My Experience In High School

The high school experience is something you'll never forget, even after graduating onto college and other careers. Toll Gate High School is a place where you learn who you are as a worker, but mostly as a person. Being in high school entails that teachers aren’t always going to be there to help with every situation or problem and that you have to fend for yourself with the large workload. This to me, was my wakeup call into true independence. Having independence is finally realizing that you are capable of doing things on your own without having somebody watching over you the entire time. After the eighth grade, I came to this realization. Whether the teacher was teaching the alphabet in kindergarten or teaching formal essays in eighth grade, I have always had teachers that would figuratively hold my hand with my work. I became so used to the fact that teachers would give me so much time for everything, that once I went to high school it just hit me. I have realized that I am fully capable of doing this, and the feeling of confidence turning in a report or paper will be genuine because it will be my accomplishment.

It was freshman year in high school, and I was ecstatic about the fact that I can officially refer to myself as a high school student. However, not everything was perfect, nor filled with sunshine and rainbows. It was just two weeks into the school year when I faced my first arduous obstacle.

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

I am embarrassed and ashamed of the snapshot you have viewed of my performance in high school. Aside from my parents, no one apart of my life over the past decade is aware I am capable of such a poor performance. I feel ashamed because my actions represent more than just myself, I represent the Army as a senior leader, one who is charged with mentoring, training, and educating some of Americas brightest young men and women. My high school years do not define me; please take in consideration the tremendous work I have strived to accomplish over the past 15 years.

I walked into Urban wearing Abercrombie and Fitch Jeans, a maroon v-neck t-shirt with a cardigan, and tan Sperrys. I had planned the outfit out the night before, wanting to impress my peers and show off my mature and put together high school self. I came into the big cold Urban gym in with my head held high, believing, no, knowing that I had made the perfect outfit to represent myself on the first day of school. However, my confidence quickly deflated and red rushed to my cheeks as I realized my mistake.

Starting off as a freshmen I was very quiet, I was scared of the teachers and classmates. Everyday was a struggle to get into the classrooms my body would shake, my hands would sweat, and my voice would tremble. Each and everyday felt like the first day of school. I hated the way I acted and looked at school as if it were a challenge. Being social became like solving a binary code. I could not figure out how to talk to people everyone made it seem so easy to connect to one another. I felt like a foreigner who did not know how to speak English. For the rest of the year I let myself be in isolation only speaking to my friends I have meet in middle school. As the new year came around I felt compelled to break the habit of being preserved. I went in with the intention of making at least four new friends. I knew it was something I needed to come out of if, I wanted to succeed in the near future and interacting was definitely needed for internships or job applications. Being very serious about wanting to grow as an individual I tried out for our school cheer. As I waited in line for a number to try out I was ready to just drop it and leave. My friend told me it was gonna be fine and I remained in line. As tryouts went on I felt so confident I was surprised myself. While learning the motions and dance I felt relieved. For the first time I was alive interacting with everyone who was trying out it was truly the time of my life. Two days later time to tryout came. I was me again.

High school teachers tend to give “easy points” and not care too much about what students do and learn. In my experiences in high school all my teachers acted as if they didn’t care, leading to my inability to be prepared for college.

Whaaaannnnn! I hear as I wake up wiping my eyes. My one year old son Ashton is screaming his eyes out. I then waddled into the bedroom where he was laying and quickly put him back to sleep. I finally started to fall back asleep myself before I heard knocking on the bedroom door. It was my mother saying “Wake up it’s time for school”. I then laid in the bed and closed my eyes as I tried to get a few more minutes of rest when my mother then yelled from the other room “Get up, you are going to make me late for work”. I then knew from there it was going to be a long school year.

When I first attended Park fall of last year I was vastly unprepared for college, so when I entered as a nursing major I quickly realized two things. 1) I had no clue how to study 2) I’m not very good at anatomy.

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

I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when my family would ask me “So are you ready for high school?”. They would ask It with such enthusiasm my immediate response always happened to be a yes. I just thought of course I’m ready it’s just another step closer to growing up It couldn’t be that big of a change. When I look back at that now I can’t help but to see how naive I was for thinking It would be such a piece of cake, that I would come out being the same person I was before I started. I know now that without my high school experience I wouldn’t be the person I am today, and so for that very reason I am thankful.

“So, why did you choose to come here?” a dorm proctor asked the very first time we met, right in front of my room in Bancroft Hall, which would be my new home for the next nine months. Confused and a little jet lagged, I did not respond; I nodded, smiled, and stepped back into my room. As the door closed, locking me into my little world of isolation, I thought about the question. I did not know the answer, for I did not “choose” to come to this school. In fact, I expected to attend a school in the UK. However, as a Thai Scholar, I did not have much choice but to go wherever the Thai embassy told me to go. As fate had it, I was placed in one of the most prestigious high schools: Phillips Exeter Academy.

Maybe it was the thought of what people felt about me, or the way I felt their glare on my back as I walked past a group of people. It could also have been the way that people stopped talking as I got closer to them and all that gave them away was the accusatory look in their eyes. The tables had turned suddenly letting me with no choice but to experience the way that other half lived. Living as a socially awkward student was difficult, but living amidst all the flying rumors was close to impossible. That fall was a life lesson that made me appreciate the friends I had and humbling me to see past the materialism that existed in the school to the vanity of it all.

In the late months of the two-thousand and fourteen first semester, I had begun my dangerous excursion into a precarious realm of stress and irritation to a juvenile network of literacy and instruction. I was beginning my first year of high school, which was still a new territory for me. I had previously attended at Howe middle school, but I was not prepared for high school. At my high school, the building is different than any other building on the campus. The high school building is on one continuous slab of the concrete foundation, but there is a gap in between the two halves of the building. In this gap, there is a connecting concrete flooring that is level with the two previous halves’ floors. The Howe students, faculty and I called this structure the “breezeway.” During a hot school day, the wind tunneled through the breezeway and brush across me like an ocean of cool air. Of all the memories in the breezeway at my high school, I can remember one moment where I saw something that changed my outlook on what I wanted to become.