Personal Narrative: What I Learned In High School

Only after my second year of high school, I was propelled into the adult world with full responsibility placed on my shoulders. It was the first time I was going to be away from my parents for a while and I had to make it through the seven weeks living in a dormitory living with the people whose names I didn’t know until the day before. To further add onto the stress, I had to take a placement test on a subject that I didn’t learn in a classroom to show that I was capable of handling the work that the new college class demanded. Furthermore, this was a very prestigious school that I went to and I had to really prepare myself for its rigorous challenges. To my surprise, I was relived to find out that I ended up passing the placement exam but

I knew that this 8 credit monstrosity haunted many students before and now it was my turn. I already started in a bad spot because I chose to skip the prerequisite class, Pre-Calculus, so it took me longer to complete the work that my classmates could do effortlessly. Even more so, I was the youngest one in the class and I felt ashamed that I was still using the trigonometry “SohCahToa” mnemonic to try to do higher level thinking that the class required. To add onto the difficulty, the course that usually takes one year to learn was crunched into only six weeks with midterm exams appearing every 2 weeks. I had to sit through 3 hours of brutish mental compounding and then work meticulous homework that demanded higher level thinking that was even provided in the class. The professor herself confessed that she would not take such a rigorous course during a summer. I would look from the window, taunted by the people enjoying their summer and wanting to do the same. Therefore, I had a choice to make. It was either that I drop the class, take an easier one, and experience more of the life besides my class or I could stick though it, finish what I signed up