College. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when the word ”college” is mentioned?
For me this word means freedom. As dopey as that sounds, it’s true…You have to freedom to choose something you want to do, rather than being restricted to certain subjects in sixth form.
For others the word ”college” means drop-outs.
In some cases, yes colleges may be for people who have no place else to go to so their only other choice is college.
But what is the label for the people who want to go to college to generally study a subject that they have a strong passion for that sixth form can’t provide?
I’m that person. I want to go to college to study make-up and hair because I have a passion for this field. I never mentioned wanting to go to college over sixth form to my teachers because I was afraid of judgement, I was afraid that they’d think that the subject I was taking was lame over the subject they taught.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a majority of the subjects I learnt during my GCSEs but the overall pressure held upon me was unbearable. I was never taught how to deal with the pressure of exams.
I loved RE, Art and Textiles. I even loved Maths because I had an amazing teacher. But overall I ended up losing those huge passions I had for those subjects due to the education system.
I was placed in the ”lowest” teaching group (according to the other students in my year), but according to the teachers we were the middle teaching group. Realistically we were the lowest because there were no other teaching groups below my set. My set was labeled P. We were labeled ”stupid” by everyone in our year.
During the first three years of being in P, it didn’t bother me that the 18 odd students and I were called stupid every-other-day.
However as soon as I came out of that teaching group when I reached year 10, I realised how different it was. I grew up around people who learnt similarly to me and suddenly I was thrown into a whole different atmosphere of a different species of students.
A majority of the people in my group learnt visually – we were different learners.
Other students could hear a teacher talk non-stop about their subject and be able to sink in all that information within seconds. But for me personally, I wasn’t like that. I liked learning through pictures, and videos – it was what made learning interesting and more enjoyable. There’s nothing wrong with that. I liked to imagine what that teacher was talking about, it helped me remember things better. I’m a creative person, it’s what comes along with me. And in case you’re wondering, no, I do not have any learning disabilities.
I guess you could just say that I like to be an individual and learn differently to your average student.
I also felt as if teachers during five years of my secondary school couldn’t be bothered to teach us as well as they taught other students in higher sets. I felt this because they taught us all the easy things in subject. They never really focused on the difficult things. I always thought that they thought we couldn’t handle it because of our label.
Anyway, my school had pretty high expectations. It was a well achieveing school. I always felt like I didn’t fit in because I didn’t achieve as well as other students would. I would always hear students complain about not getting an A* when they had achieved an A.
And this is where it made me feel stupid…I for example may have achieved a C or a B and when I’d hear a student say something like that it would make me feel like I didn’t achieve as high as I should have. It sounded to me as if A was the lowest grade you could get and that a C or a B = a fail.
Before I entered secondary school, I went to a primary school where it was very uneducated. At the time when my mother applied us into the primary school, the students were very well taught, but as the years went on all the great teachers left. So basically my older sister got a great education as she was taught by all these great teachers, which is why she has ended up with A’s and A*’s today. On the other hand me and my younger brother were left with an education that wasn’t as great as my elder sister as we were left with thew not-so-good teachers.
We would be taught science once a year. I’m not even exaggerating this. The only thing I ever remember learning in science was about a car with string on a table…It had something to do with gravity…
Due to this my mother home taught me as she knew that my brother an I weren’t being taught very well. (I still attended primary school but she taught me on the side.) I would be doing comprehension everyday, I’d be doing maths books in the car whilst waiting for my sister to finish her music lesson. I wanted to learn. I even read Jane Eyre from the age of 7 – I really loved that book.
I even had an English tutor, who I loved so much, she really helped me to understand English. And I ended up with a level 5 in English in year 4 or 5.
In my primary school I was always told by my teachers that I was one of the best at Maths and Literacy – thanks to my mum.
Now I’m defiantly not bragging, I’m just showing you how it all goes in an opposite direction.
At the end of year 6 we achieved our report sheets. I ended up with mostly level 4′s and one level 3. Which during this time, wasn’t so good.
However it got even worse as I entered secondary school.
As I mentioned, we rarely ever learnt science, so like you’d expected…I sucked at science. I didn’t know anything because I wasn’t taught anything.
Two weeks into year seven we were set something called a Cats test. I can’t remember how it went, but from ending up in the ”lowest” teaching group due to the grades you achieve from this Cats test, I guess you could say that the test went badly.
My secondary school was a lot different from my primary school. The education system was stricter. We actually learnt things.
So, anyway. Students in ”higher” teaching groups would pick on the P group because we were in the lowest set. Like I said earlier, it didn’t bother me too much until year 10.
As year 10 began I got annoyed at how we had been treated so unfairly. We were taught all the basics in most our subjects, while students in higher sets were taught more complex things which were more likely to end up in our GCSE tests.
I only realised how unfair P group had been taught once the teaching became more rushed during the two years of doing our GCSEs.
In year 11 during study leave, I was going through some maths past papers, and on the final five pages or so there were topics I hadn’t been taught. Each of these five questions were worth four marks or so. That may not seem like a lot, but think about it… 5 questions with ruffly 4 marks each. 20 precious marks! This could potentially make your grade even higher…
I began to think…Why hadn’t I been taught these last five topics as fluently as the other basic topics?
Then I remembered teachers from a majority of my classes would usually say something along the lines of “We’re not going to teach you this because it’s too complex” – instead they’d scam over it. And as you guessed…the higher teaching sets would know these topics fluently.
With all subjects you need to practice, and practice in order to remember it. (Especially with maths.) (These were my parents exact words.)
We didn’t practice and practice these topics. But me agreeing with what my teachers would say, I would ignore the questions because I knew I couldn’t handle them.
If I was placed into a higher set maybe I could know these topics inside out. Maybe I could be achieving A’s and A*’s or even a B.
Oh and by the way…Once you start year 10 and 11 you aren’t put into teaching groups like P. We were officially not the stupid ones. Except…We were all still remembered as the people in P.
Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that the way I have been bought up throughout my secondary school time was always unfair. I was often seen as incapable to learn things because of the set we were in.
Do you know something? It would make me the happiest to even get a C grade in Maths or English. I don’t care about B’s and A’s like the students in my year do. I care about getting a grade that I am happy with. And even if you don’t get a grade that you’re not happy with, it will be hard to accept that and you can always do a resit. But just because you didn’t get a grade that you wanted it doesn’t mean you’re bad at the subject and it doesn’t mean that you didn’t try hard enough. I would always push myself to at least get a B or C in science, I would revise so hard and sometimes I think I revised too hard that it just overwhelmed me, stressed me out and didn’t made me exceed well.
And people can judge me for that and say that my expectations are very low, they should ask themselves ”why are they so low?”
I don’t know if you can tell but all this really affected me a lot in different ways. I lost a lot of confidence in myself. At parents evening I would always have teachers telling my parents ”Nicole needs to be more confident in herself.” And all I wanted to do was just tell them what I’m telling you today. But in reality all I did was sit there shyly and nod, just like the way I was taught to respond to people when they’d call me stupid.
My teachers may think that I can achieve a B. But realistically the way the education system is and the way I have been taught will not get me a B because of the label I had on me.
I also found any test we did to be unfair as well because each individual student has a different way of understanding something.
For me, I panicked a lot when it came to exams, I was made to believe I was a failure, and opening that exam paper would overpower all my confidence. What people fail to understand is that if you get a question wrong in an exam, they suddenly think you don’t know the question. They’re wrong. You do know it. Everyone knows it. Everyone is capable to know the answer to the question.
I’ll use myself as an example, because I find it’s easier to talk from a personal perspective. So I’m in an exam hall, I am maybe in a sense not as well educated or knowledgeable as students in certain topics – they may know more things than me in this exam paper, yet due to the way I was taught differently from other students because of being in P is so so so wrong, YET I am given the exact same exam paper as them. Is that really fair? I don’t know if what I’ve just said has come out clearly but it’s just so hard to explain this concept. I guess all I’m trying to say is this:
I’m the fish and everyone else is the bird and the monkey. The tree is the test. And the person is the education system.
You can call me a negative person. But I’m really not. I am a very positive person, the only thing I’m negative about is my grades. I’m positive about everything, about life, about my future, but not about my grades. And this is how it all ties in…I’m am negative with my grades because I was made to be by the people around me. Nobody ever gave me a chance to believe in myself.
Being called stupid for nearly five years of your life isn’t easy. Having negative labels in general isn’t easy.
Through these five years of my life with dealing with all this negativity you’d think that it would make me a very depressed person. It nearly did to be honest. And not only having school to deal with but I also had to deal with being bullied, losing friends and having family issues along side of all this. You’d think that I would be a very negative person. But I’m not. I go through life everyday with a smile on my face having high expectations, saying ”I’m going to become a make-up artist.” ”I’m going to live the best life I possibly can.” ”I’m going to create a better life from myself, even if the dark clouds are over my head.” ”I will smile at people even if I’m sad because at least I can try making their day better if they’re having a bad day too.”
Do you want to know something else? If you’ve ever been made to feel like you’re stupid, you’re not.
Cleverness is overrated and so is stupidity.
Sometimes the cleverest people say the most stupid things.
Sometimes the most stupid people say the cleverest things.
For example, the Wright Brothers. When they first announced that they were making a form of transport that could fly high in the skies, people must have thought they were out of their mind, crazy, stupid, ludicrous! My gosh, without airplanes today you wouldn’t be going on holiday to the most exotic place ever. You wouldn’t be going to visit your relatives or partner. You wouldn’t be travelling around the world.
Do you see what I’m trying to say?
…
Back onto college. The reason I want to go to college is because I feel like I’ve been taught unfairly and I want to now do something I love. My school say that they wish everyone to stay on for sixth form. But do they really want everyone to stay on? If they did surely they’d have all given us a fairer education. But they didn’t. This I why I believe I should go my own way, start fresh and create a better education for myself doing something I really enjoy.
I want to go to college because I know what I want to do. That doesn’t make me a drop-out. And it defiantly doesn’t make me stupid. Perhaps is makes me the opposite of stupid because I know what I want to do with my future. But then again stupid and cleverness are overrated, aren’t they?
I’m sorry that this post wasn’t exactly the most happiest and may have been cheesy in some ways. But now I feel like a 500kg weight has been lifted right off my weak shoulders.
I made this post to show people that I can relate to them if they’re going through something similar.
Also remember all those great people who started ”as nothing” and became ”something.”
The most inspirational quote that makes me so happy is this one:
“I failed in some subject in exam, but my friend passed all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.”
:) – Much love
- Nicole
