My 6th Grade Parent-Teacher Conference by Tatum

My 6th Grade Parent-Teacher Conference by Tatum - April 2024 Scholarship Essay

“I’m not happy with you Tatum Nicole.” Is the first thing my mother said to me after she attended the first parent teacher conference for my 6th grade year. Naturally, I thought she was kidding. She always liked to make that joke because she usually went in and my teachers sang my praises.
I have always excelled at school, so I never thought that middle school would be any different. But I quickly found out that afternoon that my mother wasn’t joking. “You have a B in Pre-AP math. What is going on with you?” To someone who does not know me, this sounds quite aggressive, I know. But she was right, it was completely out of character for me. I was not a kid who received a B, ever.
What my mom was trying to convey with her confusion was that she knew I was capable of more. She knew that if I was getting a B, I wasn’t trying my hardest. And she was right, as she usually is. I hadn’t been trying in that class. It was at the end of the day, and I was so tired by then that I hardly bothered to try.
Why am I telling you all of this? Well, it goes to show where my academic motivation comes from. Not from my mother, or a fear of her as you might be thinking right now. My academic motivation comes from a knowledge of what I am capable of. I know that I am capable of high achievement in school work; this is a God-given quality I have had since childhood. By understanding what I can achieve, I am inspired to achieve it.
This is not to say it has always been easy. I have had courses that challenged me and pressed me almost to my breaking point. And yet, these are the classes I learned the most from and still apply today. If you had told me five years ago that memorizing 150 prepositions for an oral exam in my English class would actually benefit me as a senior in high school, I would have laughed in your face. Yet it is those assignments that are so tedious and seem so pointless that provide the most academic value.
Keeping this in mind has allowed me to succeed academically, but I have had to implement multiple focus tactics in my studying recently. It has seemed that as I have gotten older, my attention span has decreased significantly (this probably isn’t true, but it certainly feels like it at times). Therefore, I have to do something if I want to focus and get my homework done. For me, this year, it has been all about environment. This current semester, I am taking two in-person dual enrollment courses and have completed two online dual enrollment courses. So, as you can imagine, I was drowning in homework during the 8 week period that these classes were happening simultaneously. And if you know any senior who is months away from graduating, you know that it feels impossible for us to get our school work done.
So I had to get creative. I would regularly go sit at Starbucks, order a drink, and do work for 1-2 hours. But this got expensive, so I decided to do work at home. I would work in thirty minute increments, taking ten minute breaks between each, but this too got old. I finally realized there was a place I could go do my work that was free and was not my own home (where my comfortable bed often enticed me to take immensely long naps). It sounds crazy that I did not think of it before, but the library has become my favorite place to study. It is always quiet, and there I am surrounded by my favorite things (books!). I found that discovering a quiet environment was essential in focusing on my schoolwork and meeting academic goals I had set for myself.
Since that quintessential moment in the 6th grade, I have never received another B. And I will reassure you that I got that B on my progress report up to an A by the time report cards came out, so my mother forgave me. Though that experience gave me a healthy fear of my mother when it comes to my academic work, it helped me to realize that I had much more potential than I had previously seen. And recognizing this potential was essential in meeting all of my academic and personal goals.