Many students like me attend high school. And whether we like it or not, school makes it easy for us to compare ourselves to each other. We compare ourselves academically, physically, athletically, and so on. I’m going to focus on the academic side. I sometimes found it hard to be motivated in school because I felt I was super behind everyone else and felt I wasn’t good enough. In reality I found that I was not behind in school, but I just had different approach to learning than some people, which I learned wasn’t a bad thing at all.

Being a little slower to understand lessons in school used to make me feel insecure. In 8th grade I was in class and I just wasn’t able catch on to anything the teacher was saying. I was beating myself up over the fact that I thought I was a slower than the rest of the class. I felt like everyone was ahead of me and that I was the only one falling behind and not understanding the lessons. I would constantly compare myself to other students, even though I knew I was working just as hard, paying attention, and doing homework just like the rest of my classmates, sometimes even more so than them. That’s how it was for pretty much the whole year. Until one of my teachers, that same year, told the class about how she, and many college students, don’t actually graduate with a bachelor’s degree in 4 years. But 4 years seems like the norm, right? She said it is actually very common for students to graduate with a bachelor’s in 5 years rather than 4, and she was one of those people. This really opened my eyes because that was the moment I actually felt comfortable with where I was as a student. It made me feel more at peace with the fact that I needed more time to learn a subject than other people, and it gave me confidence to stay resilient in school. I came to realize that there was always going to be people who needed to do more work than others to understand something or get a good grade, and there was always going to be those who don’t need to work much at all to understand something.  As long as I worked hard and tried my best, I knew I would understand something eventually, I just had to take different approaches.

In conclusion, needing more time to learn or catch on to certain subjects use make me feel different and uncomfortable as a student, but through my experiences, I realized it was ok to go my own pace, and that it was just the way my brain worked. No two minds are the same so no two people are going to understand something the same way.