Iota by Mariana

Iota by Mariana - June 2021 Scholarship Essay

Maybe it was the googly eyes or being crowned the queen of first period or the daily emails with national holidays, or perhaps it was simply Mrs. Camerena. My seventh-grade year molded me to think differently and be different, but the potter that I owe the stature of glazed authenticity to is Mrs. Camarena.
If you venture down Admiral Akers Junior High´s middle school wing you´ll find a red door. It's not very captivating because all the doors in the open-aired building were painted red, but it's who stood beyond the door that was special. After you pass the red door will be a large five feet by five feet array of letters: it resembles a not very discrete word search called the Boggle Board. The Boggle Board was changed on a weekly basis. Awards were given to the longest and most unusual word. A trimester into the school year, I figured out that the longest word tended to be from the previous week´s vocabulary. It was easy finding iconoclasm and patriarch, but it was difficult finding words no one else would think of. I was going to need to think uncommonly to be common under the winner´s title. Drawn to its obscurity I wrote ¨iota¨ on nearly every Boggle Board entry because it was subtly hidden, but noticeable weekly. The Boggle Board was not an assignment: it was simply a way that Mrs. Camarena got students to engage in the classroom. In actual assignments was where creativity and ingenuity were lured out of students. One assignment required that a poster of religious propaganda be made to entice peasants to join the crusades. After brainstorming slogans such as, ¨Earn your ticket to salvation¨, and ¨God wants YOU to be in the crusades¨, I reflected on the assignment itself, or rather the rationale of it. I asked ¨Mrs. Camarena, why are we making posters with words if peasants were illiterate?¨ We learned prior that the only medieval people that could read were clergy. She told me to lose all logic, but I still quite haven't.
There´s another relic of iota size, but not found in an iota of an amount: googly eyes stickers. They were everywhere: on your assignment, on random lockers, and maybe on your desk. One may think that it was part of a seventh-grade conspiracy or a sixth-grader gone rogue after watching ¨The Matrix¨ or ¨Mission Impossible¨. But no, this was not a prepubescent Keanu Reeves or Tom Cruise, but Mrs. Camarena. I had no clue how she had as many googly eyes as she did, or who supplied her with a lifetime abundance of it but it was definitely different from anything my previous teachers gave. Some teachers drew a smiley face or wrote ¨Good job¨, but none ever graced anything with a kid-friendly version of Big Brother´s glaring eyes. But that is who Mrs. Camarena is: authentic, unique, and most of all different. Going through my twelve-year-old mid-life crisis I struggled with a common issue: blending in. Not at all following Dr. Suess´ ¨why blend in, when you were born to stand out¨ quote I wore fake glasses, for half a year. My entire friend group had prescription glasses, so I figured that I'd wear some phony ones to mask my privileged eyesight. I thought no one would know. They all knew. My explanation was that I wanted to be like everyone else when really no one can be anyone else but themselves. Mrs. Camarena´s own uniqueness taught me to pursue confidence in my own individuality because I was not meant to be like everyone. The ninth letter of the Greek alphabet is iota, according to Oxford Languages, but is transliterated as ¨I¨. I decided that I was no longer going to spend an iota amount of my time trying to be like them, because they were themselves, and I was well myself.
An iota can measure anything. An iota basically means something small- minuscule. I remember an iota worth of all previous classes, but can´t seem to forget an iota´s worth of memories from Mrs. Camarena´s. I would go back within an iota if I could, because she has left anything but an iota-sized footprint in the heart of my middle school experience.