There's Always a Way by Lauren

There's Always a Way by Lauren - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

For almost seven years, I have worked with an amazing math tutor, Mrs. Kennedy. As she helps me with homework and exam studying, she teaches me about perseverance and patience as well. While math has always been difficult for me, this past year was exceptionally challenging.
In my junior year of high school, I began taking Geometry. My past two years of Algebra had been hard, but never as frustrating as Geometry. I had trouble visualizing shapes, their angles, and patterns which caused even the most simple problem to take longer than it should. No matter how easy the problem should’ve been, Mrs. Kennedy patiently and kindly explained how to finish the problem. Despite frustrations at myself for not understanding, she never became angry or disheartened by my lack of comprehension. Instead, Mrs. Kennedy took it upon herself to find a way for me to not only complete my assignments, but understand them as well. I’d like to think that, through our long tutoring sessions, some of her saint-like patience has rubbed off on me.
Patience is not the only thing Mrs. Kennedy has taught me; she has taught me tenacity as well. In addition to the already rigorous course work given in Geometry, we were also assigned “Problem Sets”. These sets contained questions similar to MENSA problems that were incredibly complex. Some of the question were so hard, even Mrs. Kennedy couldn’t solve them. However, this never stopped her from working through every problem. On the ones that were too hard, Mrs. Kennedy would complete them as far as she could go, then direct me to another teacher at school to finish the problem. At our tutoring sessions, we’d sit down and work tirelessly, sometimes only completing one or two problems in the span of an hour. But that was ok. To us, it didn’t matter how many we completed in a set amount of time, but that we had finished a few and were moving forward to the next problem. Although I didn’t know it during our arduous tutoring sessions, Mrs. Kennedy had instilled in me the power to never give up, no matter how difficult things may be, and there is always a way for a problem to be solved.