To Kill a Cat and Bring It Back by Sydney

To Kill a Cat and Bring It Back by Sydney - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

Throughout my career as a student, teachers, tests, and schools come and go. I will forget who George Washington is on a bad day, and I will remember the correct math formula on a good one. There are many lessons that will never stick, and there are few that will remain forever.
In my junior year in high school, my US History teacher, Mr. White sat his entire class down on the first day of school. Mr. White is a very intimidating man at first glance, with his military-cut hair and a pool stick recycled to become his pointer for the board. It is clear that he is on another level of professionalism. He came to teach, and in his classroom, we were taught. He spoke about respect and maturity; the usual speech that all teachers replayed at the beginning of every hour for the very first day. When I was on the cusp of boredom-- although who could tell, we were all sitting up with our hands folded in front of our chests as if our high school classroom had been transformed into a debriefing room where we were being prepared for war-- Mr. White said something that I will never forget.
“Question everything,” he said it with a twinkle in his eyes, like he knew something we didn’t. Looking back now, I know that Mr. White possesses endless possibilities of ideas and theories in that brain of his, and therefore, he definitely knew and still knows something I do not. We snorted, because that is what high school students do when they are intimidated.
Throughout the entire year, we were not spoon fed information like most classrooms. Instead, Mr. White made us fight for ideas and theories as we applied logic and reasoning. He would give us enough clues to connect it all until the entire class had pieced it together before the lesson was finished. Instead of reading through the books pointblank and trying not to fall asleep while he lectured, he gave us enough to want to learn more, to wonder and to question. Mr. White’s teaching style made us question everything because we began to look at a whole picture we had pieced together. Throughout the year, it became easier to find missing information because we had been taught to look for it. We were questioning everything in history. I would go home and independently lookup historical figures, dates, and events. I took my own initiative to begin to wonder and think for myself instead of blindly following what I had always thought to be right. We talked about the missing information our history books did not have, genocides that were never mentioned, the hypocrisy and ignorance of historical men that are revered as heroes to our modern world, and the mistreatment of others that could always be lead back to the greed of men. I was taught to step back, look at the information given to me, and break it down until it became a simple statement that could be universally understood solely because Mr. White pushed his class to question everything, even the things we thought we knew.
I carry this lesson with me everyday, and I cannot recall a single day where it has not been applied to my daily life. Questioning everything is not a learned behavior, it is innate. It is in our DNA to want to know more, it comes from the same early humans who discovered fire and the same who harnessed the flames and melded it into a tool. It is the same curiosity that killed the cat, but the same satisfaction which brought it back. We have been taught to take everything given to us without any questions. Mr. White simply and thankfully reminded me to think.