Prompt: What’d You Learn in High School?

I don’t always jump into the Jetpack writing prompts, because most of the time they’re kind of “Eh.” Kind of boring, etc, etc, you know what I mean. But this one is interesting, because you could answer this a few different ways.

I could say, I learned in high school that I only learn by doing. I can’t sit in front of a teacher and a book and learn anything. I just don’t parse things in that way. It was so bad that, my math teacher in high school noticed that I was falling behind in advanced algebra, and instead of helping me, and figuring out how best to catch me up with everyone else … she placed me in a remedial math class to learn how to balance a checkbook.

But, as someone who elected to go to vocational school, I was originally going for computer science. And I got one full year of Visual Basic, before I had to switch to a completely different school district … wherein that same class was filled up, and I wasn’t able to join. So, I was made to enter into business technology. You know, learning Microsoft Excel. I kind of blame the aforementioned math teacher, and the class I wanted to be in, being full, as to why I’m not working in a tech field, a field I should absolutely be in by now.

Being hard-headed, and dead-set on things I want to do, regardless of whether those opportunities were offered to me, I spent most of my time in BTA teaching myself how to write HTML. The teacher would ask for an example of a Microsoft Access database, and in order to get back to what I was teaching myself, I would print out the example database from the back of the book, and hand it in. And he’d be none-the-wiser. Literally.

Mr. Manning, if you’re reading this today, I’m not sorry. I didn’t want to be in your class, and you didn’t teach anyone a damn thing. I wanted to be in computer science, I wanted to be a sysadmin, and that’s not where I’m at right now, and I blame the school, and the school district for not working with me enough to help me be where I needed and wanted to be, for my future.

I guess you could say, what I learned in high school, is how to do things for myself, for my own future, because nobody else is going to help you get there, but you. And I’m still working on getting there. I don’t give up, not on anything.