More Than Textbooks by Celesley

More Than Textbooks by Celesley - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

In my academic career I have attended more schools than I can count on one hand and have met many teachers along the way. Just like anyone you meet throughout the course of your life teachers have the opportunity to influence and change your or their presence could make little to no impact. It cannot be expected that every teacher you encounter will have the motivation and enthusiasm to shape the young minds that they see regularly so it really is something special when you come across one that does and teaches you invaluable lessons that can’t be found in a textbook.

I met the teacher that impacted me more than I realized at the time when I was twelve years old. I was very much a work in progress at the age and approached life enthusiastically with an early adolescent naivety that although embarrassing to reflect on in retrospective was carefree and fun. I started attending an international school in Germany after being raised and educated in the United States after my dad got a new job. It was a scary time and left me in a vulnerable state, easily influenced by those around me. Mr. Williamson came to the school a couple months after I did and much like myself we both grew to find our place over the following years.

Mr. Williamson started off as simply my physics teacher who made Coulomb’s law and ionic bonding easy to comprehend and less dull than it actually is. My primary interest lies in the arts but physics became my favorite class because I was learning more than what the education board’s curriculum had planned for me. I think that what is particularly admirable about Mr. Williamson is that he is unaware of how great of a teacher he is. He was unlike any other teacher I have ever encountered. He preferred to sit with the students at lunch rather than eating in his office and listened attentively to our unimportant and irrelevant teenage drama. He was eager to help us learn and come up with new ways to help us understand topics that we struggled with and he did it in his break time without complaint. These acts of selflessness are something that I think we should all strive to achieve.

The lesson that I learned from him was not something he intended to teach me, in fact for many students it might go unnoticed. Mr. Williamson is now the vice principal of the school I attended but even as he was gaining this new responsibility and a position that typically involves less interaction with the students, he refused to give up in class teaching completely. He balances the positions of teacher and vice principal, something that many people would shy away from because of the workload, and excels in this situation because he is passionate about what he does. I learned from him that true success is not measured by how many awards you have on your display case or how many zeros are on your paycheck but rather through practicing strong morals, working hard and most importantly finding a passion that you are not willing to compromise.

I am approaching a period in my life where I will be making monumental decisions about my future as the end of my high school career nears but with the lessons I was taught by Mr. Williamson I am confident that I will make decisions that I won’t regret. School can be so much more than essays and grade point averages if you have the right people with good morals and intentions to lead you through it.