Understanding Us by Lea

Understanding Us by Lea - August 2016 Scholarship Essay

I learned the most in high school from my psychology class. It was only a semester class that I took senior year to fulfill a history credit, but it ended up being so much more to me.
Before beginning this essay, I posed this same question to my friends. I needed ideas; I’m a band kid: all I remember is band! But everyone I talked to brought up my love for my psychology class. Every day was something new. We learned about the physical body and how the brain works in a physical sense. We talked about gender and the differences between girls’ and boys’ brains. The different stages children go through. We even learned a little about ourselves.
Science has always been a good subject for me. But this was a history class in my school. It felt just like science. We did activities where we simulated how a neuron receives information and sends it to another neuron. We took the time to break down why optical illusions work. We listened. We held experiments. We used those experiments to understand the importance of details. For example, if you interviewed a person at 6 am in a busy, noisy coffee shop, their demeanor towards your questions may seem annoyed and agitated, even if you were asking questions unrelated to their surroundings or how they feel. But if you ask those same questions midday, in the subject’s living room, they’d be more peaceful. All this was was how to conduct an experiment with the least human error.
The stages of childhood development was the most interesting to me. I feel like knowing what I know will make me a better parent one day. I know they have phases that make them interested in what’s “down there” and that it’s okay. I know that at a certain age, they need to have space and be able to make plans and follow through on them, even something small. It is just how children develop and not only will this make me a good parent, but I believe it will also make me a better teacher. I want to teach elementary music, and that’s when children are very vulnerable. I want to build them up, not tear them down.
I learned a lot of things about myself. We had an activity with 8 boxes, each containing something in it. One had a set of simple steps (one line up, one over, one up, one over), another had just 2 parallel lines going vertically. And we were told to draw whatever we want in each box. What you drew and how it related to the figure already drawn said something about your personality. On the first day, we had to look at another student and give a judgement about things like what their room looks like and what music they listen to. I found out I come off as a spic-and-span, classical music loving nerd. All by the way I dress and handle myself. Another time, we shared our morning routines and I discovered I was a bit obsessive-compulsive with mine. Because I had an exact time for each activity and said my morning would fall apart and become stressful if I broke that schedule, I am a bit obsessive, which does not mean I have OCD. But we learned about disorders, too.
This course was taken solely out of necessity, with senioritis just around the corner, it was to fulfill a requirement, but it ended up teaching me about the world around me. Why do my friends act the way they do? Why do I do what I do? It gave a lot of answers to that age-old question: why? I learned so much about just how to think. How to understand others and get along better. How to be understood better. These lessons can be use in a classroom to be a better student, but I really appreciate how it made me a better person in life.