In a way, coming to the Village School for my junior year helped take the trajectory of my future and its success to the next level. Before coming here, I struggled severely in my course assignments and had difficulties paying attention in long classes. None of these issues however, measured up to my inability to write. Consequently, I performed the poorest in my previous english and language arts classes and held a deep resentment for anything associated with reading, or writing; I couldn’t even write a paragraph properly.
As part of my parents’ response to my acute learning challenges, I switched schools every 1-2 years and trialed through a plethora of tutors specialized in teaching children to write. For the time being, it seemed as if my writing was slowly improving until I was struck with in-class writing exams; many of which I utterly failed. I even provided myself with false hope by thinking that my writing abilities would develop over time, but I was proven wrong when I received a c-minus in my 9th grade English exam.
I felt incapable and wanted to give up on writing.
The following year, I was placed in a school with a self-paced approach to the Texas education system which boosted my academic confidence, not just in english but in every subject. With all the academic praise and accolades I received from that school, I still recognized the fact that I needed to be more academically challenged.
That was the primary motivation behind moving to the Village School and especially enrolling in the IB program.
Within the first few months of beginning, I had already written more than I ever did in my previous high schools which brought along a great learning curve for me. To ease the stress pertaining to learning to write, my parents found me a tutor who could empathize with my learning setbacks and modify her teachings to my learning style which allowed me to thrive in the Village School’s competitive and rigorous academia. While attempting to reverse my writing weakness into my strength, I discovered valuable personal strengths such as my strong work ethic, my motivation to improve and my lifelong love of learning which encouraged me to remain persistent while I was initially struggling with my steep learning curve.
With the help of my tutors' Socratic template dialogue, the writing tutorials we went through together, and the generous support of my english teacher Ms.Miller, I found myself comfortably and critically writing 500-2,000 word essays and papers by the beginning of March break, which is when schools began to transition to online learning during the COVID crisis. Because of the consistent and intensive writing practice I received up till then, seeking support in person from my teachers became less of a dire need, since most of our assignments involve writing. My transition to online learning became much easier because of this and given the fact that I was used to online learning through meeting with my tutors over zoom.
With the initiation of online learning, I began to find more myself while balancing a healthy virtual social life and continuing to consult my teachers (especially for IB english) frequently, leading to further milestones in my early academic writing career. One of these includes writing a 900 word, half individual oral commentary with a few suggestions from my english teacher. This would have not been possible given my writing deficiencies a year prior and I can only thank the IB program, its teachers and my tutor for helping reach this point.
With that said, thank you IB for helping me become the critical thinker, academic writer, and successful student I have become after just a year of being in your program. I look forward to my senior year coming this fall and while I do recognize that it will be stressful beyond limits at times, I do know that this program will have changed my life for the better. See you in fall!
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