My Personal Experience : My Experience At 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 have never experienced more friendship, love, disgust, and sadness at one time than at my time at a Rotary Youth Leadership Award camp (RYLA) this past summer. Everyone said it was not going to be as bad as I thought and that I was over reacting. However, they were only half right. I thoroughly enjoyed every second at RYLA, but I also wished I was at home.

As we all know life is full of experiences. Some of those experiences do not affect our lives, where as others are very significant. On my way into eighth grade I made the decision with my family to be home schooled. I learned many useful things, and it’s still fresh in my mind. The lessons I learned from my experience has strengthened my character immensely. My middle school years were the hardest of my life. I experienced more sadness and stress in those three years than an average adult experiences in their whole life. My sixth grade year was nearing to an end, and I had a falling out with my best friends. Before this I had never experienced any drama. As a thirteen year old, I never thought I would experience something so devastating and heartbreaking. A couple months before the school year was ending one of my best friends and I were having a good time hanging out. As the day was coming to an end, her mother came to take her back home. My friends and I were very close and we are always sad to see each other leave. The next morning, I walked into school expecting to see all my friends and have a good time. I began walking towards them and I noticed a couple people glaring at me. Then I realized they were all glaring at me. A lot of people I didn’t know we even giving me dirty looks. The only two people I didn’t see was my best friends. As i went around school looking for them people began whispering when I walked by. The people where saying: “I can’t believe she called

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.

In middle school, I was a weird, chunky kid. Not that being chunky is weird, I just looked like a little bowling ball with really frizzy hair. Having never really been good at sports, I was never really cool, and neither were my friends. It wasn’t until I saw my friend drawing, that I decided to give it a shot. I knew I wasn’t very good when I started but I didn’t really care. Wanting to get better, so I practiced more and more. At this time I was only in second grade, so I was just grateful that I found something I enjoyed.

When I was in junior high, I found my group of friends. I thought we would all stay close forever, but things changed throughout our years in high school. I went from feeling like I had a family to feeling like I been left behind and forgotten.

It was a good day, woke up early so i could go to the gym and warm my body up and just to get some practice in. Went home to my mother making breakfast as usual, started to get my things together for school like usual made sure I had all my books, computer and pencils. When I got to school it felt just like a regular day went to class like always i didn't have any test so that was a big load off. As it got closer to the end of the day the more nervous I started to feel I started to feel worried, nervous and scared but I did not know why I knew I was gonna be fine. It was an unusual feeling it was like my heart was feeling those emotions but in my head it was totally different i wasn't scared or nervous not even worried. It was my last class of the day the whole class i wasn't even focused on what was going on more on what was about to happen later. The bell rang school was over, it was time for tryouts.

I awoke on an early morning, my mother tugging on me. I ask, "What are you doing?" in a tired voice. She replied, "Get ready, Armani!" That's when I remembered, that today was the big day, where I would go to school for my first time. In a hurry, I jumped out of my bed and put on my clothes. I've never seen my parents so happy before, and I was confused why. I wasn't quite sure what "school" was, but I knew it was a place where kids like me went and I will learn things. Thinking about it, scared me on how my experience was gonna be for the first time in my life.

In school, I have always been a relatively successful student, and I was always considered one of the smarter kids by my parents and a lot of the other students. In about sixth grade when they started to split the grade up into certain classes for the “advanced” kids and the kids that weren’t considered advanced. I was in the classes with all the kids that weren’t considered advanced. At the time though, I didn’t realize what they were doing or that I wasn’t actually considered a smart kid by the school, I just knew all my friends were in classes I wasn’t in, and it really upset me. I got put in the classes with a bunch of kids I didn’t like, or just people I didn’t know, and had never seen before. I still had the bus where I got to see a few of my friends, but other than that, they just weren’t around.

There i was standing there in front of my classroom trying to prepare myself for the hell i was about to face today. I knew when i walked into that classroom, I would be tormented by not only the students but the teacher as well. This is what i went through for almost the past 4 years attending my elementary. I felt like an outcast, i was constantly told i wasn't good at anything and i believed that. I felt like everyone had something they were good at or excelled at and then there was just me. At this time I was 10 years old and attending Ridgewood elementary in Columbus Ohio. i had 5 classes at ridgewood and all of the classes and teachers treated me the same excluding one, art class with Mrs. Worley. Mrs. Worley was the only teacher that believed in me and thought i could do anything if i set my mind to it. On top of that i loved art, i loved to draw, paint, design and Mrs. Worley would always be fascinated by work. I remember that i would always stay in the art room during recess and draw. Mrs.Worley would always tell me that i had a talent for drawing and that lit something in me it was as if Jim was good at basketball, Sally was good at singing, David was good at math, and I was good at drawing.

At a young age, I quickly learned that I was good with numbers; math always came easy to me. Along with math, science interested me as well and my favorite things to study were the systems of the body in biology. I remember once when I was around eleven years old, my parents took me to the body museum and I actually got to see, in real life, the individual systems of the body. Whenever I got to experience this, I knew that I wanted to learn so much more about the body. During school, my learning style has always been more visual and hands on than anything. I have to see and do in order to learn, and that is how I do well in my classes. When we have group projects it is difficult for me to work with people who are assigned to me, but I do enjoy working with the people I am used to. It is hard for me to meet new people, but once I get to know them, I get along very easily.

Being in middle school for two years has definitely molded a lot of people to be who they are today. Possibly making some people stronger and some others weaker. Dealing with the pressure middle school had to offer, is something i would definitely skip a million times again. However it was not the teachers, the tests or trying to find your classes, it was mostly just trying to “FIT IN”, and feel like you belonged to some group of any sort. Finding out who you are to me definitely affects how and what people think about you, but on the other hand for some people they do not care about what people think and I definitely was not one of those people.

Six years old, with my hair carefully braided into two bunches on both sides of my head, looking around at a school I’ve never been to before. It was my first day of school and I had no idea where my classroom was or who my teacher would be. Eventually I ended up where I was supposed to be and the first thing I noticed was a funky peanut shaped table located by a huge window towards the back of the classroom. My teacher's name was Mrs. Jones, a very tall woman with a love for flamingos. Her classroom was full of brightly colored posters with educational information displayed and several flamingoes hidden in plain sight. There were about twenty other children in the classroom, but I was too scared to go up to anyone. I stayed in the corner closest to the door, unable to make the first move, waiting for someone to notice me. Everything started out easy and one by one each student was taken to the peanut table. When it was my turn, I realized that we were being tested. Mrs. Jones kept on saying that my score didn’t matter and all she wanted was for me to do my best. The test contained several reading passages and after I was done I was asked to answer multiple choice questions about what I read. I answered the question the best I could and once I was done it was the next person's turn. At that time, I didn’t realize why we were being tested or what was the point of it. How was I supposed to know that this test would be used to separate our class into different groups of reading

San Francisco in 1906. Laughter and questioning was what they heard but all I could hear, were memories of trains flashing by my house and the mutters of drunk and drugged homeless men pacing up and down the streets. At 11 years old, all I wanted was to live in a safe welcoming neighborhood with trees shading the street, letting light flow through the branches at dusk. All I wondered was why my parents chose to live where we did. I was able to avoid having friends over throughout Elementary, but them coming over during middle school was inevitable. The embarrassment I had about where I lived had consumed much of my childhood, but I learned how to be open about who I was and how one aspect of your life does not determine who you are.

“Welcome to the secondary campus!” from a teacher I was unfamiliar with. It was the first day of sixth grade, and I was entering a brand new school for my middle school years. I was confidently wearing my new pink Hollister collared shirt and a pair of all white Nike kicks. It was the first time my mother had ever let me get shoes with white soles, because I was prone to getting sneakers dirty. I had a lesser likelihood of that this year, because unfortunately we no longer had recess, which previously had stained any shoe of mine from the mulch.