Mentors save lives by Karen

Mentors save lives by Karen - January 2015 Scholarship Essay

In high school my mentors were my teachers. They were and still are my heroes. They didn’t just educate me with a class room curriculum. My teachers actually took the time out to share life learned lessons about times where they had to overcome both emotional, and financial turmoil. By sharing this they revealed to me how to think. How can anyone ever learn anything without learning how to think? So the best piece of advice I would give to a teacher to help me learn would be to become a mentor. My mentorship helped me make one of the greatest decisions of my life.

I was overcome with anxiety whenever I thought about my life after high school. My soul was engulfed with forlorn and there wasn’t a single day when I didn’t drown myself in a world of self-pity. Yet I had this insatiable appetite for a college education. At times I thought I can’t afford to go to college, or that the other kids were just naturally smarter than me so I should not try. Then my teachers shared with me that I can do anything as long as I put the work. I couldn’t put forth any work while casting myself into this constant state of worthlessness. So to me his advice on how to be successful was some generic boring quote about life that someone else had already professed thousand times but even they themselves had not believed. You see I had a stereotypical mindset. I thought because of my race, and where I come from people just tended to be less intelligent. However through the long grueling afterschool academic lessons I learned a lot of information about my teachers and developed a relationship that put things in a better perspective.

One of my past perspectives was that if I just behaved I could do exceptional in the class. I thought I could slide through physics. I was so wrong! The first day of class my teacher established he was not that kind of person that used favoritism when giving grade reports. In fact he scowled at each and every one of us and said in a stern voice, “Some of you will fail because you will think it is okay to not show up to class, not do the work or copy.” Everyone was stricken with fear because that was a general expectation of my schools student population. Some teachers just didn’t care. But my physics teacher did and he worked so hard to educate us by donating both his prep, and lunch periods, and leaving the building sometimes three hours later to get home. It sure did take a longer time for me to understand things but with the time we put into to the material I learned how to approach things for myself. Suddenly I understood that with a little work anything is possible. Eventually as time went by we developed an endearing relationship where we shared things about our lives and I learned he came from a background similar to mine in which we faced economic hardship. Then I thought if he did it so could I. His encouragement became my inspiration to attend college.

Another one of my teachers that I have built a close relationship with taught me that money does not guarantee happiness. He was a business owner with many riches but no peace of mind. Given my economic position I was astonished to see someone who had an access of wealth but no happiness. He gave everything he had to charity and became a teacher. Through our relationship I have learned not to chase after money but to indulge in the things that make me happy and this has also inspired me to go to college.

These two teachers have established a system of friendship and trust with me because sometimes teaching requires stepping outside of class room criteria. Education itself cannot be applied to someone who is not willing to be educated until the boundaries hidden deep within a student’s mind set by external obstacles can be breeched. It took relationship, or knowing that someone out there wanted me to succeed for the betterment of myself. It took having the mindset that I can do this and that I will not be a result of predestined failure because of where I come from, or my race. I know now that I am better than my past excuses. I learned that I can do well in college because I learned how to think positively of myself and that I have the capability to think critically when understanding information. This is all because of my teachers who became the best mentors in my life.