It was a warm late summer evening. The wind was blowing an ominous pressure was in the air .“SCHOOL” It was the time to decide to sleep early or stay up. I chose to stay up at the request of my friends who wanted to play video games. At 12:00am, I finally went to sleep. I hear the
“BUZZ” coming from my phone in the morning at 6:30 AM. My alarm it's way too loud so I shut it off immediately. After laying down for another 10 minutes I fell back asleep. As I slowly drifted asleep I had a dream. The dream was very odd to me. It almost seemed real, firstly it started with a teacher giving a lecture. It then turned into me listening to him, it was the most boring topic I’ve ever heard so I dozed off and shut out all of the surroundings. I woke up again to the sound of my grandma yelling
“WAKE UP YOU HAVE SCHOOL” She was so loud like a roaring lion ready for a fight I jumped out of bed and threw on the first pair of clothes I found. I ran downstairs, grabbed my backpack, and ran out the door the fastest I have ever ran. My grandma was already in the car ready to go. I’m dreading going to school. I have to learn my locker combination and learn all of my teachers names and room numbers. From the previous 8th graders I have heard what teachers to watch out for and which one assigns lots of work. 8th grade sounded like it would be terrible. As me and my grandma drove through Mariemont the more and more I wanted to go back to bed. I was so tired. It was almost like I was an owl. Halfway to school I had the idea to get a coffee. So my grandma stopped at Starbucks. I arrived at the school nervous and excited. My first task was opening my locker. I had no clue how to open a locker, so throughout the day I had my friends open it for me. (Eventually I learned to open it.)As the day progressed it's my first Spanish class. As soon as I walked through the door I heard
“hola” from the front of the room. I have no clue what to respond with so I walk over to my friend. He says
“why didn’t you respond to the teacher”. I say
“I don’t know, I barely know how to say hi in Spanish. ”
School took a lot of effort and I never really felt like doing my work. I was doing bad in
all my classes. This caused my grandma to give me a huge lecture on why school is important. I told her that
“it’s jr high it doesn’t matter.”
After that my grandma said “ if you keep this up through 8th grade you’ll get into a bad
habit of not turning in work.”
After the lecture I proceeded to do my daily homework to try and prove my point. My
grade only went up 1%, still it's a C that’s a passing grade I think to myself. I will never forget the disappointment on my grandma's face when I had a C on my report card. Her face looked bitter almost like an unripe strawberry. As I continued to do all of my missing work. The day felt like it lasted years. The next day I went to school with the intention to learn. It felt as if I was like a bear cub learning to climb a tree, it was so hard I almost fell asleep. Learning was a challenge,

so I put all of my energy towards getting my work done and balancing a social life. After that day, all I would do after school was try to work on as much homework as my brain could handle. I would usually stop after an hour. I started to realize that school actually matters after watching my sister struggle with her homework in high school. It seemed so much harder than middle school. I asked her what was so different about high school.
She said “there’s a lot more work that takes so much longer.”
` I went to school the next couple days with a good attitude ready to take on any challenge that appeared in front of me. Although I was not prepared for my first big math test of the year, I still aced it. This made me so happy, it showed me that my learning was working. From that day on I’ve been trying my hardest to complete all of my assignments to the best of my abilities. The lesson I learned was. realize that if I did well in school it would shape my future into a bright one.