The Significance of Sudoku by Catherine

The Significance of Sudoku by Catherine - July 2017 Scholarship Essay

If I were to be given the opportunity to deliver a TED talk, I would aim to discuss a topic for which I contain great passion: the importance of gifted programs within primary and secondary education in my life and the importance of supporting such programs. I recall the first day that I attended REACH, which was my elementary school’s program for gifted children; the students left class every Thursday to spend the day completing more rigorous work with the REACH teachers. The first Thursday that I ever had the privilege of leaving class, I was sent to Mrs. Maples’ room, and class had already begun. The other kids had been working on a sudoku puzzle. I had never seen a sudoku puzzle in my life and, after asking for help from the snobby first-graders around me to no avail, I filled in the boxes with random numbers. I did not perform well, but you can imagine that Mrs. Maples then made sure that I knew how to complete a sudoku puzzle after that day.
Throughout the rest of elementary school, I read new books, participated in a stock market competition, filmed product commercials to learn about marketing, completed impossible math mind-benders, and entered into numerous science fairs. All of these things I did on Thursdays. In middle school, I no longer had to constrict my intelligence to Thursdays because I was placed in gifted courses with other students who had also lived for Thursdays. In the midst of being enrolled in more difficult classes, I struggled in sixth-grade Earth Science with Mrs. Brooks, even though I had thought I was good at science. This was only because I had always been learning at an average pace. With her tough-love, Mrs. Brooks never once let me give up, and I ended the class with a 91. I continued to grow academically with the help of teachers like Mrs. Brooks, and it was through the aid of my middle-school language teachers that I fell in love with reading and writing. These teachers invested specifically into that skill set of mine and further invested into my character. Mrs. Redmon taught me how to laugh off the bad days and trust Jesus through all of it. Mrs. Jeffries taught me that it is absolutely okay to devote my time into school and my passions rather than superfluous activities and pastimes. Mrs. DeBilzan taught me that people are not always going to like you, especially if you are good at what you do.
These well-qualified and talented teachers prepared me for the difficulty that high school gifted courses would bring, and I am so fortunate that they did. Throughout high school, I have only taken one “regular” class, and all the rest were advanced, gifted, or AP. It is in these courses that I have truly learned how to be a person. I have worked until three in the morning, I have lived on coffee, and I have spent collective hours sitting with my teachers as I sought further instruction. I have learned how to work hard for what I want, how to stay humble in success, how to get up in the wake of failure, and how to bring others with me in the meantime so that they can succeed with me.
This past year, I took AP English Language and Composition with Mr. Robbins. I have never soaked in so much knowledge as I did in that course. We may have just been reading The Scarlet Letter, but it turned into class-wide discussions about the social constructs surrounding women, religion-based societies, and exceptional children. We may have been reviewing a scholarly article about allowing oneself to write and create via stream of consciousness, but, for me, I was learning that superior writing does not always take fifteen drafts and seven different shades of red pen. We may have been discussing the outcome of the election, but it evolved into a beautiful moment of unity when a Muslim woman in our class bore her fears and dreams in the midst of a region that ostracizes her.
I would have had none of these experiences if my county and state had not been equipped with intelligent and thoroughly-trained teachers and administrators. If my schools had not offered these educational options, then I would have never been challenged beyond 2 + 2 and knowing to simply put a period at the end of a thought. I might have never found my passion for writing.
Unfortunately, such opportunities are being compromised in the state of Georgia due to amendments to Department of Education guidelines, in which a misunderstanding of language implies that special education programs for disabled students are the only programs that necessitate teachers with specific training. It implies that gifted classes do not need teachers that are particularly certified to teach gifted classes. It is in this sense that my education, my younger brother’s education, and future gifted students’ education is put in great jeopardy. The challenge leaves the classroom and meets students again when they are receiving rejection letters from dream colleges. Gifted education and its necessities cannot be compromised, for it is the only hope that the state has of producing truly exceptional young people. Without gifted teachers or programs, there is no sudoku, science fairs, or scarlet letters.