Challenging Academic Experience by Peyton

Challenging Academic Experience by Peyton - December 2024 Scholarship Essay

As a senior in high school I have been through 12 years of school in total, and I have had many challenging academic experiences. Although I have had many academic challenges, only one has followed me for most of my 12 years of school. This challenge can be described in many different ways and can also describe many other people. For me, this challenge is described as a failure in comprehension.
Throughout my elementary and middle school days, I experienced the challenge of not being able to comprehend what I was reading and what I was being taught. I would ask for explanations and the teacher would say the same thing, but I still never understood. It turns out that I am a visual learner, and the reason why I struggled with comprehension is because everything was taught by auditory learning. I was always told what to do and had to read only words and not look at any pictures or examples.
When I entered high school I realized that I wasn’t stupid or dumb, I just needed a different way of learning. When I entered high school a lot of freedom came my way when it came to my learning. I used YouTube for my math classes, note cards and review games for my history classes, google for my English classes, and review games for my science classes. Review games helped me a lot when it came to my learning. Instead of review sheets, I would create review games.
My favorite games when I was little were the memory games. All the games where you had to flip the cards and remember where each one was, I was a champion in. I used this type of game and changed it to fit my learning style. When it came to reviewing games, notecards, or review notes I would remember one to three words in a definition that I would use to remember the answer. Once I figured out what words would stick out to me the most, I would go over and over the questions until I remembered each one. When I do review notes I write everything down on a sheet of paper, and re-write multiple times until I can almost write it without looking at the others. With this tactic, I could remember in my brain the order of the notes, so when going through a test, I would just go through the notes in my brain from top to bottom until I found the answer I was looking for. When it comes to math, I go through review packets highlighting keywords and write explanations for each question so that I know what equation to use and why I used it.
I always make fun of my study tactics but it is what I used to overcome my challenge of comprehension. There are so many different academic challenges, but this is the one I had and the way I overcame it. Everyone is different, all learning processes are different as well. My future goals include becoming an elementary teacher, so I can help little kids with the same struggles that I once had and show them different ways to learn.