It Takes Two People

By Yadira Birseno

When you think of high school, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? To me it would be the word “hard”. We could all agree that high school can be very challenging, but imagine how much harder it would be if a teacher decides to give up on you. If they decide that, you are not worth their time.

I am one of those students. Once in 5th grade I got told that I wasn't going to make it very far. That teacher kept reminding me that I wasn’t as smart as other students, but she wouldn't just tell me, she would tell multiple people. She made us think that we weren’t smart enough.

I memory that I have clearly about that class is that she would sit people depending on how they behaved. On one side of the class she would have the “smart people” and on the other side she would have “troublemakers”. I would sit with the “troublemakers”. The reason according to her on why she did this is because she didn’t want the “troublemakers” to distract the other students.

She would only focus on one side, she would give all her attention to the side where all of the “smart kids” were.

Back then I would blame myself. I would tell myself that it was because I wasn’t smart like them. I thought that for the whole year but as I grew older I realized that it wasn’t me.

But despite it all, here I am, almost six years later, passing all of my classes with a GPA of 3.8. I know that there are some students here in Yerba Buena highschool that are going through the same thing.

I’m not saying that all teachers are bad. I’m just saying that some teachers could do a better job at teaching. Depending on the person that you ask there will be different responses that you're going to receive. The teachers blame it on the students and the students blame it on the teachers.

Ms. Gerodias, a math teacher at Yerba Buena High School says, “A teacher does 50% and the other 50% has to come from the student”.

I agree with her because I get it. There is just so much that a teacher can do to help a student out but it doesn’t always work out.

Every class has the smart students and the students who struggle a little more, and I’m not going to say that those students who struggle are more dumb becuase their not. I belive that theres no one thats dumb, it’s just that some students aren’t given the proper teaching.

Yoce Robles, a junior at Yerba Buena High School, is one of the students that had the luck to have the same teacher for 2 years in a row, but for her it wasn’t so much luck.

It wasn’t luck because that was the same class that she received an F for both semesters in the previous year, and I get that people are going to blame Yoce for failing that class but this year is a different story for Yoce.

Right now she has an A for math 2. Yoce believes that the reason why she didn't pass math 1 or math 2 is because of the teacher. “If there is no help, how's the student going to pass? It takes two people to pass a class,” she said.

She says that as time went on, the teacher decided to kinda give up on her “When I was in math, [the teacher] wouldn't come up to me and asked me if I needed help, [they] would just look at me and say nothing”.

This is when Yoce started to believe that her teacher didn’t care about her anymore. If you were to ask the teacher, she would blame Yoce for not asking for help.

Even though her teacher saw that she was failing, they never suggested recovery for Yoce, so Yoce was never really aware of the dates that recovery was on.

A lot of students don’t even know what recovery is. Ms. Delahunta, a recovery teacher, says that “Recovery helps a student learn something that they didn’t understand in a class and then get graduation credit”.

But even Ms. Delunta thinks that recovery can be challenging, “I think that sometimes it’s hard for students to be consisted of one day after school, sometimes they doubt that it’s going to be helpful and it’s very long”.

She's not wrong, recovery is after school on Wednesdays for 2 hour and it goes on for the whole semester, so sometimes students struggle on being consisted, and the only way to receive your full credits is to complete the whole course.

Sometimes it's not even the students fault on why they failed the class. A study by the Opportunity Myth stated, “Only 16 percent of lessons that were observed had strong structions”.

But if you got to ask a teacher on why a student is failing, they are going to blame the student. They’re going to say “it’s the student’s fault” but I don’t think that it’s the student's fault because I have been there personally.

My freshman year I suffered the same thing that Yoce did. As a matter of fact, I had the same teacher that she did. I know the struggle that Yoce went through. The only difference is that I decided to change my teacher. It was a hard process to change my class just because the first quarter was about to end, but once I did my grade went up to an A.

Feeling that anxiety of not passing a class can be very stressful, Yoce felt this feeling for her freshman and sophomore years. She said, “I got worried a lot because I wasn’t getting the credits that were being required”.

I know that some people could relate to Yoce. We get so focused on getting that grade up that in the moment your grade is all that matters, and this is made because of all the pressure that a teacher puts on you.

How are we supposed to put our part in if teachers don’t put there’s in?