Don't Become a Bad Habit by Ben

Don't Become a Bad Habit by Ben - January 2016 Scholarship Essay

As a senior in high school, I have realized that life and school have become a habit. The teachers all have their schedules, as do the students. Every day, I follow a routine and in return have become increasingly bored with it. As a senior in high school my mind is challenged daily as I try to solve math, which no longer uses numbers, but letters. I try to analyze why an author may have used the spelling, "grey" v.s. "gray". I am constantly challenged by the daily gruel of trying to speak another language! It may sound exciting, but every day it's the same and everyday, I expect the challenges that face me. Students today suffer from the same problems, and teachers and educators know what they are. Educators know why students drop out, they know why they fail, they realize the students get bored of school and lose interest. As children, students are fascinated by every detail, by every subject, and by every thing in their lives. They may imitate a cow by saying moo, giggling because they are now imagining the absurdity that they are a cow. Adults may smile and play along, but the magic for them is not the same. Adults and older children know that a cow says moo, and are not impressed by the child and have indeed become a new creature of habit. The older we get, the less impressed we are by the world and the wonders it has. We lose our childishness, and we become more mature. We no longer want to learn why the earth is round, or why there are only eight notes in a scale and not twenty-seven and a half. We just accept that facts are facts and we cease looking for questions, and instead look only for answers. But that is the problem!! We should be learning answers to search for the next question, students in schools are taught to only find the one correct answer. No longer are they taught to ask, "Why?", they are taught to accept that to find the area of a triangle, b does equal one half the base times the height. Students and adults have lost their child hood imaginations, and have lost the drive to find new things and create new ideas. They have become a bad habit. They always follow the same routine, getting up at their alarm clocks beck and call, they reach for their phone the moment it vibrates, their eyes gloss over in class. Adults go to work, loiter around the water cooler, drink the third cup of coffee.
My 2016 resolution is to break people of their habitual selves, and to bring them to the edge of the box they have been thinking inside of. I want to make a difference in someone's life, to try and help them achieve the potential they didn't know they had.
My 2016 resolution is to not let people become bad habits.