Try to Not Try by Hieu

Try to Not Try by Hieu - July 2014 Scholarship Essay

Many people are probably starting off this essay with the white lie of, “All teachers that I have had has positively influenced my attitude towards education.” Yes, maybe that is true in one way or another, but in all honesty, half of my teachers bored me to death with their talks about protons and neutrons or the pre-historic era. These types of teachers made me set very simple goals for my first two years of high school: go to class, get an A, and do not look back. Now that I think about it I’m not even sure if I took the time to actually learn. Some topics came so easy to me that I breezed through the class while others were a bit of a struggle that I had to try my best. My teachers eventually made me believe education was just going to school and pursuing to pass.

Up until my junior year, my mindset took a complete 180 turn on what education really is about. I took an AP Language and Composition course and thinking everything was going to be a piece of cake, I took out my pen, was handed a quiz, and failed. Yeah… I was not eating any cake after all. I thought, “Man, I really want an A in this class… I need to try better next week.”

After a few days before the next quiz was given out, my teacher gave my class a speech after seeing the disappointing scores from the previous week. He stood up in front of us with his torn brown shoes, blue jeans, and white T-shirt, leaning back against his desk with his two hands and said, “All that you guys are worried about are your grades and high scores, you need to not try so hard for an A and actually take the time to learn.” My teacher was the type to push us to do better rather than seeing us do our “best."

From that point, I realized trying was the problem, my problem in particular. All I did was try but I was not learning from my mistakes, I was not learning any content; I was not soaking in what he was teaching me. All I was doing was letting information sit in my brain until the test was over and allowing it to leave soon after.

I took his advice and applied it to not only school, but to life in general. Education is not about trying to accomplish everything being thrown at me, it is about failure and growth-- succeeding because mistakes were made and using those mistakes as future references.

It is sad to admit that I went my first two years of high school not learning anything besides "hola." I never really took the time to challenge myself and I was never improving as a student. It is safe to say that my junior year AP Language teacher changed my views on education; I was no longer bitter towards failing… So because of that, shout out to Mr. Ireland.