The Importance Of My Life

Plenty of factors have contributed to the type of student and human I have become. The people I have interacted with have had a huge influence over the decisions I have made. Supportive people in my life have lead me and supported me on the paths I have taken. The situations I have gone through, good and bad, taught me invaluable lessons. Through the course of my life, many influences, risks, and experiences have molded me into the student I am today.

My parents have always been a very positive encouraging force in my life. They support my academic successes and advise me through my struggles. Both my mother and my father work in the education system, so they have always pushed me to succeed and achieve more than what is expected of me academically.

While in high school, I played two sports. Through participation in athletics, I learned the value of working as a team. I typically prefer working on my own, but with team sports, that is nearly impossible. In basketball, I can not take the ball and dribble down the court by myself and score against five opposing players. In volleyball, it would be a violation of the rules of the game for me to pass, set, and hit the ball over the net on my own. However, when our team can come together and work as a whole, we can succeed. In intellectual pursuits, sometimes I will get stuck on a problem, but if I can learn to work as a team and reach out for help, I can work past my struggle. Working as a team can open my mind to things I have not considered. A singular mind can be great, but ideas become better when more minds work

I like to play it by the book and get things done in a timely fashion exactly the way the teacher guides me to, but there was an assignment that got out of hand. For Anatomy, my teacher assigned us sections of a drawing notebook that were due in increments throughout the course of the year. During one particularly busy quarter, the assignment completely slipped my mind until the night before the deadline. I did not start my assignment until late that night, and ended up getting minimal sleep for school the next day. My notebook was sloppy, and I definitely did not receive the grade I would have had I been more organized and taken my time. That assignment was a failure to me, but just like Kathryn Shulz discusses extensively in the book Being Wrong, “Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about our world” (5). From this failure, I learned that in order to succeed in a class setting that was more self-paced, I needed to get more organized,, so I got a planner and learned how to better manage my time. I also had to learn to be more realistic about the amount of time assignments would