Learning How to Learn by Anastacia

Learning How to Learn by Anastacia - August 2016 Scholarship Essay

My high school years were a time of meticulously devoting myself to being a good student. I didn’t like that I was getting C’s and D’s, so I decided to get A’s and B’s; I told myself I had no excuse to forget anything, so I memorized information and regurgitated it for perfect scores on tests. My grades improved, but it wasn’t until my 12th grade English class that I finally got a handle on how to learn.

AP English with Mrs. Henry was not a class where I could record facts and take notes of the teacher’s opinions and get by using that information only. Instead, we were challenged to research our own facts and come up with our own opinions. We spent hours taking pages and pages of notes on the literature we read, of which only one or two lines would be graded. But what would have been mere busywork in another class was instead an opportunity for us to generate original thought. I still look back at those tightly-packed paragraphs on occasion and am shocked at the insights that high school me was able to have. I still feel a sense of pride and satisfaction looking at a page of text annotated so densely that there’s no white space left. This is not a skill that has helped me only on my path toward an English degree, but also in every other class that I’ve taken on the way.

Anyone who dislikes essays has made the complaint, “I got a low score because the teacher disagreed with my interpretation,” but in that year of English I never felt that was the case. We were challenged not only to come up with opinions, but to justify them to others as well. If I wanted a high score, I had to earn Mrs. Henry’s agreement. Going into community college, I discovered that this was going to be the case in every subject I would ever take. In history and anthropology, I had to make connections that weren’t always obvious between ideas and time periods and groups of people. In public speaking and debate, I had to pull an entire audience down my path of logic. Even in math and science, the concept of “show your work” was never one that challenged me.

The skills that I learned in that English class have been useful to me for so much more than just English.