An Unfair Assumption by Yuritza

An Unfair Assumption by Yuritza - July 2014 Scholarship Essay

Mrs. A was one of those rare teachers one hardly ever came across due to the immense value she would emphasize on human character, rather than just solely focusing on the value of her students' grades. Her teaching style was exceptional in that sense because of how she treated everyone with a similar, but somehow unique, value of respect. Her kindness and understanding towards the lives of each of her students is exactly what enlightened me to view my own life a lot less strictly, while also giving me hope about overcoming my own apathy towards the world and somehow finding comfort in being more open and trusting towards others. What set of my dramatic transformation that year in middle school occurred when I met Mrs. A for the first time. That meeting would mark my first attempt of battling an ugly prejudice within myself, and instilling me with one of the biggest revelations in human character that I have ever had to learn.

What has to be made clear is that before entering Mrs. A's classroom, I could best be summed up as being nothing more than a close-minded and uneducated individual. I was twelve at that time, and for all I liked to assure myself that I knew everything that needed to be known about how the world worked, I knew for a fact that I didn't understand a thing about what life was like outside of my own. I misjudged others terribly in that chapter of my life, and took to listening and agreeing to the words of men and women who had an even more basic level of understanding of the world than I had back then. By making life out to be much worse than what it truly was, I became bias and prejudiced towards others. That being said, before I entered Mrs. A's classroom I had held on to a terrible and absolutely incorrect belief that all Christians were bad people.

That had been one of the main reason that when I found out that Mrs. A was a devoted Christian follower, I came to the decision that I should lessen my great opinion of her. As I've stated before, I had been inflected with a bias against the religion that she affiliated with at that time and as much as I know now how wrong I was then, at that time I could only recall feeling confused and upset with this discovery. However, I also recall feeling it unfair to give up on Mrs. A who had instilled me with such a meaningful impact about my potential as a student. How I found out about my teacher's religious affiliation is not what matters now, but the way I responded to it is what should be focused on. In my mind I tore apart the words I had once believed true about Christianity and splayed them wide open, silently reevaluating where I stood with Mrs. A and my biases. Why did I allow some stranger's assumptions I'd heard on television diminish my view of her? She was still and would always be the Mrs. A I had come to admire from the start, so why stop now? Questions like these allowed me to conclude something important about this teacher.

That conclusion I made about Mrs. A was that she could not be so easily summed up as a simple ray of color like my prejudiced mind had tainted her out to be, but more so like an array of specific tints and hues that truly heightened the humanity she had always exhibited. In one swipe, it was that same humanity she always displayed that vanquished the previous unfair assumptions I had made about her, and her religion. I came to see the true definition of Christianity, the good and positive side of it that I had often been reluctant to believe existed, and never have I felt more human than at that moment than when my mind made that drastic switch in thinking. From this experience, Mrs. A taught me that education doesn't just start and end in the classroom, but that it continuous to grow and thrive in places we would least expect it to in our own everyday lives. These days I strive to be as open-minded and kind to others as she had been to me, and as I keep experiencing new parts of my life I hope to reach her high level of understanding of this world one day.