Intelligence by Ziara

Intelligence by Ziara - December 2024 Scholarship Essay

Intelligence

Growing up, school always felt pretty standard. You read, write, memorize multiplication and learn division all for the greater cause of a future. For me, it was never too easy or too difficult. But, when I got to middle school, things changed. I was doing fine until a contagious disease drove us into our houses and forced children to learn through a screen.

I hated school. I was spending my last year of middle school stuck in my room typing words into a chat room of faceless thirteen year olds and a teacher I would never meet in person. I got to a point where I completely stopped trying. I was depressed and isolated and couldn’t bring myself to even look at my homework. I’m surprised I even passed 8th Grade.

That year was my academic downfall. I learned almost nothing, I was stuck with this gap in my education and now I loathed school more than anything. The only thing that got me through Freshman year was my friends. I was finally out in society again with people I could actually see and talk to face-to-face. But I still had this hole in my education—specifically math. Algebra 1 and Geometry were beyond difficult. I spent so many days trying to make sense of numbers and equations that I just couldn’t understand. Then, my Junior year rolled around and I had to take Algebra 2.

I had never felt so stupid. None of it ever made sense to me. I was enrolled in weekly tutoring and, half the time, it felt like not even they could help me. I was being helped by people who used to be engineers and math teachers—yet I grasped none of what they were teaching me. All it did was send me spiraling again. I convinced myself there was something wrong with me—that I must’ve been missing a part of my brain, or I was simply just not smart enough. I spent the longest on tests and I still failed every single one of them. I think there is only one recorded test from my entire year in that class that I barely passed. The only reason I passed the class in general was because of my homework—thank god for completion grades.

When I finally was rid of the class, I was able to reflect and realize; I was never stupid. I just was stuck in classes that my brain was not built for. We get told so often that you need these classes to graduate, that you start to believe that you must just be unintelligent when you can’t pass the classes. But the truth is, everyone is made differently, and this infuriating mold we’re told to fit in has caused so many students to feel how I did—like they just weren’t enough. And while it won't be easy, it's a cycle we need to break.