Personal Narrative: Changing From A Private Middle School To A Public High School

Going through high school the days were all the same, except for game days. There was just something different about the culture of the school. You could almost feel the excitement in the air. Every “Good luck tonight,” that was received made it feel like the whole school was rooting for me. This was my senior year and tonight was an especially big game. The game that night would decide if we made playoffs and if I could step on the court as a Hawk again.

My transition into high school was as easy as taking a breath. I had always found school quiet easy and I never had to put much effort into getting promising grades. Before high school I had my whole life figured out, or at least I thought I did. I had planned that I would attend a law school or major in English. After a while of being in high school I started to realize many things. My parents did not have the financial stability to send me to a law school, I was not as smart as all the other kids, little by little I began struggling with a negative mentality about myself and my future. I slowly let go of my dream of becoming a lawyer and decided to join the Health Careers Academy. Soon enough, I began to have a deep interest in the medical field but then again I continued to have the same question; how can I afford going to a medical school? I did not know much about college or what it took to get into college. I assumed I just had to have a pretty transcript and that was all it took. My self confidence began to lower as I saw how other students cruised through their high school years so effortlessly. I never wanted to ask for help because I did not want to seem “dumb”. I would bite my tongue and hold in all the unanswered questions I had. My junior year, I was having a very difficult time. I had a tight schedule which consisted of almost all AP or honors courses. I slowly began to give up because I did not believe that I could do it. I let my grades slip failing almost

In the past year, a lot has changed for me. I lost a grandfather to cancer, then a month later an uncle to a gruesome semi accident. My grandmother on the other side of the family barely remembers me due to alzheimer's, and my mom lost her job but is now working over 1300 miles away in Florida. If someone would have asked me at the start of my Junior year what I expected to happen, I wouldn’t have listed any of those. As anticipated, it was not easy dealing with a downfall of events like that, but the way I was raised helped me cope with it all. I started out at a small private school, where Religion was just as important as Math and English. How we were to act was drilled into us, and after I switched to public school, there was a noticeable

It was such a big transition from middle school and it was a lot different then I had envisioned. Coming into high school, the concept of going to school with some adults just went around in my mind all summer, but at the same time I was not really stressed as bad as I thought I would be. It is a very big difference from going to that setting to something like high school. Even though I had to deal with that situation I still pushed through because I realized that I was definitely not alone because every time that I thought of going to another school, I thought about the other hundreds of thousands of kids who were in the same situation. As for the grade situation, I went to my counselor who explained it for me.

I use to go to Bethesda Elementary before I moved here. The reason I moved was because I would go to Thomas. H. Pyle Middle School while the kids at BE would go to Westland Middle School. If I continued going to BE in sixth grade when I moved to Pyle I would not know anyone. The reason I moved to Bradley Hills, and not any other school that was going to Pyle was because Bradley Hills had a renovation that allowed more kids to come.

From my experience, surviving middle school takes a mixture of luck, naive fearlessness, and an aggressive number of colorful plastic binders. I started my first day of fifth grade a jumbled mess of nerves, anxious about making friends and doing well in class, and inexplicably dressed head-to-toe in red, white, and blue swag my mom got when the Summer Olympics were in Atlanta. I mean, my backpack matched my shoelaces, which matched my pants and my shirt. I might have even had a hat. A hat. A precisely matching hat. That I wore all day. Needless to say, I was not a particularly cool child. I studied hard, had a core group of equally nerdy friends, and constantly worried about whether I was doing the right thing or, perhaps more accurately, becoming the right thing. Was I not studying hard enough to get into college? Or maybe studying too hard, missing out on my youth? Would I grow into my teeth one day? Would my skin eventually stop looking like greasy peanut brittle?

Once again I found myself at the bottom of the food chain entering 5th grade. I had just moved back to Eureka as my mom realized she wanted to be closer to family, and I remember how scared I was. I came in the middle of the school year yet again, so there I sat in the library as I waited for my teacher to come grab me. I remember seeing familiar faces from the prior year pass by me on their way to first hour. I waited patiently, still no teacher had come to claim me for their homeroom. I realized I had been forgotten. What a great way to start off the new year... not. Finally a teacher came and got me and laughed about the fact that I was forgotten, which I failed to find as funny as she did but oh well. Looking around my homeroom I anticipated seeing all the same faces, quickly I noticed that there were A LOT of new faces,

As I went through 1-9 grade school I finally found grit. Going to St. Mary’s during 1-6 grade school getting up at 6:30 every morning just wanting to hit the snooze button so I could get that extra hour of sleep in. After getting ready for school, I would get on the bus, three stops later we would pick up these annoying foster kids that gave me a headache every day because they would shut their mouths that I would have to push through school with. Then building up all the energy sitting in 1-2 classrooms the whole day waiting for recess so I could let it all out. Since I pushed through those challenges, I was able to move on to middle school. During my two years of middle school three out of the five days of school, I would get up at 5:30 and

When I hear the word “survival”, I think of someone who has made it through the impossible or conquered a near death experience; but that isn't all that it means. According to the the Merriam Webster dictionary, “A survivor is a person who copes well with difficulties in their life.” Moving from elementary school to middle school taught me many new characteristics such as how to be more independent, responsible, and more open to changes.

To know how much I have changed over the years, you should know how I was before I went to public school. I was a sheltered homeschooler, and I had very bad social skills. My parents knew this and that is part of the reason I’m at Remington. The other part is because math sucks. So let me start from the beginning of the story.

I remember when it was time to go from being a 12 year old 6th grader, to a 12 year old middle schooler with a lot more responsibilities than I was used to having. I had to make sure all my homework was done on time (It took me awhile to get the idea of no late homework hammered into my head), asked for help when I needed it the teacher wasn’t going to help as much as the elementary teachers would do unless I asked, with asking for help was a lot harder than I thought it would be everyone was confused too, after awhile the teacher finally got tired of running around the room jumping from student to student, marched up to the front of the class and wrote on the board of how to do a certain assignment.

After sitting at the same desk for three years, I figured I was beyond seeing anything new. I was wrong. After that third year I saw a lot more than I thought I would. I went up to high school and everything was so much different. The grades were harder, the assignments were harder and the teachers were harder.

I went to three different middle schools. The first middle school I went to was Baldwin Arts and Academics Magnet. This was probably the best middle school out of the three. I had the most and best friends. They were all different, and they loved and understood me. The two things I hated about Baldwin were the stairs and the miles our P.E. Coach would make us run. The teachers were sweet for the most part, and even though I didn't do well because I wasn't accustomed to magnet school, they helped me as much as they could. The transition from public school to magnet school proved too tough for me, so I had to go to another school.

Being homeschooled until I entered the fifth grade, I probably wouldn’t keep the friends or the attitude I retain to this day. One quality you definitely would see if I didn’t transfer into public school is how shy I was. I wouldn’t have seen people the way I did, or acted around others the way I had. Had it not been for the journey of going from kindergarten to being homeschooled and finally to being in public school in the fifth grade, I would be someone completely different. I mean, my first day of school in kindergarten I stabbed another kid with a pencil for taking my lego block. But fifth grade became a whirlwind of new things, I didn’t even know about cliques at the time. When I got into public school is when I met Just-Ice (Justice) who has had that nickname since fifth grade. He and Leon were my only two friends back then. Leon and I underwent a falling out though and we stopped talking as much. But when sixth grade came around, I began to get to know Jesse and a good portion of my good friends today. Swapping school types again later on in life

When I was at Tad Gormley watching the Blue Jays and realized I couldn’t stand, I learned not everything goes as planned. My parents were helping my sister move into college, so I was attending the Jesuit football game with a babysitter. During the celebration following a score, I knocked my water bottle onto the track; so, in order to retrieve it, I decided to jump over the fence that separates the field and the stands. It didn’t seem like a monumental task as I had jumped over that same four-foot fence multiple times that game alone. Unfortunately, I was standing at a poorly patched area in the fence and as I jumped my foot barely caught the edge of it. Consequently, I fell awkwardly, but I rotated my body to avoid hitting my head and ended