My Experience In High School

When I entered high school in 2012, it was something completely different from what I was coming from. I was coming from a middle school with familiar faces and a comfortable environment. I had the option to continue at my middle school, but I wanted to try something new and go somewhere that was going to challenge me academically. However, at the time, not only was I in a new school, I was also around new people and in completely different surroundings. My peers partially prepared for what was to come in high school, but the uncomfortable feeling I felt walking into the doors of Beacon High School was something I did not expect. It was strange sitting among people I had never seen before; roughly 1,300 new faces. When I was going from elementary school to middle

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.

Throughout junior high, I was bullied quite often and never formed lasting connections with any of the people there. I was transferred to a high school out of my district because it was overall “a better place,” as my mother always assured her frightened fourteen year old child. I was grateful to get away from the cajoling of my peers but the unknown of a private school was equally as intimidating.

As I have grown up, I have been extremely lucky to grow up in a well rounded household with privileges that many students are not able to experience. From a young age I was enrolled in a private school and then moved to a public school program in a nice neighborhood with an impressive school system. I was able to enroll in club sports and be a part of anything my heart desired. My parents were both able to receive a college degree and go straight into the workforce with little debt from their college educations. I have been able to have dogs, fish, and a cat throughout my childhood, never realizing how much of a privilege that was until I began to grow older and meet people who had grown up in very different situations. Waking up christmas morning to see stockings filled and presents piled high, everything I had asked for and more. I've been able to travel all over the world and experience things that some people can only dream about. However, once I came to high school, I joined the Academy for Global Studies, which is a program that focuses on the global aspects, and has helped me to become more aware of the people around me and not focus

High school did teach me how to solve math problems, take good notes, and ask for help when I needed it the most; but it didn’t teach me how to efficiently prepare for college. My high school taught me how to associate with people I didn’t even know. But, it never taught me to take notes down when the teacher was talking about crucial information, such as y=mx+b being on the test. It may have taught me that I could pass some tests without studying, but it never taught me how to come up with a study method for making sure I do an outstanding job on the 15 point Geometry quiz. Now that I’m in college I feel like I have to prepare myself for it and to succeed in the process.

Of all the things I struggled with while growing up, school wasn’t one of them. The classroom was like a second home to me; everything, from the sights (desks in neat rows, spotted multicolored linoleum), to the sounds (chalk against the blackboard, shrieks on the playground), and even the smells (a combination of glue, disinfectant, and wet paper towels) wrapped me in a cocoon of comfort and familiarity. I enjoyed doing assignments, and getting to know new teachers. Purchasing new school supplies felt like a second Christmas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Until the summer of my sophomore year, I was unquestionably shy. I was the kid whose raised hand lifted four inches off the table and who slouched over her sketches of strangers. That summer, I was forced to change.

In my senior year of high school I took a ceramics class. One day the teacher invited a professional potter who taught us a convenient way of making pottery. This experience was significant, because it taught me something I never expected to gain from high school which was to broaden my horizons, and approach different subjects with an open mind. I ended up making many pieces at home using that technique.

Going to high school is where life begins. We tend to go through the worst things in school and sometimes it may really affect us throughout our teenage stage. For me there was always three things that really played a major part in my life. It was very hard for me to fit in with most people my age at school. I never seemed to understand why I couldn 't be like them, do the things they did, or even wear the close the wore. I felt like I wasn 't good enough or pretty enough. I even struggled with finding friends. I thought I had “true friends,” but instead, they all turned there back on me. Then my feeling and emotions came along the way and made things even worse. Although everybody has to go through things to learn, I always wondered why.

High school also gave me the opportunity to meet and develop friendships with interesting and unique people. Being a student in a school with only about one thousand individuals, it was fairly common to see the same people around school. Due to such a small community, I feel like it was easier to develop relationships with my peers. Such frequent