I wasn’t ever really the best at learning. I don’t know if it was the classroom system that my brain didn’t like or if I just struggle to grasp new concepts, but school wasn’t necessarily my favorite place to be, and this was something that was established early in my academic career. Coming out of kindergarten I was placed in the unofficially official “bad kids class” which was composed of sixteen loud, unruly boys and three other girls who were just as restless as me. Needless to say, my first grade teacher had a lot more on her plate than she probably bargained for.
I went through a lot of academic ups and downs. In one year alone, I was placed in the advanced math group, then was dropped from it because I couldn’t keep up, then assigned a mandatory tutor by my teacher because I was struggling so much, then tested again into the advanced group and was once more dropped from it. No one really seemed to know what to do with me, and frankly I didn’t really know what to do with myself.
By the time I got to middle school I was basically just scraping by. I could not have been performing more average. It wasn’t for a lack of effort, I just couldn’t seem to get to where I wanted to. On top of that, I had a handful of teachers who made me want to pretend to be sick everyday so I wouldn’t have to go to their classes. I was unlucky enough to have a notoriously cruel teacher for two years in a row, and I remember one day we got to class and found out we had a last minute substitute. Appropriate or not, I remember we actually cheered. There was this energy of extreme relief that sparked out of nowhere and suddenly we were hugging each other and laughing. I’m sure the substitute had a big confidence boost that day.
But in eighth grade I got straight A’s for the first time. I don’t really know how exactly I did it but I somehow managed to replace my C’s. At the parent-teacher conference, my history teacher told my parents that I was doing great, and he could see me really going places, especially as a writer.
What?
That year was a turning point for me. After being waitlisted, I finally got into the high school that I wanted to go to. It was a humanities public high school program and it was writing-based. I went there because I wanted to improve my writing skills, but what I ended up finding was so much more. Almost every teacher I had genuinely wanted to be there, and really cared about helping me grow as a student and as an individual. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone as passionate about teaching as I did in the walls of that school. My history teacher lived and breathed U.S. history, a subject I didn’t necessarily find too fascinating. But when your teacher loves history so much that he literally names his newborn son after his favorite president, the feeling is contagious. I learned to appreciate new subjects and I learned to feel good about my own academic achievements even if they were brought about through unconventional ways. My teachers made me comfortable enough to go into their classrooms at lunch and ask questions, and sometimes even not about academic subjects. I had a group of people invested in my growth, and it made me want to grow too.
By my senior year, I was a peer educator, meaning for an hour each day I would tutor and mentor a few freshmen struggling to adapt to the rigors of high school. It was a complete 180˚ from the girl who didn’t know how to learn in the rigid academic system. From my own experiences with the teachers who taught me, I understood that these students just had different learning styles. They didn’t belong in the “unofficially official bad kids class,” they just learned in different ways than we’re taught are conventional. And that’s okay. The problem is there isn’t a lot in our academic system that caters to that, but sometimes there’s a teacher, or a handful of teachers, or a high school full of teachers, that understands that not all students learn in the same cookie-cutter way. And only then can a student really begin to love learning.
