Remember the Present by Chelsea

Remember the Present by Chelsea - July 2014 Scholarship Essay

School has always felt like shackles around my ankles, preventing me from flying towards my dreams. Just like the formulas taught in math class, surviving school also had a simple formula: go to school plus take notes plus do well on homework plus pass exams plus extracurricular activities equals happy parents and a summer spent ungrounded. Day in and day out, I attended class harboring such negative feelings until I happened to take a class taught by a particular student teacher.

The class I took was Anatomy and Physiology during my junior year of high school. I expected the class to be the same as other classes: dull and its existence purely for the sake of getting credit towards graduation. However, I was wrong: the class was the most unique and interesting class I had ever taken thanks to my student teacher. The main component of the course was the grueling, grotesque, yet oddly captivating, cat dissection. My student teacher would play his Indies rock playlist on iTunes in the background in order to “get us in the right mood” as he would say. He would also make jokes while guiding us in the right direction of particularly difficult organs or muscles to identify. For the first time ever, I looked forward to attending class and before I knew it, school no longer felt like a chore.

However, the thing I loved the most about the course was that at the end of each class, my student teacher would make us all get into a circle and discuss a scientific topic from an article he had chosen for the day. From lucid dreams to 3D printing, every discussion forced my peers and I to really utilize our brains, form an opinion, and participate. Each discussion branched out to other topics in an endless web and inspired students to research the topics, even at home.

One day before class started, my student teacher and I were talking about my future prospects. He encouragingly told me, “I can tell that your eyes are open. Keep your curiosity and lightheartedness because funny doors will open for you and I want to hear about it”. In that moment, my opinion of education did a complete 180 turn-around. I was accustomed to hearing teachers complain of how I would never participate or how I have a “Type A” personality. However, here was a teacher who believed in my abilities, and me; finally a teacher that I could trust in good faith. Maybe school was not as bad as I originally thought.

To this day, I can distinctly hear the words he told me on the last day of the year: “Remember the present”. I was so focused on the end goal that I forgot to live in the present and enjoy the small things life has to offer. Fresh coffee in the morning, spending time with loved ones, and lying down on my bed with a book at night were just some of the important aspects of life that I did not appreciate at the time. Education was another. I realize now that education is a valuable stepping-stone that provides the foundation of knowledge, interpersonal relationships, and the chance to be humbled that no other experiences could provide. Aside from being able to name all the bones in the human body or multitudes of medical Latin prefixes, I learned valuable life lessons from this one, bright student teacher to carry over past high school graduation and for that, I am forever grateful.