Tuesday 5 April 2016

My Defining Moment


The moment that defined my life the most was when I switched schools in grade four. I had done well enough on the CCAT test that I had the option to be transferred from the standard program at my primary school into the gifted program at a new school. This was a big deal back then and I had initially wanted to stay with my friends but my parents didn’t give me much of a choice. Moving into this class changed quite a few things for me. I think the thing that really impacted me the most was the other people there, and because of the nature of the class, a lot of the people in the class were very interested in maths and sciences. Whether I wanted it to or not, that started rubbing off onto me. I didn’t really have interests in specific classes at school by that point, I think around then the only thing that I cared about in school was recess. But now, when I was exposed to fellow students or even teachers with goals in those fields, it really set me down that path. Another way school changed when I went into that class was that we had a lot of open ended projects, I think one every month, and the real benefit of these was that we could do them on whatever we wanted. Because grades 4-8 are really relaxed and there is pretty much no pressure on you, I had a really good time researching and learning about all these things. I definitely didn’t know what i wanted to do after school before that point, and even though I still don’t completely know the exact things I want to do, I now have a much better Idea. I think that creating an interest and enjoyment in the math and science classes I had really did benefit me, and has a massive impact on who I am, and who I will be as a person.  All in all, choosing which school and program to go to was a massive crossroads in my life, and who I am was majorly impacted by my choice.

7 comments:

  1. Connor, do you regret not staying with your friends or was this better for you and the remainder of your childhood?

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    1. It definitely felt really bad at the time. However looking back I can hardly even remember most of the people I hung out with, so it feels trivial to me now. Another benefit of the program was that I stayed in the exact same class with the exact same people, so I feel like I was closer to them than I was with my old friends.

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    2. It definitely felt really bad at the time. However looking back I can hardly even remember most of the people I hung out with, so it feels trivial to me now. Another benefit of the program was that I stayed in the exact same class with the exact same people, so I feel like I was closer to them than I was with my old friends.

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  4. I really liked your use of flamboyant vocabulary. It really tells a me a lot about your personality. I also liked how you hold this school to such importance and how you noted how it can define everything you do later in life. What do you think has more of an impact on your future: High School or College?

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  5. Sometimes parents know best!! I'm glad that you had such a positive experience in the gifted program. Your comment about open-ended projects really resonated with me. There is a push in kindergarten, and the primary grades, to provide students with inquiry projects...where they decide what they are going to learn. I often wonder how it could be implemented in the high school classroom

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