Change by Morgan

Change by Morgan - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

The most important lesson that I’ve ever learned from a teacher is to stop being afraid of change. For the entirety of my high school career I have been deeply involved in our choir program and have gotten close to the teachers and other students that were a part of it. By my sophomore year I had begun to see my choir teacher as a mentor and looked up to him as a musician and as a person. In May of that year, at the end of our emotional last concert, he announced that there would be a pizza party in the choir room the next day.
So come time for the pizza party, my friends and I had gotten some slices with our favorite toppings and chosen an area of the room to gather and watched as other groups did the same. About ten minutes into the party our teacher called everyone’s attention to the front and began making a speech about how much he had learned from all of us how he had devoted his life to bettering our program, which made what he had to say next all the more difficult.
He announced that after the end of the year he would be leaving our school in order to tour Europe with his music group. The rest of the day was a blur of emotion and tears as everyone came to terms with this unexpected change. I remember crying for what I now see as an unnecessary amount of time. But in that moment I couldn’t help it. We had all just assumed that he would be there. I mean he was there for twelve years, what was two more? And in that one day, what all of us had assumed would happen, wasn’t going to. He wasn’t going to be there as we moved up to the higher choirs, to go on class trips, or to hand us our diplomas. It would be a stranger instead..
Three weeks later the students got to sit in on the final interviews of a select three applicants to take the place of our beloved choir teacher. Out of the three there was one interviewee who I decided that I liked and ended up voting for him in the arbitrary student election that was held so that the administration could see who the students favored.
The teacher that I liked ended up getting hired. And now I sit here looking back on how I thought that no one could ever amount to our previous choir teacher and find the notion of it quite silly. Our new teacher is wonderful! I would even say that I like him more than our previous one. So yes, when my teacher told us he was leaving, it caused a large part of my life to drastically change. But he taught me a lesson that I am forever grateful for. He taught me to stop fearing change, and instead, to embrace to unknown with open arms.