Beyond The Obvious by Sabrina

Beyond The Obvious by Sabrina - August 2016 Scholarship Essay

All twenty-three juniors of our unparalleled charter school would agree that Ms. Siegel was something else entirely. She taught English to the whole of the high school (which consisted of no more than sixty students), and a four-hour history class every Friday to the juniors and seniors. She was also the only teacher we knew that regularly attended Burning Man, grew up in New York with a multi-millionaire, horse racing tycoon for a father and often told stories of her time in the Czech Republic. She was fairy-like, a storybook character that believed in burning sage to energetically cleanse the land while simultaneously teaching open-mindedness. She believed that education was the ultimate answer to the betterment and solution to many of our world's problems. She also taught the most unprecedented and influential class that I had the privilege of attending, one that fostered my growth more than any before, or after.

Her English and History classes blurred like ink in water; they did not consist of simply reading stories and reciting dates. In fact, she found the thought of a traditional curriculum crushing to a child’s creativity. Instead, she made up her own curriculum as the year passed, creating units, projects, and discussions based on what she observed in the classroom. The feminist unit was expected by some of my more critical peers who believed that Ms. Siegel was more of a hippie than a teacher. However, those same students enjoyed the following unit: an in-depth analysis of the nature of war. Creating and re-creating utopias was one of our favorite projects, involving the reading of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley or 1984 by George Orwell and ending with a school-wide LARP (live action role play).

But beyond academics, her classes taught us about life whether she told us blatantly or allowed us to come to a conclusion on our own. Her recurring mantra was to "Agree, disagree, or make your own opinion," and I got more than one opportunity to do so. Ms. Siegel was the vigilante for lost opinions and timid voices. Her classes invited me to do perhaps the most important thing when forming an opinion about the world: observe. By doing so, I heard every argument, stance, and solution for an idea. I wrote about solutions I had thought of and began to research, for the first time in my life, what these current issues were all about. I became a hybrid of opinions, as I was able to see both sides of the argument, and sometimes even create my own solution to a problem, not matter how improbable or far-fetched.

Not only were the topics of her humanities class interesting to learn about and discuss, so were the thoughts, lives, problems, solutions, epiphanies, failures and successes of my fellow students. Ms. Siegel was the teacher that listened to all of them. I'm still not sure when exactly the Revolutionary War started, but I learned that every person is fighting an unknown battle. I don't know exactly what the significance of the scarlet letter is, but I learned that shame is a societally perpetuated construct. I may not know the timeline of the Holy Roman Empire, but I learned that humans are great, and that life is complex. Ms. Siegel's humanities class was the most human class I have ever taken, in that we redefined what it means to be human and interact with other beings. No matter what I learn in my final year of high school or in my continuing education at a university, I will perhaps never learn more valuable lessons than I did in that class.