Think about your experience and history as a learner. What story can you tell? Write about your
disconnections with learning (the things that cause you grief, create barriers, impede your progress as a learner). Then, write about the tensions and excitements associate with learning. Use specific examples when possible to illustrate your meaning.

I have always enjoyed school. There has rarely been a time when I felt uncomfortable in the classroom. The only negative experience I can think of occurred in the 8th grade. We had a new teacher that year, Mrs. McKinney. She had us keep a journal during class and would often take the journals up to make sure we were writing in them consistently. One day when she took them up, a girl in the class did not have as many entries as Mrs. McKinney expected. The teacher just blew up and started yelling at her in front of the whole class. I’ll never forget the way Tesha just sat there crying while the teacher humiliated her.

After that incident, the class was never the same again. We were terrified of our teacher after that. If her purpose was to ensure that we always had our homework done on time, it worked. We were all to scared of her to slack off. That was the most uncomfortable situation.

The next year, our English teacher was the complete polar opposite of Mrs. McKinney. Mr. Mills really made learning active and fun. The first time I ever felt excited about class was in his ninth grade English class. We were studying the short story and we read a piece entitled “The lady or the tiger.” At the end of this story, the audience is left guessing what is behind the door the protagonist is preparing to open. It is either his beautiful lover or a deadly tiger. For this story, we had to choose which lay behind the door and then support our theory with evidence from the story. This assignment made me very nervous. How was I supposed to know for sure whether it
was the lady or the tiger? I went through the story, gathered as much evidence as I could to support my theory, wrote my paper, and crossed my fingers. When the papers were handed back, I realized the real purpose of the assignment. As my classmates and I compared our graded papers, we discovered that it did not matter whether you choose the lady or the tiger, it matter how well you defended your point. No one really knows if it was the lady or the tiger. There was no right or wrong answer, only an answer poorly supported.

As I progressed through school, I came to realize that this principle can be applied to other classes. Science, math, psychology, and almost every other text book is full of theories. These theories cover every subject and are from every school of thought. Not one of these theories can fully explain their topic. That is why they are called theories. Each has its strengths and its weaknesses. We hold to the theory, that based on our own experience, makes the most sense.

This seems like such a trivial thing, but it had a profound impact on me. Once I realized that there
is rarely an absolute, I understood my role in the learning process. No one is going to tell me what the right answer is. There’s seldom a right answer. It is up to me to discover what I think is the best answer. This is why I love taking new classes and learning new things. The more I learn, the more capable and prepared I feel.