Thingy Ma Bob

Favorite Mistake

So, in my ninth grade year, I didn't attend school much. I had anxiety about school because there were so many people. From kindergarten to the first month of 7th grade, I went to Harpursville Jr./Sr. High School. Basically the Jr./Sr. part means that it is both middle school and high school in one building/

I was very used to that school. I had only gone to other schools as a young child. In Harpursville there is pre-k through 6th grade in one building, W.A. Olmstead Elementary School. I had gone to the head start about a mile up the main road in Harpursville, then a random headstart in Binghamton when I lied with my father. Then I moved back in with my grandmother and went to W.A. Olmstead which is right across the "street" from the high school. I was used to my grade which had about 70 students, and has stayed about the same size.

In all of Harpursville there are about 900 students. In grades 7-12 there are approximately 400 students, and that has stayed relatively the same over the last 5 years (according to publicschoolreview.com). Binghamton High School has approximately 1,600 students in grades 9-12 (according to publicschoolreview.com). That is 4x the number of students in the high school at Harpursville. There are approximately 850 students in the entire Harpursville district. There are approximately 670 students in West Middle in Binghamton (which was the middle school I went to in 7th and 8th grade) so, that is only 270 more students. In the Binghamton school district there are approximately 5,780 students.

So...you can probably understand why I had anxiety about school when I started school in Binghamton. It wasn't as bad in 7th and 8th grade, the grades went from 70 to approximately 111 students per block and there was a block a and b for each grade, so approximately 222 students in each grade. In the high school there would be about 400 students per grade once both middle school verged.

So, in 7th and 8th grade my attendance and grades started going downhill. It got even worse in high school. I would go school for a week or two an then skip the entire next week. The weeks that I skipped I would use people as an excuse or that I was gonna fail anyway since my grades were just barely passing. There was a part of me though that couldn't stand the idea of failing, so that's the part that would make me go to school every so often, that and my grandmother saying I couldn't stay home some days.

So, I went to school some days and tried to keep my anxiety at bay and distract myself, but I wouldn't skip after I was there for the day, I would stay in school the whole day because last period I had biology and liked it.

I missed probably a month or so in total, and around March my Algebra teacher expressed her concern about how my attendance was affecting my grades. She gave me the spiel I had heard from many teachers since 7th grade about how I had the potential to do better and blah blah blah. But for some reason the way she said it connected and I felt ashamed of myself for not trying harder. She talked about how I would make up my work and try hard to keep afloat, and would ask for help, which led her to believe that I wasn't just gonna drop out. But she did express her concern that if I continued that way then I would probably drop out and she didn't want that.

After her lecture she asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I didn't really know. Then she told me to just say something that intrigues me, what would I even consider going to college for, or what job I wanted. I told her that I wanted to become a mortician, and this intrigued her. She then told me that she wanted to go to college for that but her parents refused to pay tuition for her if she went for that, she instead she became a math teacher, which she loved, and couldn't imagine being a mortician now. But she told me that I would need to pick up my math grade more, and try hard in math and science if I wanted to reach that goal.

This still sticks with me to this day, if I hadn't had this talk I probably never would have moved in with my mom on April 2nd of 2014. I probably would have dropped out of school, and I wouldn't have tried to better myself.

So, my mistake was my attendance and taking school for granted in 9th grade. I moved in with my mother to correct that mistake, since I would be back in Harpursville and not have to worry too much about anxiety. Once I moved in with my mom I worked my butt off to get my grades back to passing (which they were all just passing until I was out of school for an entire month), and was willing to redo my freshman year if need be. I wound up passing my 9th grade year, and I'm going into my senior year. My plan is to take college level courses (something I never imagined myself even considering in 9th grade since college itself seemed like an unattainable goal) and I plan on going to college for mortuary science.