When I walked into the hardest class I have ever taken at school, I walked in as I would in any other class at Eubanks Intermediate School, like I would own the class and succeed with little to no hard work. Man, I was so wrong it feels like a comedy now. Our first lesson was about adding and subtracting integers. Fun, right? Nope. It was horrible and I literally got a 47% on the first Relly (homework) assignment of the whole year. Now, I’m sure all of the people reading this think that this is when I say: I learned how to work hard in one day, succeeded, and just learned the little lesson and that was the end of the whole story. But that’s not what happened. 

Let’s start at the beginning. I was in class, and I almost failed all of the first week’s Relly assignments. My teacher, Mr. Kriegshauser, was the accelerated math teacher, which means he taught 7th and 8th-grade math to 6th-grade students in one year. I struggled through my lessons every day and didn’t understand the majority of what he was talking about every day, and then I would go home and struggle through my Relly every night. I remember one particular lesson more than the rest. We were learning the slope of lines and I did every single one of the problems wrong because I was taking the difference of x, not y. I was devastated because we were practicing for about an hour and I only got two right answers out of over twenty. Not a great percentage, right? But I would realize in the future that I wasn’t doing well because I wasn’t working hard enough to earn the results I expected. More on that later. 

Time to dive more into my struggles. Three months after my 47% on my Relly assignment and slope notes, we received a project called the Parallel Cities project. We made little drawings or models of buildings that coincided with the different angles and vertices of two parallel streets with intersections. I didn’t try on the project and figured it was whatever and that it wasn’t a big deal. My family had just gone to get ice cream, and we parked in the garage when my mom told me to stay outside with her. Whenever either of my parents told me to talk to her alone, I knew I was in trouble and this time was no different. Guess what? Yep, I got a 48% on my parallel cities project. My average was 74% after I had started to do better in the class. It felt like my whole life was crumbling all around me because grades were always my strong suit, not my weakness. 

The next day, I went to go see Mr. Kriegshauser, and he brought me to the back, sat down, and talked to me. The conversation that resulted changed my whole year, and the years to come. He told me that while I had received a bad grade, the way to come back from it was to work as hard as I could. He told me that what I needed to do was to study as hard as I possibly could. I took it as study as hard as you possibly can or you’ll fail my class. So that’s what I did from then on, and that is how I learned how to work hard. But it didn’t happen overnight (I wish it had, would have been so much easier), and now let’s dive into how I arrived where I am today. 

First, I was forced to learn how to study. I had never had to study (like ever) for any class I had ever taken. I’m an excellent test taker, so I know how to work easy multiple-choice questions, tune out the noise, eliminate answers, etc. Notice how I said easy questions. Not the ridiculously hard ones that Mr. Kriegshauser would give us all the time. I started to review my Relly to prepare for the test. This strategy has helped me in the future and helped me back then as well. I realized that if I reviewed my mistakes, reworked problems, and changed my way of thinking then I would understand the concepts I was learning. As I worked every night, I realized I had learned how to study, a skill I wouldn’t dust off for another couple of years. 

Once I had taught myself how to study, it was time for me to apply what I had learned to a testing format. I walked in on Show-Off (Test) day and started hyperventilating like I always did when I had a Show-Off. I folded my notebook paper, got my pencils, and started to work. It was so much more fluid than any of the Show-Offs I had ever taken before. As I worked, I knew I was doing better than I ever had before. When I received the results, I had received a 90%, and that was the highest I had received since November, and this was in February. Mind you, I was getting hundreds on all of my other tests in every other class, so achieving As on all my tests was a big deal during this period. Now I know what everyone is thinking right now. Great, he learned how to study and now all of his troubles disappeared! Wrong.

A few months later, I was taking the final for the class. I had studied and studied and studied because I knew if I failed this final I would be held back and not pass the math class. I was solving the problems on my separate sheet of paper and re-solved every single problem on the test. I received my results and had received an eighty-five. I was devastated, but then remembered what I had been receiving on my tests before I learned how to study. I had been barely passing my tests all year until I had forced myself to learn how to study, so it wasn’t necessarily surprising that I hadn’t done well on the final. However, I had passed the class, which was my goal in a class where I had been struggling all year long. I went home that night and celebrated that the class that was the bane of my existence (for a year) was finally over. I had finally achieved the goal I had set for myself all year. I had worked extremely hard and failed. I had failed over and over and over again. My grade had collapsed, my dreams of perfect scores turned into dreams of passing the class. I had finally learned the most important lesson I could’ve learned from school. That when failure strikes, like the strike of a bolt of lightning, and when all seems dark and gloomy, one must work as hard as one possibly can to light the darkness and work to travel through the dark to the light.