Dropping High School

Daniel Medina Due Date: 9/6/2005

English Comp. Writing Assignment #1

Although I've only been alive for twenty years, I have had many experiences that have been significant enough to change the way I am. When we are young we are just learning about life. The definition of young, according to Dictionary.com is as follows; being in an early period of life, development or growth. I think there are a lot of experiences that have helped me grow both physically and mentally as an adolescent. An important occurrence in my life was when I dropped out of high school. The situation I was in both changed who I am as a person and the way I think about things.

Half way through tenth grade, when I was sixteen years old, I stopped going to high school. I was always a good student until I got to high school. The summer before I dropped out, I worked in construction and had a part time job. I always knew I wanted to go into the construction field when I grew up but that summer really made up my mind. When I was at started high school I found the material a lot of my teachers were teaching me was wasting my time and would not be useful to me in the future. Also, I was trying to learn in an environment where kids that did not want to learn and did not care about school. It was then when I decided to drop out of school, obtain my G.E.D., and go to technology college. I started working fulltime construction and began studying a twelve hundred page G.E.D. book. I went on to do excellent on my G.E.D. exam, and start college two years later.

I think this situation forced me to grow up faster than the normal teenager. While a lot of my friends we going out partying on a school night I would be sleeping because I had work at 7 in the morning. I started paying some of my own bills to lessen the burden on my mother, a single mom with two kids. I started to learn about taxes, bills and what they call the "real world."

My mother and I had many long discussions before I made my final decision about school. I knew that I could not just drop out and not go to college. Not many businesses will take someone serious who dropped out and had not earned a college diploma. I knew I had to buckle down and concentrate on my task at hand. My mother gave me an extreme amount of motivation and was there for me every step of the way. Once I had achieved my G.E.D.