My Educational Experience In High School

Students who are becoming freshmen often ask “what’s it like to be in high school?” High school is not what you think. Freshmen don’t get pushed in lockers, there's not that one popular girl who shoves other students books out of their hands, and the cafeteria is not the most embarrassing place to be. High school is not an amicable. If you really think high school is a amicable place where students smile at each other, think again. Here is some advice from my high school experience.

As we pulled up to the massive elementary school building, I begged my mom to let me stay home from school, just once. As usual, she said no. Realizing my attempt to get out of school was futile, I shouldered my backpack, swung open the door, and trudged over to the front door. I would rather be anywhere else than here. For the majority of my life, I attended public schools. It wasn’t rare for me to fail a test or even a whole class. It was because of these failures that I would get even more demotivated and threw away the idea of working hard or completing quality work altogether.

1. Provide a short description of your high school experience. How have you grown/evolved from 9th grade to this point? List some of the highlights of your high school career.

The most paramount challenge I have had to face in education and every facet of my life has been the divorce of my parents when I was in the 3rd grade. Overcoming the emotional chains of the event has been in an oxymoronic fashion extremely simple, and the hardest thing to do in the world. After about half a year of feeling like Atlas with the earth on my shoulders, a decision had to be made. I choose to continue on with my life, but also improve every aspect of it. My grades skyrocketed, I became extremely social, and overall I was much happier. A simple decision, but one that led me to where I am today. It is terribly unfortunate that too many people in my situation would simply give up, look at proverbial “bare wall” and proclaim, “I can’t

High school is one of those times in life where most people have the best times of their lives, but for me I just wanted to get through it. Coming in freshman year I was done with the cattiness of the girls, the social pressures, and the monotony of school. Then I discovered the joy of ceramics! Ceramics was unlike any class I had taken in my entire life and had far reaching effects on my life. Ceramics kept me in high school by sparking my creativity and all of life’s possibilities. In high school I found joy in ceramics, found out what it was to no longer practice, and what it was like to start doing it again after thirteen years.

Way back in June of 2005 I graduated from Lynbrook High School in San Jose, CA and like everyone at that age, I was looking at my future not sure what I wanted to do. I was considering attending college or a tech school only because that was what everyone was expecting me to do. I was not so eager, I watched my older brother attend college and he was having a hard time of it. He was either living at home commuting an hour and a half each way, or he lived in a small studio apartment and worked 30 hours a week to pay his bills. My brother was constantly tired from a busy school schedule or he was broke because he had to live on a strict budget. He was always struggling with his assignments because of how much he worked and a constant dread of the tens of thousands of dollars in student loans he was racking up to pay his tuition. College was their but I wanted a little more I wanted to know what else there was instead of another four years of school.

The past four years spent throughout the halls of my high school were filled with laughter, the undeniable mix of cultures, and the enforced golden rule, treat others how you would want to be treated. Throughout those four years I was granted opportunities to venture off to the city that has my heart, spontaneously volunteer my summer as a youth group leader, and meet the teacher who taught after retirement. And while I never could have predicted that life would turn the way it did, all I store is thanks because these few, however enormous events shaped me as well as my thinking towards the rest of the world.

My own educational experience has taught me that school is not about learning as much as it is about getting good grades and assignments done. Student are expected to be successful once out of high school but all a student does is complete the homework that they were assigned.”Thus, it shouldn't be surprising that when students are told they'll need to know something for a test- or, more generally, that something they're about to do will count for a grade- they are likely to view that task ( or book or idea) as a chore.”(Kohn) Instead of schools worrying about the materialistic things, they can receive from their students scoring well on a standardized test, they should focus on their students receiving a proper education. A schools is like a second home where we spend majority of our time at. After school activities take up a large amount of a student's time, there have been days I’ve been at school past 9pm sometimes even later, especially during basketball season. Although educational institutions claim to have the student’s best interest in mind they don’t; schools have a job to do which is educating the future generation, high school should be about learning instead of a competition, and many school do not prepare their students for what is to come after graduation.

My educational past is complicated to say the least. Starting in the fourth grade, my mother pulled me out of traditional schooling to homeschool me, while she ran a home daycare; however, while the idea of being homeschool sounded great in the mind of a fourth grader my mind of a 20-year old knows this wasn’t the best idea for my educational experience. Until about the 8th grade my mother, an alcoholic, rather than teaching me used me to work in her daycare while she grew more and more incapable due to her growing addiction. Starting in the 8th grade I began to attend a co-op funded by the Tahoma school district, (Russell Ridge Center). Once I began making connections with both peers and teachers, I began to realize how much I had missed out on both social and educational standards that were met by a typical 8th grader. With the help of free tutoring from a select few teachers I confronted about wanting to gain academic knowledge, I slowly caught up to the standard educational goals, then pushed myself to succeed further. I became captain of our high school programs debate team, earned the lead role in three musicals, and became stage manager of our local high-schools theater stage. My Junior year, I began to attend Green River Community College as part of the Running Start program, earning a 3.5 GPA by the end of my first year. The next year I continued but ran into some obstacles. As time went on my mothers addiction grew ten-fold. It came to the point of physical abuse,

I was a 17-year-old pregnant high school dropout the first time I took the General Educational Development (GED) test. It was in the summer of the year 2001 on a beautiful sunny day at our local university. The GED test was to provide me with a high school diploma equivalent. I had months of preparation and practice tests. I was a fast learner and always well prepared. I was confident and very adamant in passing this test. That is, until I got the results of the GED test.

As much as I would like to claim that today was a regular day, it wasn't. With me getting ready for my college applications and personal essay, I had a lot on my mind, and the last thing I needed was another confused teammates adding to my worries. Sitting on the bleachers and I quietly working my outline for my college essay, my little cousin ran into the gym crying. We, the Obi, prided ourselves on being manly, smart, pride, understanding and thick-skinned and there was only one thing that could make him cry, and that was him getting taunted about his accent.

Do you ever wonder what high school was like several years ago? Can you imagine what it could have been like? People want to know what has changed since several years ago. Since people want to know about high school in the past, I sat down with Deb Hossler, graduate of 1977, to hear her thoughts about her high school experience.

Writing is a continuous journey that begins in one’s elementary years and should hopefully gradually progress all the way up to college. While in elementary school, you learn the basics of composing literature, like stringing together sentences to make one short story, high school is when one’s writing skills should develop the most. Throughout my high school experience, my writing abilities have not gradually been attained. Over these, almost, four years, I have had a couple breaks in the increase of my writing skills. In ninth grade, I took an academic class, fearful of the fact that I would not be able to survive in an honors English class. That year was the longest break of my writing competence. In this class, the teacher gave us “our” rough draft essay. We would have to copy the essay by hand onto a paper, then type it, and she would grade us on the correctness of the paper, leading to everyone usually getting a one hundred. She said this is the way we would learn to write “proper” essays and we completed this cycle for every essay we “wrote.” I felt as though I lost a whole year to expand my writing ability, so the next year I took tenth grade English Honors. In tenth grade, I was genuinely pushed to do my best writing; although, it was intimidating because this teacher gave us less instructions, almost like a college professor would. I found this way that I really enjoy writing essays and writing about all the complicating ideas that came to mind when we were

Like other kids, high school is a place where one tries to understand who they are and

On the last day of a two-week summer class, I walked down hallways that were still unfamiliar to me, in a school I didn’t know. The previous year, in ninth grade, I went to a quiet online school, and I planned on going there again. Attending this school, PLHS, was always an option, but I kept thinking it would be to much to handle. Except now, after spending some time in a real classroom, I thought about how I actually wanted to experience more aspects of high school than a computer screen. My supportive family told me I could transfer schools if I really wanted, and even though I knew it would probably be overwhelming, a few months later, I was enrolled in PLHS.