Make Me an Artist by Jocelyn

Make Me an Artist by Jocelyn - March 2013 Scholarship Essay

Most of my high school career was spent sitting in a desk putting forth minimal effort to learn the material in class. That all seemed to change when I entered the Physics classroom operated by Mr. Painter. Mr. Painter was a young teacher fresh out of college who was enthusiastic about teaching his students everything and anything pertaining to the subject matter of his courses. On the first day of class he pushed the envelope of my thinking capacity by presenting Newton's Laws and asking us to provide multiple examples of how these laws are relevant to our lives. That morning my brain was on fire from all of the electrical impulses that had been fired in such a short amount of time. I had no idea how complicated Mr. Painter was going to make my life my senior year, but I soon found out.Almost every day in physics we were expected to do experiments in class with a group and come up with our own conclusions about what we thought we were supposed to be learning, and present these findings to the class before Mr. Painter had even lectured on it. It involved rigourous procedures and infinite amounts of calculations that seemed way above my head; more than half of the time spent in that class I had no idea what I was doing or how it was relevant to my learning experience. After that class, my brain was exhausted and the homework made it worse.I also had the privilege of having multiple math courses with him, including Trigonometry and Pre-Calculus. Both of these courses also stretched my brain capacity, even more so due to the fact that before I transferred to this school I hadn't had a math course in over a year and math was not my strong point. Mr. Painter made the class spend enormous amounts of time relating the principles of trigonometry to a ferris wheel, which I never seemed to grasp. And yet again, my brain was stretched to its full capacity during these classes as well as the hours of homework I was expected to do.At the same time that I was in Mr. Painter's classes, I was also in several Advanced Placement classes, which are college courses taken while you are still in high school. It seemed to me that although I had these courses and they were meant to prepare me for going to college, I was working harder to maintain a high grade in Mr. Painter's class while being able to work less in my AP courses and still gett high grades.All in all, my experience in Mr. Painter's courses made me appreciate high school. For me, taking classes where I can skate by without really studying or putting forth minimal effort bores me. I like to be stimualted mentally with my courses and enjoy what I'm learning. And even though I didn't particularly enjoy the subject matter of Mr. Painter's courses, I had the most fun in those classes because I had to work hard and use more brain power as compared to my other classes in high school. His classes did a better job at preparing me for the courses that are thrown at me in college because he went out of his way to make the material relevant and he modeled his teaching style after most college professors. It is because of Mr. Painter that I have earned above a 3.0 the past 3 semesters in college. He has made me an artist.