As I previously mentioned on my Family page, I was raised by a family that places a high value on education. For me, school has always been a priority and since I started preschool until I finished high school, so had been getting good grades. I was told it was necessary to get good grades, that is, if I wanted to get into college. Before I was even old enough to think about college I was still being told to get good grades. Somehow not-so-good grades were frowned upon even if it was because I had a bad teacher or because it was my weak subject.
My family had interesting ways of motivating me to get good grades. In elementary school, an uncle from my dad’s side of the family would take me to Toys R Us and let me pick out a few toys if I brought good grades in, which happened every semester. By the time I reached middle school, I was already in the habit of getting good grades—no bribes involved. The first three years of high school were fairly easy for me. I had attended a private elementary school with a very strong academic program, so when I started ninth grade at a new school, I was ahead in almost every subject. During those first three years of high school, I did little or no studying and got mostly straight A’s. I had lost the studying habits I had learned during my first 8 years of school, as I was no longer used to working hard.
I moved from Puerto Rico to Florida for my senior year of high school, and I have to say that school there was a lot more difficult for me due to the language transition and the different, more advanced curriculum. After eleven years of focusing on getting good grades, I started to get frustrated with myself as it got more and more difficult as the semester advanced. For both semesters, the school counselor registered me for Honors Physics with a teacher that changed my perspective on learning.
Mr. Herman came off as out of his mind the first time I met him, but he ended up being one of the best teachers I have had. He was a very energetic person and would always find interesting examples to use to explain the material. He was always drinking Mountain Dew and would find any excuse to take us out of the classroom. I remember once he had us play “physics baseball” and another time where we had to make a device out of toothpicks and glue (only) in which we could drop an egg and have it not break once it the ground. He brought in a fire truck and had a fireman test the devices from mid-air as he stood on the escalator on the truck. Setting aside how much I enjoyed his class, I truly was not doing well in it. I was getting D’s on his exams and if averaged out with assignments I was destined to get an F in the class. Even though I was doing badly in tests, I would always talk to him about it and ask him for help. Before helping me he said: “Grades are crap if you don’t learn anything.” I ended up getting a good grade in the class simply because of the interest I showed in learning the material, which he believed I deserved a B for. It is because if Mr. Herman that I attend college not worrying about getting straight A’s. Although I try to do my best, sometimes my best can only get me a C+ in Calculus, but to me, it is worth more than an A in ENC1101. I now hope to become a teacher with the personal goal of Teaching students—teaching with a capital letter because what I aspire to do is not just what has been done for years.
As I compare my before and after opinions of Mr. Herman, at first judging him as crazy and later realizing how great of a teacher he was, I realized that similarly we judge others except that with them, we do not get a chance of formulating newer and more positive opinions. “Others” are frequently being represented—or better said, unrepresented—in a fallacious manner and we are taking that information and labeling it as the truth, like Susan Sontag argued in her book Regarding the Pain of Others. I believe that before formulating a judgment, we should make sure we educate ourselves first and remember that there are always two sides to a story.
