Lessons in Geometry by Hannah

Lessons in Geometry by Hannah - December 2024 Scholarship Essay

My freshman year of high school, I had to take geometry to fulfill the yearly math requirement. Up until this point anytime someone would ask me what my favorite subject was, I would always say math. I loved working with numbers, it made sense to me in a way that the other subjects didn’t. As I was seated for the first day of class, I wasn’t worried at all. I thought that the class would be a breeze. I quickly learned that that would not be the case at all. It’s also important to note that my entire freshman year was online because of Covid.

Freshman year geometry was the only class that me and my best friend had together all four years of high school. I remember in the beginning of the year, we would send funny TikTok’s to each other back and forth, and watch each other’s reactions on camera through Zoom as the teacher was talking. This didn’t last long as we were quick to find out how hard geometry was, and we desperately needed to pay attention. Every week there was a quiz assigned to recap what we had learned, and of course I failed the first one. I gotten bad grades plenty of times before, I’m no stranger to not having an A in class, but this was the first time where I genuinely had no idea what I was looking at.

I like to consider myself an independent person. I’m very used to solving problems on my own, or just not solving it at all. At this point I couldn’t do either of those options without failing the class. This was the first time in my life I had to seek out help. Luckily for me, my teacher was dedicated to making sure the class understood what was going on. She often kept the Zoom class open after lessons so that we could stay and ask questions. There were times that I was getting help from her for close to 30 minutes.

When I was 14 I didn’t have a lot of friends, just my best friend Brie. At this point we weren’t nearly as close as we are now. Since we both were friends though, and in the same class, we would do the weekly quizzes with each other. I remember we would spend hours on facetimes trying to solve these problems with each other. Sometimes it was like the blind leading the blind, other times we would end up teaching each other something.

Being in this class forced me to learn how to open up and ask for help. This experience also prepared me for becoming an adult, and advocating for myself. I didn’t have anyone holding my hands anymore. I had to take my academics seriously, and I had to that on my own not by force. It also brought me closer to Brie. Even though that was the only time we ever shared a class schedule, all the hours we spent on the phone just trying to geometry ended up birthing a friendship that had lasted almost five years now.