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All I needed to know I learned in high school

This is the paper I wrote for our final essay in my Brit Lit class.  My teacher really liked it, so I thought I would post it for the xanga-munity to read.:

I must admit, when we got this assignment, I was pretty excited, and not because it was our last paper to write either.  I already had my own personal outline written by the time class got out that day.  There have been a lot of things I have learned in high school that did not have to do with academics, and I am insanely excited to be able to write about them and actually get a grade for it.  I really enjoy writing papers like these, especially because they come from my own experience.  In my opinion, the three most important things I learned in high school is that people really do care, just be yourself, and these are the best and the worst years of your life at the same time.

There were many reasons to believe why I did not think people cared about others before I got to high school.  Middle school to me was just torture.  Most of my teachers never really gave an effort to help me do my best, especially in seventh grade.  Up to this point and until high school, I was in the challenge classes, and I was doing pretty well.  My two best subjects were language arts and math until seventh grade.  For language arts, I had Mrs. Morgan.  She wasn’t bad at her job, trust me, she did just fine at it, but she was known for having the challenge students do almost a full semester of mythology, including a full project including deep research into a god or goddess and, yes, dressing up like them while doing a speech on them.  It was this project, along with the intensive vocabulary that made me hate this class through the rest of middle school.  In this same year, I also had possibly the meanest teacher I had ever had, Mr. Gee.  Now, I am almost positive that he was not mean to everyone, but he definitely was mean to me for absolutely no reason.  He always put the troublemakers in the front of the class, and somehow, I was always the only girl in the front, sitting next to all the trouble makers.  He didn’t like me so much, that by the end of the year, he still did not know my name. How do I know this?  At the end of the year, we had to present a golf course design to the class, and when it time for my group to present, he could not remember my name, and he finally guessed my name to be Elanor (Elanor…who names their child Elanor anymore?  I really do not know of anyone with that name).  When I got to Jeff, I had two teachers my freshman year that made me remember why I liked these classes in the first place.  The first one was, yes, you, Mr. Fernandez (no, I am not sucking up, this is the truth! :]).  You always made me laugh in class, and I always loved doing those journals.  Looking at the journal spot when I walk in makes me happy.  It really helped me do better in my writing skills and I was able to speak my mind.  I knew that if I needed to write something down that I was happy about, sad about, or mad about, I could write it in that journal, and you would read it.  The journal is one of the things I wish all English classes did, it really helps with your writing skills and lets your creative side show.  I actually think that the writing helped me with my skills in yearbook as well.  If it wasn’t for me getting re-interested in writing, I most likely would have never joined, and consequently, never become the student life editor.  The second teacher that helped me was my Algebra I teacher, Mrs. Johnson.  I ended up taking Algebra I in 8^th  Mrs. Johnson was always really nice to me, and she made me feel like I was a smart and important human being.  She made me gain my confidence back in math and made me remember why I liked it in the first place.  To this day, she still says hi to me in the hallway.  grade, but near the end, I was just so depressed about school and life that I let my work slip a little and got a C, so I retook the class my freshman year.

The second most important thing I learned in high school is to just be myself.  I will admit, I did not have too many friends in middle school, and I can count on one hand as to how many I still associate with, one being Brandi Bales.  When I got to high school, I decided to branch out, and instead of hiding in my little shell, I would break out of that shell and show who I really was.  Doing this helped me make a whole bunch of new friends that I will most likely never forget.  I was walking out of school on Friday, and I got stopped about five different times by people in the hallway, one person in which I did not even think knew my name.  It got me to think about how if I did not try to be myself, most likely would have never happened.  One of the ways that I showed my personality was constantly changing my hairstyle to what I liked and taking risks with my hair (which were all successes minus one, thank you very much).  I also never went for the trends in fashion that most high school students tend to do.  I mean, really, how can you show your individuality if everyone else is doing it, wearing it, or saying it?  I personally do not like trends for those reasons, which is why I rarely follow them.  I can actually only remember following one in particular; the giant shiny purse trend.  I thought most of them were ugly, actually.  I only liked the black ones, and that was the one I had.  I stopped using it after a month or so of having it.  If it wasn’t for me branching out, I probably never would have met my boyfriend of over a year and a half, Cale Rauch (wow, his last name is actually a word on Word…it did not underline it…nifty).  He gives me confidence in me being who I want to be.  He tells me that I am not like most girls ad he would not have it any other way.  The Sixth o f December marked our year and a half of being together, and as we were getting ready to walk to the 11:50 p.m. showing of Twilight (hah, seeing Twilight at twilight, how coincidental), he told me how I don’t complain and how odd, yet amazing it was.  He told me that almost every girl complains, but not me, and he was right.  What is the point of complaining?  It is not going to get you anywhere or anything really, except for maybe a few people telling you to be quiet because you’re annoying them.  I am also myself when I write papers, like this one for instance (like my lovely parenthesis of side notes such as this one). 

The final thing I learned during high school is that these truly are the worst years and the best years of your life (this reminds me of the three witches in Macbeth).  There are, of course, the best of times and the worst of times (A Tale of Two Cities! I’m on a literary roll here).  It is often heard of that everything has a consequence, some good, some bad, and some a combination of both.  There are so many decisions made in high school that it often can become overwhelming.  Saturday, I got a letter from Ball State, telling me I got accepted, and they were offering me the Presidential Scholarship, which pays for half of my tuition for up to four years.  Ball State is pretty much my dream school, but honestly, getting that letter was bittersweet.  I do not know if I want to leave Lafayette for college.  I applied to Purdue and I have not heard back from there yet.  I am afraid of leaving my boyfriend here, not because I don’t trust him, I trust him deeply, I just do not know how I would be able to cope with not seeing him for months at a time.  It would be a large culture shock.  My best friend, Abbie Seidle, is going to Purdue, and we had huge plans as to how we were going to dorm together and who was going to buy what.  These two people are the reasons high school can be the best years of your life.  In high school, I have made friends that I know stay true to me and I want to have the rest of my life.  These are also the worst years because we are going through some major changes that could affect the rest of our life’s outcomes, like choosing a college for instance.