The City
“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on” (Robert Frost). Isn’t it amazing how crucial and important everyday feels when your in high school, life seems so short and you feel as if you have to do it all before “it” goes away. It’s ironic that we have no foresight as teenagers, yet we have our entire lives ahead of us. I wish I could’ve seen the future when I was teenager, I would’ve saved my self from a bunch of inconvenient situations which should’ve never happened at all.
December fourth 2001 I remember it as a cold snowy chilly night. The ground was wet, fog clogged the road ahead. The weather was so bad that morning that Jose the man who was helping us move, could barely make out what was thirty yards ahead of us on the hazy RT. 46. We were on our second trip from 162 ST. Fort Washington New York NY 10032 to 17 Hobart Place Clifton NJ 07011. Boy was I tired, that day I had carried so much stuff that my hands were all scratched up my back was in tremendous pain, my clothes were filthy covered in dust and who knows what else from that nasty New York apartment; but it was all worth it. I felt proud that day, I almost felt like a man. I was only fourteen at the time but my skinny little frame with the help of another scrawny fellow, Jose, were able to move all of that crap down the five flights of stairs into the small van and accommodate it as well as we could in the empty house.
That night my sister with her baby daughter my mother and my self slept together in the frigidly cold basement all coddled up, I imagined the first night the settlers arrived in North America perhaps having very few blankets making a small fire and each family went to sleep holding each other to retain the heat; and their new unknown future full expectations and hope for a better life would begin the next day. That’s how we felt, well at least my self, my new life was going to begin the next day, and as opposed to the prospects which I had in the city my future here was promising and my outlook was optimistic with this new beginning.
In the city I was going absolutely nowhere. My life before the move was in complete shambles. In September of hat same year I was a freshman in high school, besides all of the problems a regular freshman has in high school such as peer pressure being insecure, bashful, foolish, and uncontrollable, I also had to face drugs, excessive violence, unruly gangs and not to mention one of the worst schools in the city. I was attending George Washington High School in upper Manhattan also known as G’dubs. In New York city as opposed to New Jersey you do not go to the high school in your vicinity rather students take a standardized test and according to the scores of that test and your junior high school grades you have high schools look at your records and decide whether they want you or not, sort of like applying to a university. Most of those schools are charter schools which have very high academic standards therefore if you’re an intelligent student but had the unfortunate circumstance of attending a low, very poor academic junior high school your chances to succeed and attend a better high school are limited. So there I was in an awful school whose teachers treated you more like an inmate rather than a student. For instance my first week there I was suspended for three days because I had a two buttons missing in my school mandated white button up shirt and therefore I couldn’t button it all the way up, ridiculous. It was almost as if they wanted you out of the school more than they wanted you in the school. I also had a math teacher who could barely speak English so the couple of times I went to that class I was mostly clowning around in the back with the other knuckleheads. My science teacher for the short time I was there was a substitute teacher who made us do worksheets the entire time we were in class. The only good teacher I had was my English teacher but she was too busy working with the other forty students in the class. Feeling discouraged with school and most importantly with life I started hanging out with the wrong crowd.
Being a young man with no father figure can be hard on anybody. As for my self I searched for that father figure in my older friends. When I began going to G’Dubs and realized that I wasn’t going to do anything there but “waste my time” I began to cut school. I would wake up in the morning put on my regular clothes instead of the required khaki and white button up shirt mandated by G’Dub; and I would meet up with my “boys” who were part time students’ part time drug dealers and users, and we would usually chill in one of our apartments. This happened almost everyday. We weren’t concerned with school or our parents and unfortunately what we neglected the most was our futures. But we couldn’t see that far ahead all we knew was that “today” had to be one of the greatest days in our lives. Whenever we dished school and went to one of our friend’s apartments we made sure we had the essentials marijuana, liquor, and girls. We thought we were the greatest, I was the youngest of the group and I looked up to those around me as if they were my family more importantly my role models, boy was I wrong. I didn’t care however because I though I was just like them, at the time I was just concerned with making them happy, making sure I was cool enough to hang around them, not knowing that in reality those guys didn’t care about me but used me as their puppet to entertain their immature brains.
I didn’t have any foresight at fourteen; I was too caught up in everyday life not concerned about the future. Partly because of the school situation I was in and partly my inability to stand back and realize that if I didn’t make it better nobody else would’ve, had placed me between a rock and hard place, I was going nowhere fast as they say. If my mother hadn’t intervened and made all of the strenuous efforts to move me out of that situation into a more suitable one for my future I’m pretty sure I would’ve ended up exactly like those guys I was hanging out with; using drugs to an extreme where it would’ve consumed my entire life, committing petty crimes, having unprotected sex with the wrong girls and living life day to day with no hope for a future. I thank God everyday that although I didn’t have foresight, my mother did. I feel sorry for those who do not have parents to guide them through adolescence. After several months of not acting like myself my mother realized that I hadn’t changed but that the people around me had changed me and the influence they had on me was enormous. So she decided that a change of scenery was what I needed. And she was right.
At the time, surprisingly enough, I was happy I was moving to New Jersey. I knew that there I could start all over. I realized that I wasn’t a bad kid, and personally I didn’t like the life I was living in Washington Heights, but felt I somehow had to live that type of life just to survive. When you live in that type of environment and you don’t have a strong support system you’re bound to fall in with the crowd because essentially you have no other choice, you’re either in or you’re shut out. There is no in between in that environment you can’t be a good student and be accepted by your peers at the same time.
When I woke up the next day in that chilly basement, I realized that my new life had begun. There was a mess in the house and my mother my sister and I tried doing everything we could to make it a more comfortable living environment for all of us but we still had a long way to go. Most of the furniture we had in the apartment was thrown out because it was old and worn out, so our house looked empty for a long time but our house was full of love, and that was all we needed.
When I enrolled in Clifton High School the following week I was amazed to see how everybody was so welcoming and pleasant towards me. The teachers and even the students treated me as if I was a long time friend even though they had just recently met me. It was a short time after 9/11 so that may have had something to do with everybody being so nice, but it didn’t matter if that was the reason I still embraced it. Clifton high School is a very multicultural school, I was used to being around nothing but Dominicans in my previous school, but this was a change I needed. I discovered how to be around and respect other cultures something which I would’ve never had the capacity to learn in Washington Heights. And the education in Clifton was superlative as opposed to that which I was receiving G’Dubs. In Clifton I realized that my math skills were mediocre at best and I realized that I needed much help with it which I received from a teacher I would never forget, Mrs. Rooney. Mrs. Rooney was an awesome algebra teacher, everyday she would stay with me in after school remedial and we would go over everything I didn’t understand, but she was much more than a good teacher she was a humanitarian. One day after remedial, it was pouring January rain and I would usually walk to my house which was around fifteen city blocks away from the high school, Mrs. Rooney offered to give me a ride home which I gladly accepted. Maybe this isn’t an act that deserves tremendous merit, but I personally feel it should, this seemingly innocuous act changed my entire outlook about teachers and it made me realized that maybe they aren’t the root of all evil, but rather they’re there to help you and make you a better person.
After the move I continued to get good grades, a couple years later I would start working, and later after that I would enroll in Kean University, now I’m about nine months away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English education and teacher of students with disabilities. It is almost certain if my mother didn’t have the foresight which I lacked my life now would be a complete disaster.
“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on” (Robert Frost). Isn’t it amazing how crucial and important everyday feels when your in high school, life seems so short and you feel as if you have to do it all before “it” goes away. It’s ironic that we have no foresight as teenagers, yet we have our entire lives ahead of us. I wish I could’ve seen the future when I was teenager, I would’ve saved my self from a bunch of inconvenient situations which should’ve never happened at all.
December fourth 2001 I remember it as a cold snowy chilly night. The ground was wet, fog clogged the road ahead. The weather was so bad that morning that Jose the man who was helping us move, could barely make out what was thirty yards ahead of us on the hazy RT. 46. We were on our second trip from 162 ST. Fort Washington New York NY 10032 to 17 Hobart Place Clifton NJ 07011. Boy was I tired, that day I had carried so much stuff that my hands were all scratched up my back was in tremendous pain, my clothes were filthy covered in dust and who knows what else from that nasty New York apartment; but it was all worth it. I felt proud that day, I almost felt like a man. I was only fourteen at the time but my skinny little frame with the help of another scrawny fellow, Jose, were able to move all of that crap down the five flights of stairs into the small van and accommodate it as well as we could in the empty house.
That night my sister with her baby daughter my mother and my self slept together in the frigidly cold basement all coddled up, I imagined the first night the settlers arrived in North America perhaps having very few blankets making a small fire and each family went to sleep holding each other to retain the heat; and their new unknown future full expectations and hope for a better life would begin the next day. That’s how we felt, well at least my self, my new life was going to begin the next day, and as opposed to the prospects which I had in the city my future here was promising and my outlook was optimistic with this new beginning.
In the city I was going absolutely nowhere. My life before the move was in complete shambles. In September of hat same year I was a freshman in high school, besides all of the problems a regular freshman has in high school such as peer pressure being insecure, bashful, foolish, and uncontrollable, I also had to face drugs, excessive violence, unruly gangs and not to mention one of the worst schools in the city. I was attending George Washington High School in upper Manhattan also known as G’dubs. In New York city as opposed to New Jersey you do not go to the high school in your vicinity rather students take a standardized test and according to the scores of that test and your junior high school grades you have high schools look at your records and decide whether they want you or not, sort of like applying to a university. Most of those schools are charter schools which have very high academic standards therefore if you’re an intelligent student but had the unfortunate circumstance of attending a low, very poor academic junior high school your chances to succeed and attend a better high school are limited. So there I was in an awful school whose teachers treated you more like an inmate rather than a student. For instance my first week there I was suspended for three days because I had a two buttons missing in my school mandated white button up shirt and therefore I couldn’t button it all the way up, ridiculous. It was almost as if they wanted you out of the school more than they wanted you in the school. I also had a math teacher who could barely speak English so the couple of times I went to that class I was mostly clowning around in the back with the other knuckleheads. My science teacher for the short time I was there was a substitute teacher who made us do worksheets the entire time we were in class. The only good teacher I had was my English teacher but she was too busy working with the other forty students in the class. Feeling discouraged with school and most importantly with life I started hanging out with the wrong crowd.
Being a young man with no father figure can be hard on anybody. As for my self I searched for that father figure in my older friends. When I began going to G’Dubs and realized that I wasn’t going to do anything there but “waste my time” I began to cut school. I would wake up in the morning put on my regular clothes instead of the required khaki and white button up shirt mandated by G’Dub; and I would meet up with my “boys” who were part time students’ part time drug dealers and users, and we would usually chill in one of our apartments. This happened almost everyday. We weren’t concerned with school or our parents and unfortunately what we neglected the most was our futures. But we couldn’t see that far ahead all we knew was that “today” had to be one of the greatest days in our lives. Whenever we dished school and went to one of our friend’s apartments we made sure we had the essentials marijuana, liquor, and girls. We thought we were the greatest, I was the youngest of the group and I looked up to those around me as if they were my family more importantly my role models, boy was I wrong. I didn’t care however because I though I was just like them, at the time I was just concerned with making them happy, making sure I was cool enough to hang around them, not knowing that in reality those guys didn’t care about me but used me as their puppet to entertain their immature brains.
I didn’t have any foresight at fourteen; I was too caught up in everyday life not concerned about the future. Partly because of the school situation I was in and partly my inability to stand back and realize that if I didn’t make it better nobody else would’ve, had placed me between a rock and hard place, I was going nowhere fast as they say. If my mother hadn’t intervened and made all of the strenuous efforts to move me out of that situation into a more suitable one for my future I’m pretty sure I would’ve ended up exactly like those guys I was hanging out with; using drugs to an extreme where it would’ve consumed my entire life, committing petty crimes, having unprotected sex with the wrong girls and living life day to day with no hope for a future. I thank God everyday that although I didn’t have foresight, my mother did. I feel sorry for those who do not have parents to guide them through adolescence. After several months of not acting like myself my mother realized that I hadn’t changed but that the people around me had changed me and the influence they had on me was enormous. So she decided that a change of scenery was what I needed. And she was right.
At the time, surprisingly enough, I was happy I was moving to New Jersey. I knew that there I could start all over. I realized that I wasn’t a bad kid, and personally I didn’t like the life I was living in Washington Heights, but felt I somehow had to live that type of life just to survive. When you live in that type of environment and you don’t have a strong support system you’re bound to fall in with the crowd because essentially you have no other choice, you’re either in or you’re shut out. There is no in between in that environment you can’t be a good student and be accepted by your peers at the same time.
When I woke up the next day in that chilly basement, I realized that my new life had begun. There was a mess in the house and my mother my sister and I tried doing everything we could to make it a more comfortable living environment for all of us but we still had a long way to go. Most of the furniture we had in the apartment was thrown out because it was old and worn out, so our house looked empty for a long time but our house was full of love, and that was all we needed.
When I enrolled in Clifton High School the following week I was amazed to see how everybody was so welcoming and pleasant towards me. The teachers and even the students treated me as if I was a long time friend even though they had just recently met me. It was a short time after 9/11 so that may have had something to do with everybody being so nice, but it didn’t matter if that was the reason I still embraced it. Clifton high School is a very multicultural school, I was used to being around nothing but Dominicans in my previous school, but this was a change I needed. I discovered how to be around and respect other cultures something which I would’ve never had the capacity to learn in Washington Heights. And the education in Clifton was superlative as opposed to that which I was receiving G’Dubs. In Clifton I realized that my math skills were mediocre at best and I realized that I needed much help with it which I received from a teacher I would never forget, Mrs. Rooney. Mrs. Rooney was an awesome algebra teacher, everyday she would stay with me in after school remedial and we would go over everything I didn’t understand, but she was much more than a good teacher she was a humanitarian. One day after remedial, it was pouring January rain and I would usually walk to my house which was around fifteen city blocks away from the high school, Mrs. Rooney offered to give me a ride home which I gladly accepted. Maybe this isn’t an act that deserves tremendous merit, but I personally feel it should, this seemingly innocuous act changed my entire outlook about teachers and it made me realized that maybe they aren’t the root of all evil, but rather they’re there to help you and make you a better person.
After the move I continued to get good grades, a couple years later I would start working, and later after that I would enroll in Kean University, now I’m about nine months away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English education and teacher of students with disabilities. It is almost certain if my mother didn’t have the foresight which I lacked my life now would be a complete disaster.
1 comment:
i think your essay is great!.. its so wierd by looking at someone you dont know their background ya kno? i give you much credit!
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