Personal Education Story
During our discussion, the class really only focused on all the negative aspects of the education system. Some of the positives are how you could win at it. I think winning means getting everything you possibly can out of your education, it can also mean going on to do what you want with it; whether your goal is to move on to higher education or the workforce what you learn should help you get there. Most people only really focus on the moving onto higher education part and not much else.
This isn’t what everyone wants, to suit the needs of everyone different versions of the same classes need to be developed. If I had to write a novel about my education I would probably title it “How Everything Changed”. I would title it this because all throughout my life I never had to study or go back over what I had learned in class, but as I have gotten older it has become more difficult to retain information. The reason for this is probably because the classes and what is being taught in them has gotten more complicated and harder to understand. The epigraph I would use would be “take advantage of what you have while you can because you never know when you may not have it anymore”. I would use this epigraph because you never know when things in your education might change.
You shouldn’t slack off when you have a really good chance of doing well. I would organize the novel by putting the events in chronological order. I would do this because then you could see how things got progressively harder and harder. Some themes that would emerge would be “how things aren’t what they seem” and “things won’t always be easy”. I would prefer to write a novel rather than a short story or poem because I could really go in depth on how things really were for me and how they played out. No two stories will be exactly alike, but they can be closely related to each other.
I feel like my story would only be somewhat similar to Malcolm X’s. I didn’t drop out of school in eighth grade, only to later on become self-educated; but I never had anyone help me with school. If I had a question with homework, I couldn’t ask my parents for help because they didn’t understand. So I had to figure out on my own, even if took all afternoon because getting anything below a “B” was, and still is, unacceptable. I understand what Maxine Hong Kingston had to go through because even though it was a different time period I had to go through something similar when I went to kindergarten. When I was five and started school I didn’t speak English, so I had to go to ESOL.
I knew the alphabet and my numbers up to a hundred, but I was lacking the most important part, which was the language. My teacher told me to tell my mother to only speak English at home so I could learn quicker, I went home and told my mother what my teacher had said and she said “Tell your teacher that he is in charge at school, but I’m in charge at home and he can’t tell me what to do”. Of course I didn’t tell that to my teacher, so I had to work harder to learn the language. I only spent about two months in ESOL before I tested out and dropped the accent. I went on to do relatively well all throughout elementary school, intermediate school, middle school, and into high school. I have been through a lot of things during my time in the education system and I know that I’ll go through more.
From teachers telling my parents what to do and my parents telling the teachers what to do to being asked to join clubs like the National Honor Society due to my academic success. There is no winning in the education system unless you believe there is. You make your education what you want of it. If you whole heartedly believe that the classes that you take are worthless, then that’s what they are. Only you can decide what is right for you because only you really know what you want for yourself.
If you don’t put in the effort to achieve it, then you’ll obviously fail.
