My Experience At Our School

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.

I walk into a new place where I have never been before trying to find where i’m going next. I struggle to look for my friends in a commons area full of people. It doesn't help that my eyesight is very poor. I start walking straight into the commons in hopes to find someone. I finally find a group full of familiar people who had graduated two years ago from the school I went to. I go up to them and ask them where my classes are, if i have good teachers, and if anybody has the same classes that i do. Unfortunately none of them did but as i spot my better friends i say goodbye and head away from them. I walk up to my best friends alec and tyler they tell me “Gracie there's nothing to worry about, its college!” I figure that they are right but that doesn’t change the fact that it was only my first day and i had no idea who anybody was here. I was scared, i knew it was going to be way harder than high school. Both alec and tyler say they have the first class with me and it was 15 minutes to but they joked with me and said that it's almost mandatory to show up at least 5 minutes late to a college class. So of course it also made me nervous that they were going to be late to class. I had thought about all the times i got threatened for my attendance at the high school and how the teachers would make you go to ISS for the whole hour if you were even a minute late. I had millions of thoughts running through my head, who am i going to sit by? What if the teacher yells that we are

When I entered ninth grade, I was someone totally different from the person I am today. The experiences I have gained during these long four years of high school have shaped me into the young adult I am. I have had to learn many lessons about myself and friends. Many failures have had to be taken in stride, and I am glad to say that I overcome and dealt with them all in the name of evolution.

I, in most respects, am a perfectly normal teenager. On any given day, you can find me laid across my best friend’s bed, homework in tow, munching on junk food and chatting about the latest gossip. If I’m not there, you might be able to find me curled up in bed, binge-watching the latest shows on Netflix. My weekends are filled to the brim with shopping and team spirit, as my friends and I cheer on our football team under those bright Friday night lights. All of this combined presents a vignette of the typical high school girl. However, my high school experience has been anything but typical, as I have spent the last year and a half of my life attending high school on a college campus.

I hated school and everything that had to do with it, but I always enjoyed making up stories. It was my way, even as a small child, to escape everything. I have always had a very vivid imagination and writing was my way of channeling that. I enjoyed writing about events in my life but would always add a magical twist or have someone there to save the day. On the day, my teacher approached me as I was sitting in class and not paying attention as usual. My notebook was full of all the workings of my imagination.

Like every Saturday morning in the spring, I found myself cramped up in the backseat of a car at an ungodly hour. With swim season ending today with the All-Star meet however, this would be the last time this year that I would have to worry about this specific discomfort, then I could focus on other 5-year-old things like my upcoming birthday. Until then, I’d have to ‘deal with it,’ something nobody my age ever wants to hear. Luckily for me, I fell asleep within a few minutes and didn’t have to endure the rest of the trip to Beaumont High School.

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.

“I have grown into a being that is sitting on top of a throne.” Entering school on September of 2016, I started off slow and bad thinking it was just the aftermath from the long fun summer I had. After a few months, my grades began to drop, I was missing school, and I was making bad decisions. Academically and personally, I was digging my own grave without my knowing, but soon I gathered my faults my mistakes and my ongoing issues and tried to start clean. I started to realize more and more as I went through my high school years up to now how important some things may be and how somethings will not matter in the future. My Junior Year I learned to distinguish between what I know will help me in my future vs what will not help me and to remove what will not be important to me. I lost friends, chances, a little bit of dignity, but through the year I learned that it is okay to lose friends, I learned that I will begin to take opportunities that will present for me, and I gained back dignity that was lost. I created a new atmosphere for myself and began to appreciate what really needed to be appreciated. Junior year may have been the hardest year of my whole education.

That day I found out If I was a school shooter I would be a straight white male, 79% of the time. However, if I were to go to jail I would find that all I would have had to be, was a different skin color.

Throughout my years in preschool, primary and elementary, middle school, and high school, hands-on learning and the relationships I’ve formed with teachers and classmates have made my education effective and fun, forming me into the student and person I am now.

To say I enjoyed our field trip to Epic Elementary would be an understatement. I learned so much in those two hours, and I have found myself thinking about Epic a lot over the last week. Anytime I attend professional development, I try to take one idea away to try in my classroom. After leaving Epic on Wednesday, I couldn’t just pick one idea. There were so many valuable take-aways from this experience.

Before I moved to the United States, I went to school in Mexico for about nine years. School has rarely been difficult for me. I’m a fast learner. But as any other thing, school has its bad side too. It was the one that stopped the fairy tale I was living in, and got myself into real life. Movies made me believe that life was going to be easy. That no matter how many dilemmas I’d encounter, people were going to be there for me and help me get through it. School taught me that people don’t want to see other people succeed, it is impossible to compete with the teacher’s favorite, and that good grades are not the only thing needed.

Throughout my years of school, I often was the top of my class. I excelled in subjects such as science and math, and even could write an essay worthy of applause. In kindergarten, my mother gave our teacher a paper with nine different math problems, all advanced for what we were learning at the time. I had completed them all with ease and efficiency. I was recommended for a program at the school called Challenge. This program was for the students who “thought differently” and “performed tremendously” in normal schooling. I took the qualifying tests and passed and was to begin attending the next week. I recall my parents telling me sometime later that the instructor for that class told my parents that she had never seen such a young boy with the intelligence I had.

School was rolling up and since I lived alone now was kinda different. I was homeschooled and on a mountain near Seoul. I got startled by Candy (my rabbit) who stomping on the wooden floor. I hesitantly get up from my bed and walk over to Candy and feed him some food. I look at the time, 6 AM, its was still early so I changed into my new uniform from Hikari Academy. The school was for people that have super powers and abilities. Mine was Telepathy and Animal control. I kinda got it from my parents about slightly different. I cook some eggs and start eating. When I finish, I get up from the chair and stretch. Because I was homeschooled, I had no friends in the past. Well I did have some animal friends. When I go to school I usually get headphones so I don’t read everyone’s mind which was kind of annoying hearing everyone’s thoughts. After 30 minutes I put my phone in my pocket and grab a soft scarf. I head out the door and the cold air goes through me. I quickly put on my headphones, almost forgetting. I walked my way to the school, many others were also going to school. I arrived at the massive school and realized how nervous I was. It was quite frightening. I see a guy that was at least 6ft tall. I walk in the school. And some people look at me weirdly. It was probably because of my tattoo I got before, making them think I’m in some kind of gang. Until I realize that a dove was on my shoulder. I eagerly shoo away the bird. I really disliked attention from others. I look