In my old school, students, like I, tended to wonder if they would actually learn something in school or if they would waste ninety minutes in each class being bored and uneducated. But, I had three reasons to hope that this terrible tragedy would not happen. They were: my science class, the manner in which I came to take Spanish III in my junior year, and my experiences with high school basketball. These incidents have shown me that there is something to be learned from even the least likely situations.
The first, my science class, taught me how to handle disorganized lessons. Often the teacher came in with hardly any preparation and gave us lectures on whatever she felt like talking about whether or not that topic had anything to do with science. There was no way to know if the assignments given were ever going to be picked up or, if they were, if they would be graded. Still, in the second half of school we covered the principles of chemical equations, which was not a topic that was covered before my junior year. I learned from the teacher, despite the drawbacks of an unusual grading system and of a class that almost no one took seriously. I also learned that there was something to be gained from any class and how to manage disorganized classes.
Furthermore, my school went through several changes in administration just before my junior year, and one of the benefits that brought came in the form of a new assistant principal, a religious man with a no nonsense attitude. A month before school reopened for the fall, I was called in to talk to him about a conflict with my scheduled classes. From experience, I expected to be told that I could not take one of the courses I had chosen during the previous school year, and I arrived at the school prepared to fight to keep each class. I wasn't surprised when he told me that my Spanish II class did not fit in my schedule, or when he suggested that I might take a lower level class.
