Mrs. Urioste Empowers her Students with Success by Destinie

Mrs. Urioste Empowers her Students with Success by Destinie - August 2016 Scholarship Essay

The best part about being a student is learning new subjects and new topics. After all, entering a new classroom each year involves meeting new teachers and a new set of curriculum that is more rigorous then the previous year. Every student is anxious or dreadful to have a new teacher because it is a risk to enter a new environment with an instructor that may dislike their job causing the student to fall behind and dislike school, or a teacher that is passionate about their job and enhances a student’s ambition to learn. My junior year of high school I decided to take a risk by choosing an Advanced Placement U.S history class. Mrs. Urioste was the teacher of my first college course I would be taking in which she helped me gain reading skills, write analytical essays, and provided the support and motivation I needed to being a successful AP student.

One of the skills I learned from in Mrs. Urioste's class was understanding the complexity of a text in a history book that I have never been able to do before. The textbook was difficult to understand because one of my weaknesses is reading comprehension, but the structure of the chapter book questions allowed me to learn that lesson before hand. Each week she would assign the questions in sequential order to my reading with given subtitles that helped me find the correct answer. The next day when it was due she reviewed the questions with a quick PowerPoint slide lecture and answered any questions to clear up her students confusion from the book work. This structure it allowed me to grasp the most important information I needed to know for the current unit and helped me further expand my learning throughout the weeks on it, following a test I was always confident about the subject.

A big goal for Mrs. Urioste that she shared with my class at the beginning of the year was to help her students grow and learn the correct way to write an AP long essay or DBQ that was a short essay being timed. She started off by giving us rubrics on how the college board would grade us for the end of the year exam we were preparing for, and explained she would be using the same grading scale. Given each hand out, it clearly stated what information we needed to present in each paragraph and how we could outline our essays quickly and correctly in a fast pace. We had multiple essays throughout the year before the exam. Each essay took place approximately at the end of each lesson/unit. Given so many essays it was my turn to teach the reader what I learned and let me understand the basis with a summary.

This AP us history class was defiantly a hard course that challenged my abilities the whole year. The pace was very fast, never a time to get distracted or check the time because by then the bell would be ringing. In so little time a vast amount of information was to be covered, taken home, studied, memorized, and onto the next. My brain was a sponge with overloads of new information to be sunk in each day. I couldn’t have got through and been successful with an ending grade of an A each semester without all of her support and volunteer time put in, she spent her lunches and a few hours after school for one on one time with any of students to help clear up their confusion. Mrs. Urioste also related to each student with an open mind of circumstances that comes across in our lives. With her dedication to never leave any one behind on a certain lesson. I personally developed a great relationship with her, which resulted in boosting my academic confidence that anything is possible if the hard work is out forth.

The main goal of the class was to help her students prepare and pass the AP exam, but in the end what mattered most was that all the skills I gained from the class would be held onto for the rest of my life and kept close in preparation for the college work . Although the class was a challenge with advanced work for a junior, I appreciate the workload. It has helped me gain the realization that college assignments are much harder and have fast deadlines. Mrs. Urioste's class didn't just help me grow academically strong but also as an individual ready for the real world and what it has to offer.