Advanced Essay #2: Central

Before I start, I would like to thank those who helped me with this essay, and I would like to thank you, the reader, for taking the time to read this. I focused mainly on the general atmosphere of Central High School and it´s learning environment as a whole. I am very pleased with being able to let my angry emotions flow out from the awful experiance at Central which allowed me to write this essay with a passion to let everyone know how the dreaded school made me feel. As a writer, I plan to write many more things that I can directly connect my feelings to in a similar fasion. I also work to revise how I input my emotions in future assignments. With No further ado, Lets begin.

A school's experience can greatly impact the way one learns. I am here to talk about Central High School, who greatly ruined my learning experience. ¨Central is such a horrible school¨ I´d tell myself every day I got home. Central was one of those schools that does not expect you to make any mistakes, and always expected you to be on your A game. However, even after trying my very best, it was not good enough. F here, F there, Fs everywhere I looked. It was impossible to pass with solid grades at Central, even after hours of study and hours of work. I believe that my ADHD made it very difficult to excel, because I learned at a slower pace than everyone. That being said, none of the teachers got the memo. Even after countless attempts to connect to the teachers and explain to them that I worked at a slower pace, while having an IEP to back it up, they just could not teach me in the way I needed to learn.

One teacher, in particular, was the worst.  My Biology teacher. Ms. Bonner was her name, and detention was her twisted game. Show up late, detention. Miss an assignment, detention. Ask for help, get talked to in a way that made you feel like trash, then detention. If that wasn't enough, she straight up lied to parents about how classroom and working conditions were student friendly. She also lied about her relationship with the class being on par with friendliness and connectivity to working on assignments step by step. If that wasn't enough, she lied to me about telling my old cab driver that I needed to stay after school for detention. It turns out that she never communicated that to the cab driver and when I showed up to the cab later than usual, I got in trouble with the cab driver due to him saying I wasted his time.

The story called ¨I Just Want to be Average,¨ written by Mike Rose, had a situation that was like looking in a mirror with my situation at Central. ¨My homeroom was supervised by Brother Dill, a troubled and unstable man also who taught freshman English.¨ Brother Dill acts very similar to how Ms. Bonner acted, and this quote reflects greatly on Ms. Bonner as far as her teaching skills go. These types of actions provide stress for many students, as they are pressured to retain a constant behavior each day. Said teachers also expect many of their students to refrain from making any mistakes, as if they expect them to be perfect.

 The only class I ever loved was my Mandarin Chinese class, where we had a nice, strict, yet compassionate teacher, who took his time with everyone and made sure we learned. However, staying at Central for the one class that I enjoyed was not worth me failing my other classes. I gave up hope when I received a notification from the school, claiming that I had failed too many times to participate in extracurricular activities.

This whole predicament is not just about teachers, It was also about the other people there as well. There were only about 3 to 4 kids that were friendly while the rest were pretty much stuck up jerks. There was 1 student that purposefully got on my nerves. He fooled me with his friends and then he called me gullible. He called me out in class when I screwed up. He criticized me for things I couldn´t help. But out of this all, it´s almost as if all the Central students hated each other, due to the school having such a bad atmosphere.

There was even a thing going around, in which, every Friday was dubbed ´Freshman Friday´.  On ¨Freshman Friday¨, most of the seniors aimed and/or picked on the freshman just for fun. Even after the principal said it was not to happen anymore, seniors still did it. Mike Rose describes a similar situation in his story. ¨I just want to be average.¨ In the story ¨I just want to be average¨ this line is spoken by Ken who is struggling to fit in. This quote represents how I felt amongst the people of Central when they treated me horribly.

Central put a lot of stress on me from these experiences, and yet I could continue to talk about so much more. Central, who claims to be diverse, is absolutely not diverse in any way. In order to be diverse, you can´t just accept a bunch of Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Indians, Mentally impaired, physically disabled people and such. You also need to prove that you can work with them as well. And Central Failed in the vast majority of this.

It´s imperative that schools should be honest, accepting, diverse, and have a warm atmosphere in general. Without these traits, it would be very difficult to retain a steady learning environment. Such schools, like Central, who possess little to none of these traits, Fail to sustain a suitable learning environment for everyone. In cases like these, the student struggles to sustain a suitable grade, which can endanger their future colleges and careers. The student may also be frowned upon by many individuals who would criticize them for things they cannot control. In conclusion, for Central to call themselves a ¨diverse¨ school, without possessing any of the traits listed, proves that they are not diverse enough to follow their own claims.

All in all, The only school that has followed Central's ¨Diverse claims¨ is Science Leadership Academy. In Science Leadership Academy, the students are usually teamed up with other students to complete group related activities. Science Leadership Academy mostly dedicates their time to making a warm and friendly environment, while still retaining hard work and tough challenges. The teachers are very friendly, have a nice and generally slow pace when it comes to teaching by making assignments easy to understand. The periods where we dedicate time to study up and complete assignments are controlled by teachers who try very hard to help you succeed and raise your grade by keeping you on track with what assignments you may of missed and advice to do better jobs in other classes. And best of all, this school accepts any race, ethnicity, and mental/medical conditioned student in order to try to help them excel at their own pace.