example, Financial Aid. The topic time management was also influential across the semester. Learning a little more about my personality was also something that was influential across the semester.

Right now I am a freshman taking both honors Biology and English. I have actually never thought about not taking honors classes before I was even in high school. I guess it has always been assumed that I would be taking honors classes and harder classes. It’s something that my parents have talked to me and my sibling about when we were little so that it could be a goal for us. The high school is different, but in a good way. We have longer passing periods, longer classes (so you can finish more work) and more opportunities such as clubs, more sports, and different classes.

At Holland Patent High School, I am a 17 year old girl, who has understood how foolish I used to be, how impactful high school truly was for me and my personal growth, and how much I’ve really changed. I have a new outlook on life, I am more confident, and I am overall so much happier. This identity I have of myself is a combination of every single person I used to be over the years at the middle school and high school. Today, I can walk the halls of Holland Patent understanding that the high school has become like a second home to me. I changed the way I would look at school and began to enjoy it so much more. I got closer to people around me, staff or friends, and I started to enjoy learning and the high school environment again.

“Sorry, I can’t. I have homework.” That was the constant excuse I used in high school when my friends asked if I wanted to hang out. Junior year of high school was a rough year for me--not only was I taking six AP classes in one year, but I was also in the marching band which dominated a lot of my time. I was so invested in all of these that I forgot how to even socialize. I would negate a lot of my friends and family who wanted to gather and just spend some time with me. Now, don’t get me wrong, this does not mean that I was a loser by any means, I loved to “hang” and party and all the typical teenager tropes. It was just that year. That one year that I screwed myself over with a crap ton of demanding classes. That one year I wish I could do all over again. That one year that would have been enormously simpler had I been amicable enough to accept other people into my life. Which leads to the situation that most strongly defines what my dilemma during my junior year: I should have gone to the movies instead.

The day I left home for the first time to start Junior High was a bright day, brimming with hope and optimism. I’d always done well at school, so expectations for me were high, and I had gleefully set foot into a new chapter of student life, relationships and experiences. Now appearances, of course, can be deceptive, and to an extent, this spirited and energetic persona of mine had only been a veneer, although a very convincing one. The truth is underneath of it all, I was deeply unhappy, insecure and fundamentally frightened-- frightened of other people, of the future, of failure, and of the emptiness that I felt was within me. Despite all of this, I was very skilled at hiding it, and from the outside I appeared to be someone with everything to hope for and aspire to. This fantasy of invulnerability was so complete that I had even deceived myself, and by the end of the first year, no one could’ve predicted what was about to happen.