Sophomore Year Was Tough, to Say the Least. by Maryam

Sophomore Year Was Tough, to Say the Least. by Maryam - April 2019 Scholarship Essay

Every high school student, no matter what caliber they are at, go through hardships in high school, be it with friendships, trying to become more involved, or maintaining good grades. Personally, I have been pretty good at maintaining good grades with the occasional dip in one test or another, but I have been able to recover pretty well. It was my sophomore year of high school that I had really faced an academically challenging situation with a class, Pre-AP Algebra 2.
In the beginning of the year, I started out strong, I understood the basic concepts of what I was learning and performed well on assignments. Then there was a day where I didn’t really understand what my teacher, Mr. Chang, was teaching. But, I decided to ignore what was going on and told myself that I’d easily be able to recover if I just went home that day and studied. That method usually worked for me, but it was that first decision that eventually led to my demise. Days passed with me not reviewing the material and I would end up relying on partial credit to pass the tests.
I can think of two main reasons why I wasn’t doing well. One would be that I just wasn’t paying attention, or wasn’t retaining what was happening when I was learning. The second reason would be my clash with Mr. Chang in how he teaches, and failing to adapt to his teaching style. That is one of the most important lessons I have learned in high school, is that adaptability is key to being successful. Mr. Chang would teach a new concept once and would expect the students to understand adapt to new types of questions with the basic knowledge that was given. Whereas, I have to repeatedly do a certain type of problem to understand and then take baby steps to problems that get more difficult progressively. A solution I can think of in response to this situation now would be to take matters into my own hands and do the multiple problems at home by myself and really teach myself the information, or ask students that knew how to do the work, or even go to tutorials to ask Mr. Chang for help after school.
In fact, Mr. Chang was really upset with me that I wouldn’t attend tutorials to learn what I was missing, to the point where he had called my parents and told them I wasn’t doing so hot in his class. This led to me missing out on the homecoming football game that year as my parents were upset that they had received a call from a teacher, something they had never had to experience with me, and that led to me being upset since I had really been looking forward to the game that year. That situation persuaded me to attempt to get better at that class, and I approached my parents about tutoring. My parents agreed and soon I had been attending one hour tutoring sessions a few times a week.
At tutoring sessions, I met Mary, and we’d instantly clicked on account of the fact that our names were so similar, Mary and Maryam. We dived headfirst into the work and although it was a little tough to get into the groove of things since I wasn’t really understanding the work, with persistence it worked out. My grades began to rise but again the situation arose where I wasn’t understanding the work once again, and out of fear of embarrassing myself by asking Mary to repeat the process of a problem several times, I would just say that I understood what she was saying and would use the sample problem we went over together to get through what we were learning.
My grades got better in Mr. Chang’s class, but they could have been better had I applied myself more in tutoring and taken more advantage of tutorial time in Mr. Chang’s class. Not applying myself not only led to the worst grade I had ever received as a final grade, but it also led to me missing out on two years of Superintendent Scholar, a program that congratulates students who meet the grade-requirements in their classes to become a Superintendent Scholar. I am upset with myself that I hadn’t put in more effort, because if I had, I would have had better grades, and my sophomore year experience would have been way better. But, this experience also taught me very important lessons. I have to adapt to whatever teacher I have, apply myself to the work, and make sure I am practicing what I am learning constantly so that I don’t have to face the situation of not understanding my work.
As a senior, I look back to this situation and I am glad I have learned and grown from the situation. The next year in Pre-Calculus, I maintained a high A the whole year, whereas the year I ended the class with a C. The change had been dramatic because I really learned my lesson and made the decision that I would not let myself fall again and this is a lesson I can carry with myself through college and life in general as it is applicable to anything I do in life.