A little about my education

A little about my education from our paper and a little encouraged from what I saw in A Year at Mission Hill and How do people learn?/ Faces of Learning.

My education has been sort of a roller coaster ride. I initially liked school when I came to the United States in the third grade. I thought it was nice that I was ahead of everyone in math (but soon fell behind again). I got to do art and to use computers for the first time; I learned how to pronounce English very well and got out of many classes. However as I got older school got harder and harder for me to deal with, I started to fall behind in everything and I began having a hard time with classmates. At some point between elementary and high school things really started to change. In high school I would just get a few nice comments and that was it, not much encouragement from home or school and teacher began to ignore me. I began to notice the difference in privileges when we were told to fill out FAFSA sign up for scholarships and to choose the colleges we wanted to go to. I had none of the requirement.

The pivotal point for me in school was a very scary and bold move I took in my sophomore year in high school. As a minority in a rural community if you do not advocate for yourself they will not do it for you. A counselor came to my English class and told us about our options our plans for the future. Scared I approach the counselor and told him that I wanted to go to college. After that everything changed for me. I felt I took control of my education. Initially before the counselor talked to me, I was placed in an English class that was made up of a couple of students (I was in the at risk category). I really hated the class I wondered about my dreams and aspirations of going to college and becoming a teacher. How would I get what I needed if I was at a completely different level than the kids I would eventually have to compete with in college? After the conversation with my adviser he changed things around and I transferred from that English class to a much harder class. I took the SAT’s and did AP Art and AP Spanish but still, I was not as smart as the rest of my classmates, my math and science were miles away from college level. Senior year, I managed to make the local news paper and to be recognized for my art work as well but why was I the only one? My parents did not have a good understanding of what school would mean for me but my educators did, so I resented that I was the only one that was Mexican to graduate in my class.