A Life Lesson From School

I remember growing up I never really questioned school. I just knew I had to wake up every day and go there. But other than that I never really understood fully why my parents made me go. And when I would ask I would never really get an answer other than “because you have to”. And I never disliked school until my older siblings talked about how much they hated it. And when I would ask them why they hate school they would say there was too much homework. And of course, I had no idea what they were talking about because I never had any homework. It wasn’t until I got older and my brother was in high school I understood why he hated school. It seemed like every day I would get home he was doing homework. For hours. Sometimes reading, Sometimes writing. But even as much as he hated school, he knew he had to do it. And when he graduated I remember how glad he was that he just did the work instead of giving up. 

But even after hearing my brother say it was worth it I still wished I didn’t have to go to school. And I never really thought too much about what he had said until it was my freshman year of high school. This is also roughly around the time when I started one of my first jobs. I worked every day after school. Going through 6th, 7th, and 8th grade I didn’t think I would like high school. But as freshman year went on I started to enjoy it. That at least till covid shut it down. And we had to sit on Zoom, which kinda sucked, but I got to work more. And then sophomore year, I got to work on days I didn’t have to be at school. So over that past year and a half, I got used to working a lot. And not having to do schoolwork as much. But even when there was school work there wasn’t much or it was pretty easy to do. Which led to me getting pretty bored with school. I often found myself falling behind in schoolwork because I kept putting it off because I didn’t feel like doing it. 

And the Zoom calls felt never-ending. After sophomore year is when I really started working a lot. I ended up working 6 days a week most of the time. And I really enjoyed working where I was working. And a lot of what I did at work was easy for me so work wasn’t so much a chore rather than something I looked forward to doing. And the more and more I started to like working every day the more and more I found myself dredging the day I would have to come back to school. Often thinking it would be easier just to keep working and just not go to school. 

And that thought really started to sink in. so much to the point that I had made the thought that I did not need school and that I would be fine without it. So I talked to some the people i work with about my idea of not going to school anymore and some said that I should stay in school. And others said that it would just be easier to get out of school and go get a G.E.D, and that would be just the same. So that made me curious, maybe it would be easier just to go get a G.E.D. I started doing research About what it was, where to get one, and how hard it would be to be able to get one. I realized quickly that getting one would not be as easy as I thought it was going to be. And then I started thinking what if I just went without a GED and just found a job that doesn’t require a diploma or G.E.D. that thought didn’t last long because all of the jobs that I looked at that didn’t require a diploma or GED was either really low paying, and any other than that it seemed that almost every job I looked at required a diploma or equivalent. And hearing from other people I know that I had the chance to come back to school to finish and get their diploma. But they said it was hard to get a chance too and that they had wished that they had just done it school when there were younger and they regretted not finishing. I realized that I would have had to go back to school. So, I went back. I decided to go back to school as much as I hated to. Looking back now I am glad that I came back to school. I’m glad I came back, it was worth it

“School” by Paradox 56 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.