As an american teenager, it is required by law that I attend school each day and earn a basic education. I spend 7.5 hours in school, 5 days a week, approximately 180 days for 13 years of my life. But these numbers are not the important thing, this is just showing how the majority of a child's/ teenager's life is spent at school.
When I was 5 years old, my mom would drop me off every day for school and I would always cry because I didn't want to be there. One day after I continuously cried for 3 hours my mom was forced to come pick me up. That day, when she picked me up, she said something I'll never forget. She told me "You can choose to be happy, or you can choose to be unhappy, but life's going to be a whole lot easier if you choose to be happy."
For me, Happiness is not just an occasional feeling, it is a goal to be accomplished through hard work and by giving everything my all. In school, I have learned throughout the years that it will not benefit me to go searching for the maximum points possible, it is not the grade that is important, it's what I take away from the assignment or class. Therefore, I have and never will be simply a hoop jumper, because when you jump through the hoop you do not gain anything. This is similar to any sport, you do not practice to score a goal every time, you practice to improve your skills, and when you miss a goal, you learn from the experience.
One of my weaknesses is my reading skills; I often spend too much time on the small details and not enough on finding the big picture. By devoting myself to improving, my reading speed and comprehension has increased significantly with help from the reading strategies suggested when reading 40 pages of a history textbook. I try to be a scholar, not just a hoop-jumper. I do not do the assignments to get them done, I do them to learn and improve upon my weaknesses. If I know that I have a weakness in a particular area, such as reading, I will consciously try to improve.
I found that I liked being able to assess myself on the tests and quizzes, not because I could give myself the score I wanted, but because I knew what I was thinking. If I had written something completely random, and I truly did not know the answer, I could mark it down, not getting points for it. I think I was generally pretty hard on myself because I'd rather loose points for something and actually think it through to learn it, than just change an answer to gain points. Also I liked self-assessing because hearing what the answer should be and comparing it to my own is a lot more valuable to me than just getting an answer marked wrong and not knowing the correct answer.
Overall I try to be a scholar and know that everything happens for a purpose, if I get a low grade on a test, it's not the points that matter, it's the knowledge I gain from it. Education is one of the things in life that is priceless and yet we have complete control over it, so why wouldn't we take advantage of it?
Overall I try to be a scholar and know that everything happens for a purpose, if I get a low grade on a test, it's not the points that matter, it's the knowledge I gain from it. Education is one of the things in life that is priceless and yet we have complete control over it, so why wouldn't we take advantage of it?