A Rockville High School Education

On Tuesday afternoon, roughly 3:02pm, I put down my pen. My hand was cramped and my head was pounding with information overload, but I stood up and handed in the last exam of my freshman year. After that, I packed up our minivan with the excess crap I have accumulated throughout the year and took the two-hour trek back to Vernon, Connecticut.            

It seems like just yesterday I was posting my final Vernon Patch blog about my graduation from Rockville High School, and now I’m already done with my first year of college. People really are right when they say that the years go by faster as you get older. My first year at Roger Williams University went exceptionally well. I met a bunch of wonderful people, worked in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions as both an Admissions Assistant and a Tour Guide, and got hired as a Resident Assistant for the upcoming 2013-2014 school year. I’m grateful for all of the experience I’ve had so far, and I’m really looking forward to my next few years there.            

But enough about me. I didn’t revive my blog to talk about myself; I have a purpose for coming out of retirement.            

On Thursday, I took an afternoon trip with my friends to RHS to visit some of our old teachers. It sounds dumb, I know. I mean, most people who graduate from high school have no intentions of going back. But really we just wanted to go see our favorite teachers and let them know how grateful we were. I can say with confidence that I would not have been as successful during my freshman year of college had I not gotten the education I did at Rockville High School.            

The Vernon school system is often criticized for its poor test results. It does not surprise me that the town has been so critical of the high school. Low test scores obviously mean something is wrong. However, I don’t think the teaching staff or the curriculum at RHS is to blame; I think it’s entirely the students’ doing.
            
As an RHS student, I took three Early College Experience (ECE) classes. For those of you who don’t know, ECE classes count towards RHS credits, but they also give you UConn credits if you pass with a 70 or higher. By transferring these credits to Roger Williams, I was given thirteen elective credits. I also took AP Language & Composition my junior year of high school and got a four on the exam, which covered my first year Expository Writing class. Therefore, I entered Roger Williams University with sixteen total credits, meaning I was a full semester ahead of the other people in my class. This may sound trivial, but keep in mind that having all of these credits meant I not only got to pick my classes before everyone else in my class, but I also had a significantly better housing lottery number. These perks are extremely important in college if you want to be guaranteed your classes and if you want your first choice of residence hall. It would also be possible for me to graduate an entire semester early, if I chose to.

The credits aren’t the only helpful part of these classes; the content has also been useful to me. At least three of the very dense, difficult articles we read and discussed in Ms. Matyseck’s ECE Academic Writing class showed up in my classes with the assumption that we’d understand them on our own, and I can’t even tell you how many classes I’ve had that have required me to know Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” which we learned about in Mrs. Smith’s AP Lang & Comp. If I hadn’t previously learned and discussed these things, I would not have felt as confident and prepared as I was when they came up in my classes again.            

And it’s not just the high-level classes that were beneficial. The basic, college-level classes that I took at RHS were arguably the most helpful for me in college. My major only requires me to take one math class, and I was placed in Basic Statistics first semester. I got an A in that class, and there is not a doubt in my mind that I would have struggled to even pass it had I not taken College Statistics with Mrs. White my senior year. Every single thing that Mrs. White taught us in a full year class was crammed into one semester of college, and all of the time Mrs. White spent helping me during study halls last year when I was struggling allowed me breeze through Basic Stats. I also took Introduction to Sociology this past semester, and at least three-fourths of the course material I had already learned in Mr. Stevenson’s College Sociology class senior year. Again, this allowed me to breeze through the class. And don’t even get me started on Mrs. Nordlund’s Creative Writing classes. I’ve taken two Creative Writing courses in college so far, and I feel miles ahead of my peers thanks to the preparation I had received from Mrs. Nordlund since sophomore year.            

I’m not trying to brag about my accomplishments thus far. In fact, they really weren’t my own accomplishments. I would not be doing as well as I am without the education I received at Rockville. I think all of the staff at RHS is dedicated to the students’ successes, and they definitely have the right curriculum to follow. What’s causing the low test scores in Vernon has absolutely nothing to do with the school system and everything to do with the students.            

If you aren’t willing to learn, then you aren’t going to learn; if you aren’t willing to get extra help when you’re struggling, then you aren’t going to pass; and if you aren’t willing to take your high school education seriously, then you certainly aren’t going to take anything away from it. You have to actually want to succeed in order to do so, and I think that’s a problem a lot of RHS students have. Much of what students will need in terms of education is completely accessible to them, but they don’t utilize it. People are so quick to criticize the school system so as to not blame the student when, in reality, the school isn’t the issue. Take my experiences into account; it’s no secret that I put a lot of effort into my education in high school (I was called a “try-hard” by several of my peers), but is that really such a bad thing? It seems like all of the hard work I did in high school ultimately paid off when I got to college, and a lot of my friends have had similar experiences. As a student, I can’t expect to be handed things on a silver platter, and other students can’t do that either. It may be “just high school,” and college isn’t for everyone, but how can you expect to do well in life if you can’t even take your high school education seriously?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m grateful for the education I received at RHS. I’m not saying the school is perfect, and I’m not saying that there aren’t things that could be fixed. What I am saying is that reforming and reorganizing the school system isn’t going to do to anything if the students aren’t willing to work hard. I’ve utilized so much of the knowledge I gained there in just one year of college, and I know several people who agree, so obviously the school is doing something right.

I hope that the parents, teachers, administrators, town officials, and any other Vernon residents who read this consider the fact that maybe the school isn’t entirely to blame. Maybe, instead of blaming the teachers who want nothing more than to see their students do well, we should be encouraging the students to work harder and motivating them to want to succeed. Maybe then the test scores will go up, and maybe then the morale of the Vernon school system will increase.

Then again, it’s not up to me.