Lesson in Disguise by Rachael

Lesson in Disguise by Rachael - August 2013 Scholarship Essay

   Our first eighteen years of life are the most impressive. From learning how to waddle to our parents to properly wrapping up an essay, no other period of eighteen years will produce the progress we see from birth to adulthood. Of these years, thirteen of them are spent in a classroom learning lesson after lesson. However, now as I reflect upon my eleven completed years of schooling, I have come to realize that the most interesting, important lesson was, in reality, seeing the different walks of life each of my pupils had endurded, and still endure. The lesson of acceptance and open-mindedness outshines the lectures on factoring, how America was founded, and even human genetics-- time and time again.  I can only imagine the day I sit among my peers, graduation cap atop my head, class president standing at the podium, all of us ready to reliquish ourselves into the world. "What got us all this far?" I will ask myself. It certainly wasn't knowing our multiplication tables or being able to recite that long poem, which already three months later I cannot recall the name of. I know it wasn't because of the one hundred I scored on my history final, or the fact that I understood what "Hola, me gusta comer," meant. It will click and I will know: the lesson that I found most interesting, that stuck with me when all other lessons escaped from my memory banks, was the lesson on how to be open-minded. It was the ongoing thirteen-year long lesson about how to treat people that was most intriguing.   The lesson began early in the form of a circle. The circle of sharing and caring. Of acceptance and warm fuzzies-- NOT cold pricklies. As we gathered in a circle- or a kindergartener's take on such a shape- we were taught to offer the crayon we weren't using and to invite everyone to play tag on the playground. The unique freckles splattered across one pupil's nose was beautiful, the teacher had said. The shades of our skin made us original; in our own way, we resembled a rainbow of colors, the teacher had said. This became the first lesson of the schooling career and it is not until now that I realize: that was the beginning of the lesson that would continue to baffle me and challenge me in ways I had not known possible.   Numerous years later, that same group of "used to be" kindergarteners now flashed their report cards in front of others' faces. "Look how smart I am!" and "Ha Ha! I did better than you!" saturated the classroom. The teacher's composed exterior set the tone for what was about to be said: "You are only competing with yourself to do better. Please keep your grades to yourself and wait to show your parents." Simple, yet firm. And it stuck. Even into the years when acceptance letters for prestigious colleges came in the mail and we knew to save our boasting for our parents. Yet again I had witnessed the teaching of the lesson-- lesson 1, part 3,432.   Learning how to accept others for being different, understanding the basics of human interactions, and catching onto the social do's and don'ts has been the most complicated lesson in my schooling history. It is the lesson that interests me the most; you watch as some struggle to understand, some grasp it right away, and some even reject the notion all together. Perhaps it was the lesson least expected by all, however it was the most prominent of all my classes. It was a lesson that never reached it's limits, never ran out of talking points or life examples, and never got boring. It is a lesson that began my first day of kindergarten, carried on through my years of elementary school, into highschool, and that will stay with me beyond graduation, beyond college, until the day I die. It is the lesson that never dies. And it is for that reason that my interest, awe, and bafflement will, too, live on forever.