Practice Makes Perfect by Romano

Practice Makes Perfect by Romano - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

“Alright class, open your textbooks to page (fill in the blank),” is the opening line that teachers use way too often. If you’re going to read the textbook to students, we would rather do that by ourselves. Teachers can teach us a lot of things over the course of the school year. Most teachers keep this learning within the realm of the subject in which they teach. Others decide to try and teach everything that they themselves have ever learned. But some teachers are able to get it just right.
Walking into my third period pre-calculus for the first time and seeing Mrs. Valdivia poised in front of the class was a little intimidating, not going to lie. I had heard from multiple previous students that it was the hardest class that they had ever taken. I knew that I was going to have to fine tune my math skills to be successful. This was true, but because of a different reason.
The most important lesson that I have learned from any teacher is that hard work trumps all. My class was chockfull of kids with very high IQ’s that I knew would pick up these abstract concepts very quickly and with ease. Some seemed able to just show up to class and know what my teacher was talking about before she even taught the lesson. One thing that enabled me to keep pace with all of these Einstein’s was that my teacher would provide us with ample amounts of practice problems. She advised us to try and get to them every night because they were a good gauge of what would be on tests. She would be available to answer questions before school. I wouldn’t always understand everything we did in class to a full level of confidence, so I would take time to do these problems. Most kids would say that I didn’t need to waste my time with them as long as got what we did in class. I didn’t go with their advice. I went with my teachers’. She told us right from the first day of school that we would have to work hard to be able to perform well in her class, so that’s what I did.
Through the extra practice and sometimes a YouTube video, I felt prepared for tests and quizzes. This hard work had given me a confidence, a real confidence that I knew what I was doing. Come test days, I was familiar with all of the material on them. There was nothing knew or out of the norm that I hadn’t seen before, and if there was, it was a combination of what I already knew. Once everyone turned in their tests, kids would do what they do best: talk. Most kids would complain that there was new material on the test, or things that they had never seen before, which was the complete opposite of what I was thinking. They would say, “when did we ever do a problem like that?” To this I would respond by saying that it was one of the practice problems given.
This advice turned into a lesson for me. This is what I had ended up learning the most from this class. I was able to not only keep up with kids that were much smarter than I, but I was able to do better than them. Come the end of the quarter or semester, they were asking for extra credit or to drop a grade, while I was sitting comfortably with my A. I had always heard the saying that hard work beats out talent or smarts, but until this class, and my teacher saying it over and over, I had been a doubter. Now, I am a fully fledged believer thanks to Mrs. Valdivia