Constant flux

Describe something you learned in high school.

Something happened while I was in high school. My parents got separated. I had to change schools. Twice. I had gone through other big changes in my life before, but those hit me hard. Ultimately, I went from a private school to a public one in my last year of high school. But against all odds, those changes ended up being good to me. I learned that life is ever changing, a constant flux, and we better get going with it.

History

It was in this school that I had one of the best history teachers in my life. His class was incredibly simple. He would enter the room and sit on his desk. Then he would say, “Today we are going to study the French Revolution,” for example. He would then start saying facts, dates, and mention historical figures. Because I was knew to that school, I didn’t know what was happening. The other students said to me, “You need to take notes of his words. The exam will be based on that. It’s not on what is in the textbook.”

I never saw other teachers impose such discipline on the students like he did. Nobody talked during his discourse, and everyone paid attention. I was skeptic at the beginning, thinking that the treatment of the topics would be superficial. But far from it. He was very detailed, precise, and extremely knowledgeable. By the end of every term, I had notebooks full of notes. They could be compared to a well written history book. And I did well in the exams, by the way. It was so simple, but it taught me how to properly take notes.

Philosophy

For some reason, which I don’t quite remember, we didn’t have our philosophy classes in the morning. We needed to have make-up classes during the night. To start with, I never had philosophy classes in my prior schools, so this also was something new to me. I attended those, and to be honest, I really enjoyed. I thought it would be something like history of philosophy, but what was taught was really propositional logic. It taught me how we can infer conclusions from premises, it helped me a lot with critical thinking.

Since we are discussing philosophy, a few years later I read about the pre-Socratic philosophers. Heraclitus’ teachings impressed me. It was him who taught that the universe is in a constant flux, everything is always changing.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Heraclitus

Mathematics

I still have nightmares about it. In them, I dream that I have finished college. I am ready to graduate, but before that, someone tells me I can’t. They say it’s because I failed my last year in high school. In other words, how can I graduate from college if I in fact failed high school? All of this is because of some low grades I got in Geometry. I wake up in despair.

Looking back, I know it was a challenging time in my life. Besides the changes of dynamic in my family, I was moving to a new home and changing schools. Also, I started working as an office boy. It was a demanding routine. I went to school in the morning, worked in the afternoon, and again went to cram school at night. I was exhausted, and probably didn’t deliver all the assignments on that topic. In the end, I needed to get a high grade on my last exam.

I studied earnestly for it. Seriously, I couldn’t afford to fail. When I received the final grades I was so relieved: I had passed! My way to college was clear.

Public school is good

Going to a public school showed me that, against all my prejudices, we had a high quality teaching there. Also, the teachers didn’t treat the students as if they owned the school, well, because they didn’t. I needed to understand that in my life. Most people in the world live without privilege, I realized, including me.

Finally, all those changes helped me understand that life is in a constant flux. Not only everything around me is transforming, I am becoming different myself. And change, even though it seems so at the time, is not always a bad thing.