Freshman Year When I Learned one Important Thing.

When I say the words freshman English class a lot could come to mind from long essays to reading poetry or whatever this school does in English 1 but when I think of English my Freshman year I think of 10 kids all hanging around in a classroom with a substitute teacher(he was more like an actual teacher after the first week) all talking about a variety of things on any given day from moments in history to our current homework in biology class heck once we had him for every class for 3 days straight because all of our teachers had to go to a conference, were sick or had to go cover a red sox game(sports report for portland press herald). In those 3 days (12 class periods in total) I learned more in 3 of my classes than I would have in 2 weeks of those 3 classes, those 3 classes being algebra 1, English 1, and religion 3. This substitute one of the smartest people I will ever meet is the sole reason I graduated my freshman year of high school I would have failed all 3 of the classes I just mentioned if he didn’t sub those 3 days because those days were a bunch of teachers were missing were the last 3 days of school for the year before finals and none of us in the classes new what we were doing half the time and we only had our English teacher 9 times for class that entire semester(we kept a tally on the white board with dates) and at the end of finals I had to stay after I finished all my finals because of scheduling and I ended up being assigned to “study hall” in the library and low and behold the substitute teacher was there feet up on a table leaned back in a chair reading the newspaper. At this point, he already knew I was going to be in his study hall because of the attendance sheet and right when I walked into the room. (I was one of 2 people in that study hall) He said to me “life is weird, it’s filled with comedic irony. Yet for most, they still see it as hell most of the time.” when I heard those words When I said it confused me for a minute, that would be an understatement because of a lot of things, the biggest being how he could describe life in 2 sentences like that and the way he said it with his same upbeat, positive yet soft spoken tone.

now I’m not going to explain what he meant when he said that because it’s pretty straightforward forward just like this substitute. He was someone who wasn’t much for similes or metaphors and always was straightforward and honest about everything, distinctly different from a majority of the teachers and substitutes we had, Because of this everyone wanted to learn from him because he would never cushion what was being taught regardless of if it was in the curriculum, Because of this I discovered the way I used to graduate high school and survive in life, Be honest even if it may hurt and stay consistent at everything to the best of your ability. That way, everyone knows what to expect from you and then pushes for a better consistency point that is the key to everything.

“School” by Krzysztof Pacholak is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.