Lessons Learned: by Lupita

Lessons Learned: by Lupita - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

I would like to thank my Honors English II teacher from sophomore year, Mr. Andrew’s. As a sophomore, this was a very difficult class, we would be given warm ups every day, he would give us four assignments to do during class plus an extra two assignments for homework. Many of my classmates felt frustrated and tired of his hard teaching style and just wanted to get the class over with and a lot of them would say that they just wanted to pass the class with a ‘C’ at least. However, when Mr. Andrew’s heard that from us, he stopped the lesson that he was giving and told us as a class that he doesn’t just want us to pass, he wants us to try our best. Not just in his class but in all our classes. Mr. Andrew’s explained to us why he thought that way, and he said “that if everyone just wanted to pass the class and not put any effort to do better, then what is the point of me coming to school five days a week and teach students that don’t put any effort into their education?”. For some reason this question made me feel guilty in a way. I felt like if I did something wrong and I wanted to do something to change that. Through for, I told myself that I will always try my best in each class no matter how hard it was.

I have learned a lot of lessons from my teachers, but there has been one that has stuck with me. My anatomy teacher, Robert Newman, was giving back our first test results and said, “I am very proud of all of you because this class is not easy and with these test scores, it demonstrates that I am doing a good job in teaching you. Even the principle had mention towards me that I need to make the class even more challenging because these test scores were impressively high.” When I received my test score, I had made a 98, which was very good for it to be the first test. We were allowed to make test corrections, each question we correct we would have to rewrite the question, tell what is the correct answer, and explain where we got that answer from. I was one of the few that did the test correction. Some of my friends would ask me, when they saw me working on test correction, “why are you doing test corrections, you made a 98, that’s passing?”. At that time, I really didn’t know why I was doing test corrections, I did pass and they weren’t required. Either way, I was already done with my corrections and turned them in. Mr. Newman was very moved when I turned in my test corrections. He said, “you didn’t have to do test corrections you know. But I am glade that you took the time to do them in trying to improve your grade. Keep trying your best and continue working hard.” That’s when I realized that I did the test correction because I felt like I could have done better on the test and I thought that by doing the corrections it made me feel like a better student. This feeling really made me understand and appreciate the work that teacher put in trying to teach students certain subjects that they will need further in life.