Take Charge of Your Learning by Isabella

Take Charge of Your Learning by Isabella - August 2026 Scholarship Essay

I can’t say I have always been very school centered. I mean, I care a lot about my grades and always have, but there has definitely been a switch in how I view school and my learning. I would say before my 10th grade year, I was just simply attending school. I would turn in my work, see my friends, and get good grades. I never really felt a true passion for learning, though. Sure, I’d have the challenging test that I would have to study for, or I’d have to stay up a little later to finish a project, but I never felt like I had to do anything more than a bare minimum. That’s until I finally was put into a class that made me want to learn. It is important for students to feel challenged throughout their schooling, and in order to succeed, a little bit of struggle goes a long way.
It was Sophomore Biology and I had heard the horror stories from some of my upperclassmen friends. At my school, Biology had a different grading scale than all of our other classes. Rather than it being your typical A through F letter grade, it was a scale from 1 to 4. The issue with this was that a 3 was what was considered a “meeting grade”. So this meant even if you turned in every single assignment, and did everything right, you’d be sitting at a B-plus. This was not something I wanted to hear. To get an A in this class, you had to go out of your way to prove you learned something by writing a 3 page essay, per unit, on something we haven’t talked about in class. My first choice was to complain about it. It’s what everyone else did, so why shouldn’t I? We would spend our lunches going on and on about how we disliked the way things were. This went on for a few weeks.
I then began to realize that we weren’t going to change a single thing. No matter how many times it was brought up to a guidance counselor, or grumbled about in the hallway, it’s just the way things were. Once I understood that, I knew I just had to suck it up and do it. At first, I had no idea where to start. I settled on learning the differences of meiosis and mitosis, a pretty broad topic. I remember doing nothing but research and watching videos to try and grasp the concept. Every source would say something slightly different than the next, and it was frustrating to understand. Eventually, I started to understand it. My paper really took shape, and I felt like I explained it very well. Rather than sitting around waiting for something to happen, I took action.
Once I got the paper back, I felt such a sense of pride because of the notes my teacher scribbled in the margins. Numerous “Exactly!’s” and check marks made my day. I had repeated this process for the remainder of the year, and made it out of Biology with an A. This feeling made me actually really like the class. I felt like I was actually learning something because I wasn’t just being told what to do like everyone else, but I was rather teaching myself. This class taught me that learning can be fun when you care, and when you’re given a challenge, the reward is even greater than what it is for any other class