Encouragement

I visited my old high school last week when I went home to do some observations and I was glad to see some improvements. When I went there the place was beyond a joke. I never had to try to succeed at all because everything was either way too easy (in general, not because I'm a genius) or because the teachers didn't care enough to even try. I graduated first in my class, which to most people would be something to be proud of, but I don't consider it a great accomplishment since I didn't have to work for it. This has been so damaging to me because it has conditioned me to think I won't ever need to work for something, which is obviously very untrue. When I came to Berea I was so overwhelmed and overall behind, I thought I would never catch up and it was hard not to think I was stupid. This has been something very hard to get over and I hope I will one day be able to use my own negative experience there to make some changes. The most disheartening thing about it was that I did have a couple good teachers while I was there, but they usually ended up leaving and teaching at the rich/smart school instead and deserting all of us when we were the ones who needed the help.

When I visited the other day, I was surprised to see more than one room covered with exciting things students had created. One door I paused and sneaked a photo and tried really hard to read as much as I could without lingering since there was a class going on in that room and next to it as well (if you look close enough you can see a girl looking at me like I'm crazy so I didn't get to stick around long enough to read the entire assignment.) However, each student apparently had gotten to make a mask and they had collaboratively written on sheets of paper "What We Learned", "What We Excelled At", "What We Need to Improve", and "Plan of Improvement" and listed ideas respectively. This reminded me so much of things we have done in 150 and I was happy to see a little bit of light in such a dim area. Hopefully things will continue to improve!