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.

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

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.

Before graduating elementary and jumping into middle school my homeroom adviser always advises us to try and enter the school program in this particular high school. The thing is to enter the program you need to take an entrance exam and get at least 85% on it. The first week of May 2012 my mom and I went to my elementary school to collect my transcripts that I needed to enroll for grade 7. At that moment and for the last time I saw my grade 6 teachers. Upon getting my transcripts I can hear my grade six teachers asking my mom if I will take the entrance exam.

Sixth grade seem like a century ago, yet I still have vivid sometimes frightening memories of that wretched year. I still remember the day we learned about Idioms. How amazing it was to my sixth-grade mind that I could use these unusual phrases to describe what I was experiencing. Today I will use my most valuable sixth grade English skills and pair my favorite idiom to my experiences.

When I was young, I did not do well in school and was not very social. I was the quiet person in the room that did not learn or understand anything. School and life was only about surviving and not failing, as I put minimal effort into everything I did. Only motivated to not be a complete failure. I was as bright as a muddy shoe. However, this shoe would soon be renewed, as my 8th grade Civics teacher, Mr. Caslavka, polished this shoe.

Growing up, I had always been the best. The best student. The best son. The best athlete. Learning came easily to me. I don't recall having to study very much. I was a sponge of information. I loved reading. My room is adorned with books, certificates, and trophies, all of which I had earned. Naturally and easily. It didn't go unnoticed either. I was in Pre-K for the second year, because legally I was too young to start Kindergarten when my mother took a chance on a school that would allow me to start a year early. This school had more rigid standards (yes, even for a 4-year-old), but I was able to not only get into this school but excel. During my middle school years, my parents decided that public school was not enough for me. I noticed it too, but I was having fun. Being the best if fun. By the end of the 7th-grade year, my mom talked to me about attending Central Catholic High School. PCC was among the most prestigious private schools in the City of Pittsburgh. They were the creme de la creme of high schools. Most people call it the Ivy League of high schools. You can only get in by a combination of tests, recommendations, and interviews. It's a college preparatory school in every sense of the word. It too was the best.

A week or two before school starts the school host a week called “bridge week”. During this week incoming freshman's will get the opportunity to meet teachers, classmates, get a tour of the school, participate in group activities, class assignments and so much more. Yes, this sounds like so much fun right? Starting highschool should be very fun, but to me it wasn’t. I didn’t know anyone in my class, and I felt so out of place. In class when the teacher would ask a question, I could look around and see everyone's hands up, BUT mine. I wasn’t use to this, I was use to myself and about two others standing out in class answering questions. This made me have second thoughts about coming to the school so I decided that I would stay throughout bridge week and I wouldn't come back. Early college starts in the beginning of August and traditional high school started in the end of August so I knew that would be an easy transition and I could go be with all my best friends and friends again.

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.

Experiencing High school is where it all began for me. Of course my middles school teachers tried to make us all feel as if high school was going to be hard and a bit scarey, but it wasn’t until I was ending tenth grade and the beginning eleventh grade when i started feeling that way. I had an idea of what my future wanted to look like but didn’t know how or if I could get there, until I took a class called PFM (Personal Financial Management). My experience taking PFM taught me why i needed to get serious about what today millennials call “adulting”.

It all started in middle school I got suspended a lot of times for arguing with my teachers. I would argue with my teacher about the smallest things such as talking while they were talking. It made me feel like they never understood why I talked all the time. I always tried to solve problems and most teachers didn’t agree. One time I disrespected my teacher and as a result I got sent to the principal’s office. Walking to the principal office I thought about how close my principal and I were. The walked seemed extra long because I would look back to see the small narrow hallway behind me. My principal understood me and always listened to what I had to say. Even though we were close I never wanted to face the consequences he gave me.

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.

It seems like whenever people talk about high school they either bloomed into this incredible person or fell straight to the bottom and hated it. When I came to high school I knew I wouldn’t have that experience, in fact, I predicted it to go almost exactly as it has. My school career has been a bookshelf, and every grade has fit perfectly in the space provided. Why would high school be any different? Well it wasn’t.

If I think about who I was at the beginning of junior year, I can’t count the number of times that I spaced out when answering questions about myself. I had never really thought about what really motivated me, and I wasn’t interested in pursuing anything in my life. The “getting to know you” questionnaires that teachers make their students fill out were my nightmare. The people I had ended up surrounding myself with were not the kind of teenagers that I could relate to, and I was wearing, saying, and doing all the wrong things all the time. I came to school wearing uncomfortable clothes because I didn’t feel like I fit in my own skin. Sweatshirts and large t-shirts were a norm for me, because I was worried about my body image. I let my friends take advantage of me. I allowed myself to get hurt, but I ended up forgiving them anyways. It wasn’t just my friends though, as I blamed everyone else for my own problems. I never owned up to my mistakes. I turned on good friends, and created even worse relationships with others around me. Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t a bad kid. I rarely got into trouble with my parents, and my grades were pretty good. I thought I was doing everything right, even though I found myself upset at the end of the day. Outside influencers were making me passive and afraid to stand up for myself. I couldn’t speak or act for myself. To be quite frank, I didn’t know who I was or that I needed to change in order to be happy. My routine of going to school and