Have you ever heard of the name "Jacobus Ezell?"  No? Well no one has but that’s me, the one making these keystrokes and painting life with words.

I'm practically nobody, 19 Yrs. old, 6'1” black male, kinky hair with brown eyes, Oh! I'm a super senior too, unfortunately.

Honestly I’m only here to spread the little wisdom i gained from being out of school an in the streets. You don't need school to be smart, I’m sure you've thought it before and its true you don't,  but you need school to succeed, And that's what I’m here to tell you about. I've used all the excuses, I’ve told every lie in the book and pulled every scheme known to teenkind just to avoid this obstacle, but it's not an obstacle. School is a ladder to success and this is what i learned as an adolescent. You can try to sugarcoat it, you can pussyfoot and sidestep around the issue until you make an entire 360, but school is necessary. Here's why... No matter how much, or what you know, or how smart you are, if you have no self-control and can't handle being told what to do, you'll fail simple as that. If you cannot respect authority the world we live in today will chew you up and spit you out before you know it. The teachers and principal know that everything they teach won’t necessarily be used in everyday life, they know that the average Joe will probably never have to employ the Pythagorean Theorem, but they teach you how to learn, they prepare you to be a student in the class of life. I wasn't always this mature you know, i was the exact opposite of everything I’m typing at the moment, if i had to pick a word for it, i was an anarchist basically. Little things used to set me off, stupid things like people talking too much, or being told what to do or even someone looking at me wrong i came far from what i used to be and I’m happy about it. The main ingredient that brought about this change was boredom. I was out of school for 2 seasons, spending most of my time partying, smoking, underage drinking, and all that other good stuff. Don’t judge me though my life was hard. You know the saying "Idle hands make the devils work"? Probably not it’s an ages old idiom, but it’s true. When you have nothing to do you do stupid things. I'm the kind of person who can’t be bored, it drives me up the wall, makes my chest tight and I cringe about it, school gave me something to do and people to talk to and it stimulated my mind. During the end of the two seasons i spent out of school for no apparent reason, my friend told me, "You just gotta stay moving, you can’t just sit. When water sits what happens? It gets stale, you can’t be stagnant you have to keep moving forward or else you’re nothing but stale water." A few words and months of boredom didn't tip the scales though. Nobody could tell me anything i was smart but foolish, intent on learning things the hard way. I was always thinking before speaking and plotting before acting, but somehow still couldn’t shake my addiction to making dumb decisions. The thing that caused me to rethink my entire life was what I experienced while running away. No physical harm had come to me during my “homelessness”, but my spirit was torn. I’d seen too much, bums laid across benches, their bodies shivering just to create heat. All of it made me think, these old men had nothing, no opportunities, no jobs, no families, nothing. I looked at myself in disgust for choosing to leave home and willingly come to this. What all of it was to me is a glimpse of the future, my future if I just sat around wasting away doing nothing, I couldn’t let myself become that, those men with no potential. In my eyes, all I saw were bodies just waiting to die. I hated school, but I realized that the idea of being nothing in this world repulsed me even more. They say smart men learn from mistakes, and the wise learns from the mistakes of others, I was both, I made a mistake, but that only opened my eyes to see that I could learn from it all.