Wisconsin by Samantha

Wisconsin by Samantha - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

Teachers have been on this planet for as long as there have been people. They are the ones that show children what they are capable of. They have devoted years of their lives to showing their students the world, to the best of their ability. They are the reason children and teens are able to thrive and grow into bright young adults. And their lessons don’t start and stop with the syllabus in the classroom. There are many more lessons teachers are able to pass down to the students in their care. Some of them are much harder to teach and can’t be found in any textbook. The most important lesson I learned from a teacher is to always try because you never know what you might be able to accomplish.
School can be hard. It can be scary, and when a student feels like they have nowhere to turn, that their efforts simply don’t matter because they will never get anywhere, it can be the worst years of their life. That was how my first two years of high school was. The classes weren’t that difficult, they were all freshman and sophomore classes, after all, and I had always been fairly good at school work, and school in general. But there is a dramatic switch between a small private middle school, from a class of only 12 to a class of roughly 150. It was a shock; a dramatic shift I was not prepared for.
My grades slipped. There was something about 150 other freshmen, and then sophomores, that made me feel like nothing I tried mattered. My grades didn’t matter, there were plenty of students doing much better than me. It didn’t matter how many friends I managed to make, there were so many students I would never know, or who disliked me for reasons I would never know. No one cared who I was, or about what I did, so why should I put any effort into it? Why try?
And that was my thought throughout most of the freshman year and the first semester of sophomore year. I did just enough to keep my parents from lecturing me about my grades, or worrying. I did not try. And then, I started my second semester of sophomore year, and I had new teachers. Specifically, Mrs. Mockler. She was an art teacher, and with art classes, there are naturally smaller class sizes. She was also very easy going about how her class was set it, it was the first one where what the student wanted really mattered. And that spoke to me.
I wanted to do well, because she never asked for much, and never expected more than you could handle. Even then, I still didn’t try, not really. I turned in projects on time, but they weren’t the best. They weren’t what I could actually do, just what I put on a page to get by. Because in the end, it still didn’t really matter.
But she was the also the first teacher I could sit down and have a conversation with. And over the semester, I learned something that can never be taught in a book. I learned that what one person does, no matter what, it matters. And if one person matters, that means they need to try. Because even when it seems like there are so many people that the actions of one person don’t matter, they do. So no matter what, you always need to try.