“When the student is ready, the master appears." ~ Buddhist Proverb
I have learned much about who I am and what I am capable of through education. It seems that we as a society have moved to a place where education, especially higher education, is something to be gotten over with, a means to an end, instead of a journey and an experience in its own right. For me, when the time came to continue my education, I was doing it to please others, but by the time I finished, I was doing it to please me.
From start to finish, I have been under the instruction of over six dozen teachers. Most of which were burnt out school-marmish women who had long since tired of their professions and were holding out for retirement. This was not the reflection of a certain particular school or area, by my high school graduation I had attended eight different schools in four different school districts and with each move it became easier to just slip through the cracks and give a minimal performance.
Early on, teachers seemed to be aware of my potential. I was given various tests and provided with outside resources meant for gifted children and that was all fun until I was booted out of the program in middle school. After that it became comfortable being able to exert little to no effort and make a minimally passing grade.
I left the mandatory public education system lost. I didn't know who I was or where my life was going. I had managed to leave school without having any friends or any form of network to rely on. Which left me very much alone.
Four years after leaving high school, I entered college. On paper it doesn't sound like a great length of time, but in reality, I was being sized up against my peers from high school who were at the same time graduating with their bachelor degrees. I was, according to my mother, behind the game and needed to put in the extra effort to catch back up. I started with all of the normal classes and continued my tradition of just doing enough to get by and most of the time it seemed to work. I also continued with making as little contact with everyone else as possible.
It was at this point in my education I began to learn about myself. I began to discover who I really was and how unhappy I had been.
