<p>I mean student in the traditional way, one who is undergoing schooling. By schooling I mean formal schooling, from first grade to graduate school.</p>
<p>BTW to save you the time of guessing or looking at my other posts, I’m a high school student and not a parent (and thank god, not both concurrently). Sorry for my recent intrusions in this section of the boards, lol.</p>
<p>I don’t think I really got any influential experience during school. All my influences and experiences came from living in the real world.</p>
<p>My high school choir director. He taught me the importance of committment to task, hard work, and working as part of a group. He was also a fabulous musician and musical mentor.</p>
<p>My most influential experience was not a good one:</p>
<p>When I was a senior in high school, I went to see my AP English teacher to discuss some critical comments she had made on an essay that I had written. During that conversation, she told me flatly that I could not write.</p>
<p>I believed her. She was an English teacher, after all, and highly respected in our school.</p>
<p>So when I was in college, I went out of my way to avoid classes that involved writing papers rather than taking tests, and I planned a career that involved very little writing.</p>
<p>Then, in graduate school, I became a TA, and when I graded papers, I saw for the first time how other people write. I saw how much some other students – good students – struggled when they had to write papers or answer essay questions. When I compared their work to my own, I realized that I didn’t have a problem with writing after all. My AP English teacher had gotten it wrong: what I was struggling with was a difficulty in interpreting literature, not in writing about my interpretations. As long as the subject matter was something other than literature, I could write quite well.</p>
<p>A few years after getting my master’s degree, I drifted into a science writing job after being laid off from a job in a different field. I have been doing science writing and editing ever since – for more than 30 years now.</p>
<p>I still regret, though, that there were certain courses I did not take in college, even though I was interested in the subject matter, because they involved writing papers.</p>
<p>^ marian,</p>
<p>DT, cafemom?</p>
<p>Spending time in east and west Berlin (before the wall fell) and Czechoslovakia. Prague when it still was showing damage from the '68 invasion.</p>
<p>Getting married after soph. yr. of college but still managing to stay in sch. and graduate.</p>
<p>Yep, those WWII era “married student housing” units that were still on campus in the late 70’s were pretty influential… cheap, ugly, tiny, and all ours! We managed fine - in fact H’s grades got better after we added all that extra book-keeping and shopping and stuff to the schedule. He knew I was comparing his effort in school to mine!</p>
<p>I think my strongest influence was my fifth grade teacher who read aloud marvelously. She read both Winnie the Pooh and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that year. Both wonderful books.</p>
<p>Going back to pre-college:
my 6th grade teacher who recognized a shy but smart kid and gave me extra responsibilities and put me in the “smart” math group. (Ran into him again when I was a HS senior on a district commitee to suggest policy changes. He was really happy to know that I remembered him!)
my HS history teacher who taught us to think outside the box and that writing well was almost as important as understanding. RIP Ralph Hayes!</p>
<p>My most influential experience as a student was participating briefly at the antiapartheid protests at Harvard, and then dropping out of the protests because I didn’t think that what Harvard students were doing would make any difference in far away South Africa.</p>
<p>The person who was leading the protests, Randall Robinson, a few years later started an organization, TransAfrica, which helped bring international attention to apartheid and became one of the forces that helped end apartheid.</p>
<p>What i learned was that activism and having a vision of a better world can lead to major change.</p>
<p>The most important lesson I learned during formal schooling was only apparent once I got out into the real world … that what you’re taught is based on the rules of the teaching institution, and not what will make you learned or successful once you leave those institutions.</p>
<p>Paying my way through college was the experence that taught me the most about life. (Delayed gratification, hard work, how to budget,time management, etc). College itself taught me how to learn. My HS health teacher who got me my first job (waitress at a country club). He was a godsend as that job PAID GREAT!!!</p>
<p>Several come to mind, good and bad:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>my fourth-grade English teacher. I loved that she made us memorize Shakespeare.</p></li>
<li><p>senior English teacher, who I stood up to when I felt discriminated against (not racially, but EC-wise). She eventually compromised. That incident probably gave me the courage to do this next thing.</p></li>
<li><p>learning that the secretary at the four-year school to which I was transferring was wrong about campus job openings in my area of interest. I was so angry that she had dismissed me as a transfer student that I applied for the TOP job, even though, as a transfer student, I was unqualified. I didn’t get the job, but the head of the department was so impressed with my moxie and interview that he gave me a scholarship. I think that one incident set me on a path at that school. A few months later, I was recommended by a prof for a part-time, professional job in my field of study. I worked there for 18 months. A supervisor at that job took me with her when she left for another company, so I was one of the fortunate people who was walking across the stage at graduation with a great, full-time job in hand. I really believe it was that ballsy move on my part to apply for a reach job that set all these other things in motion. You just never know how one thing will lead to another.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>I had two. </p>
<p>In highschool I had the most amazing, gifted math teacher who was excited about math, and made me realize I was good at it too. She encouraged me, supported me, and believed in me. Her enthusiasm was contagious. Actually she was like this with a lot or most kids, but the point being she really shaped my future and sense of potential. She had the biggest influence on me, next to my parents.</p>
<p>Another, in college, happened when I was taking a course entirely outside my major where we read and discussed several books that entirely opened my mind like absolutely nothing has since. It was an epiphany and I realized that term, “wow, THIS is why people go to college!” and I was aware of how much I had been exposed to ways of viewing the world and seeing perspectives and hearing ideas and thinking so differently (that I would never, ever have encountered had I stayed in my neighborhood and taken a job like everyone around me had).</p>
<p>Grammar School: I went to a fabulous progressive grammar school that believed that everything was connected. We spent a year studying ancient Greece. Everything we did, paintings, poetry, reading, art was connected. We spent a half year doing the same thing with the middle ages and a half year with ancient Egypt, and finally in eighth grade did the same thing with the American Revolution. You didn’t formally learn to read until seven, second grade, but after that, there was a half an hour every day just for reading for pleasure. The school was a community, and each year had a job. We ran printing presses at 11, ran a post office at 8, a general store at 9. I came out of that school believing in life long learning and that everything was connected with everything else. I also ended up having several experiences there that influenced what I did in later life, and even a couple of books I wrote. </p>
<p>High School was a total waste, even tho it was the famed HS of Music and Art. </p>
<p>As for college: I walked into UC Berkeley the year of the Free Speech Movement and found myself in jail three months later, and that summer found myself working in voter registration in Mississippi; those were life changing experiences. As for academics - I had many good teachers, but the main lesson came from an amazing professor who believed that no matter the topic, we had to write no more than 500 words - that if you were concise, you could express yourself on anything in that short length. Well, you know HS and college, we had all become experts at padding, and this professor taught me how to be concise and spare, a lesson that has served me well as a writer and a journalist.</p>
<p>I would say my Dad saying to me (maybe in 8th grade?) “I just want to make sure you understand that you can be ANYTHING you want to be. All you have to do is work hard.” </p>
<p>Probably has a lot to do with my sister & myself majoring in medicine & engineering (respectively). Scary how your kids do remember some things you say forever!</p>