Mrs. Henderson by Hayley

Mrs. Henderson by Hayley - January 2014 Scholarship Essay

I learned almost nothing is Honor's Biology freshman year. I sat there everyday for a whole year- dumbfounded at everything Mrs. Henderson was saying. It was awful. What even is molecular bio? And frankly I don't care that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of cell. However, I felt as if I was too smart to bump down and hang out with the delinquents in "average bio"; I later found out I just had way too much pride. So there I sat, in an honors course I couldn't get the courage to drop. The year passed, and I must have learned something about biology because I walked out of the NYS regents test with a shiny 92.
Walking out of my freshman year I willingly discarded all my knowledge of basic biology...However I retained my favorite study habit.

Mrs. Henderson was a fabulous woman. She was an average teacher-failing to attract me to biology, but never the less taught me some good things. She was an older woman, who liked to start off class telling us some current events about her two daughters and son that were all grown and married. One had recently finished a marathon and she willingly showed us the photos with little/to no nagging. She was just about as wide as she was tall. A short little pudgy woman who spoke with a giggly voice and always had a twinkle in her eye. She was always excited to be with us. She had talons of fake nails that would sometimes scratch the board when she would draw a Punnett square (everyone would cringe) and always wore a broach. I really liked her. I really hated bio.

She taught me my most effective study method. This isn't a glamorous method. It's sickly simple I'm surprised everyone doesn't tell you to use it. I use it all the time and am still surprised it took me until 9th grade to learn it. I use it for flashcards.

To set the scene: Mrs. Henderson sat on her stool in the front of class with a stack of freshly cut flashcards in her hand. We all sat before her with our flashcards that we had also just cut out of card stock, and she began. “You start with five,” she said, “then you learn them all.” So she pulled five out, as did we, and we learned them. “Then,” she said still sitting atop her stool, “you pull out another and you learn the six. Add another, learn the seven. Add one by one until you've finished the stack.”

Everyone in the class pretty much sat there thinking something along the lines of: “Oh...well that's stupidly easy.” HOWEVER! If you ask any of my classmates who joined me in that pivotal moment in Mrs. Henderson's freshman year honor's biology class- you will meet a group of students who's lives that had been changed forever. Gone were the days of mindlessly flipping through those cards! YOU KNEW THEM! Now you knew your history and french and english and math vocab in 15 minutes! Flashcard study time was no longer a burden because the time was cut in half- and then cut in half again when you got fast at it.

Mrs. Henderson's flashcard method changed my life. It applied to every subject and every method and just about anything you could slap on an index card. It was effective. It was one of the first tricks I learned to 'work smart, not hard'. I could never thank her enough for the flashcard method, the one that turned my studying and my learning upside-down. I'm a better and a smarter student because of it. I think of Mrs. Henderson every time I have a stack of 50 Nazi General flashcards I need to know, or some command terms for Math Studies- I know I'll finish them in 20 minutes instead of two hours. I'm forever indebted to Mrs. Henderson for the flashcard tick.