The Bigger Picture by TreMil

The Bigger Picture by TreMil - August 2016 Scholarship Essay

My very first day meeting Mr. Heiser, my AP US History teacher, he greeted me with a warm smile and told me he was glad to have me in class. I knew right then that I would enjoy APUSH that year. On our first day of class, we didn’t do the boring, time-consuming icebreakers that most teachers do. Instead we listened to a song. It might sound irrelevant to anything history related, but that day, history wasn’t Mr. Heiser’s goal. His ultimate goal, and his mantra for the entire 27 weeks, was for us to see the “bigger picture”.
The song, “Wide Open Spaces” by the Dixie Chicks, was about a girl leaving home for the first time to stake her claim in the world. She was forging her own path, learning and living and making mistakes along the way. Everything she learned helped to create the giant experience called life. Every lesson we learned that day involved seeing the “bigger picture”. Before each new unit, we would have a day where Mr. Heiser played several movie clips. Individually, we would write a few words summarizing the main idea of each clip, and then write them on the board. The one that was most accurate to the main idea of the next lesson would be circled and discussed as a group. That was the thing about Mr. Heiser, he never went annoyingly in-depth into each lecture, spouting dates no one would remember or mention people irrelevant to the lesson. He always came back to the idea of the “bigger picture”, wanting to understand not just the “who”, but why the event happened and how it affected future historical events. In his class, the effect of WWI on Europe and how it led to WWII was more important than the day it began.
Another favorite phrase of his was “The Game of School”. It was a strategy that he taught us, one that every student needs to know if they want to be successful in high school and college. “The Game of School” are like cheat codes on how to take notes, study for tests, get help from teachers, and the right mindset to have going into the major tests. It was a surefire way for a student to be their best, as long as they worked hard of course. Those two concepts are what helped me the most during school. I went from another AP student stressing over every meticulous detail and date, to someone who could review notes with ease. I became more comfortable with approaching my teachers for help on subjects. And by the time the AP test came around I felt confident and ready to go. Now, every junior AP student knows about the incredible stress that tests can cause, especially an AP test. But every student in Mr. Heiser’s class felt good about taking that test because he put in maximum effort to help prepare us. But really, the test was only a small part of what APUSH taught me.
The class taught me how prepare for my future. To see things in perspective and find my own way to acquire knowledge. He wanted to teach us “how to think, not what to think”, and to break us out of the mold that causes students to worry more about grades than actually learning the material. You see, the “bigger picture” in class, was for student to take a step back and see the ebb and flow of time, and how history fell like dominoes due to the effect of every decision made. In life, he wanted us to see how 10, 20, 30 years from now the stress we felt over that chemistry test or the fact that we cried over our B- in English would be trivial, as long as we took the lessons we learned and ran with them. Not random facts like the day the Treaty of Versailles was signed or the Pythagorean theorem, but how to think, read, analyze, and interpret for ourselves. How to have our own original ideas, instead of regurgitating what the teacher read to us. It was those lessons that will help me the most in my last year of high school and into college. The knowledge that my mind is the greatest tool I have.