Passion over Paycheck by Kiersten

Passion over Paycheck by Kiersten - June 2021 Scholarship Essay

In spite of the well-known trope of the teachers that leave unforgettable, everlasting impressions on one or more of their students, like in Dead Poets Society or The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the majority of students in high school believe that their teachers are just another adult telling them what to do for a paycheck. I too held this belief to an extent as well; I always appreciated my teachers, but I had yet to realize that the words and lessons of a teacher hold the vast potential to extend beyond a diploma and a grad cap. Although I wouldn’t fully recognize it until I was a junior, my sophomore honors English teacher and academic competition coach truly shaped the way that I analyze others’ voices and value the power that my own voice can have.
English had always been my favorite subject in school, but that was partially due to the fact that I didn’t favor STEM related studies and that I rapidly devoured books in my youth. I also genuinely enjoyed all aspects of words; ever since the fourth grade I participated in spelling bees and competitions, and I flipped through dictionary pages for fun when I was just six. Despite this, I had never truly thought of myself as an English aficionado or someone who necessarily belonged in English-based extracurriculars. But because of my passion for spelling competitions, I decided to join Spell Bowl with Mrs. Grabowski during my sophomore year. Twice a week at seven-thirty in the morning, the team would meet in her classroom to spell upwards of ninety words from a list of three-thousand words. Such intensive studying might appear to be boring, but Mrs. Grabowski fueled my love for words with mnemonic devices, spelling games, and humorous comments and anecdotes to assist our preparation. This, combined with special team traditions and extra practices at local cafes, coffee shops, and Mrs. Grabowski’s own driveway, created the most positive and genuine team camaraderie that I’ve ever experienced. Until her, I hadn’t worked with another teacher that was able to bond a group of people so effortlessly and successfully. I also had the privilege of enjoying equally uplifting teamwork on another academic team that she sponsored, which was Academic English Super Bowl. In my junior year, Mrs. Grabowski coached a team of five as we read and analyzed assigned material for a state competition. The theme of the literature was “The American Woman”, and it featured numerous acclaimed writers like Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, and Lucille Clifton. This detail was especially important to our team, as all of us, including myself, were women of color. Even though Grabowski was not, she truly empathized with us and encouraged us to share our diverse experiences with each other through weekly practices and discussions. As she does in her classroom, she also enlightened us on how our lives were not so different from those of the characters we read. She helped remind us that, just like Angelou’s poem, we are women, phenomenally. Phenomenal women: that is who we are, and that is who Mrs. Grabowski is. Even when she wasn’t teaching her traditional English classes, Mrs. Grabowski always spread her passion and positivity with her students, and participating in her extracurricular activities bolstered my passion for words, literature, and most importantly of all, working with and appreciating those around me.
Not only did Mrs. Grabowski empower her students to collaborate and share their voices in her extracurriculars, but she also did so daily in her advanced honors English course. Whether it was Golding’s Lord of the Flies or Camus’ The Stranger, Mrs. Grabowski managed to pull the characters out of the frayed pages and make her students realize that those very same characters exist on the news, across a continent, or right in the desk next to us. She accomplished such a mountainous task through “circle discussions”, daily quotes, and just-loaded-enough questions for writing prompts, like how we define the meaning of life. Additionally, she pushed her students to read diverse literature and discover those who bettered the world through projects she assigned to our class. And even if the students were bored by some of the state-mandated material, and even if Mrs. Grabowski herself didn’t enjoy it either, she never failed to spark a lively, insightful, and sometimes heated discussion. The topics of these discussions and Socratic seminars ranged from “nitpicking” the seemingly small details of a novel to sharing struggles related to gender norms and expectations. Although nearly all English teachers at the high school level engage their students in similar discourse, Mrs. Grabowski stood out in my experience because she educated us on the parallels between our assigned material and pressing social issues. She taught her students to understand the broader meaning of what we regarded as “pointless” or “boring” literature. She taught her students to listen to voices that are not like their own. And finally, she taught us to use our voices both inside the walls of her classroom and beyond, because even if we can’t change the world, we have the option to be kind, or to not be kind: to stand by, or to stand up for what we truly know is right.