My math teacher, Mr. Hurley, is one of the most inspiring teachers I’ve had in my education career. Part of what makes this man so interesting is his past experiences, and while all people have individual and equally unique and meaningful pasts, Mr. Hurley takes what he learned from his past and brings it to class. He does not exclusively teach math, he also emphasizes character building. Coming from his fun, collaborative classes four times per week, I think I’ve grown as a character. This is perhaps an even more important accomplishment than learning precalculus.
Two of my favorite Mr. Hurley ideas:
“I don’t want to pity to for your failures, I want to praise you for your success.” He said this to my class after our first math test where the none of us performed exceedingly well. He said he wasn’t going to make the tests easier…in fact, they were only going to become increasingly difficult.
“I’m not your teacher, I’m your consultant. If you come to class just a day ahead of where you need to be, you’ll know what you don’t know. My job, as your consultant, is to fill in those gaps for you.” Mr. Hurley talked a lot about this during our first couple of classes. He shares how he got through college being just a day ahead in his work, because then, one really knows what they don’t know.
And most recently, Mr. Hurley shared his experiences at the Naval Academy. He related this to PA, and how similar the experiences are. I’m a broken record. I think I’ve said this too often, but I truly believe the beautiful thing about PA is that we take students from all over the world. Many are from the US, many are even from Massachusetts, and a solid portion are international students. Hurley told us how he went through high school: not trying would result in a B+, and trying would give an easy A. At one point, he thought he was some kind of genius.
However, after getting into the Naval Academy, he found his grades at the lowest point ever. He says the Naval Academy made an overt effort to take him and all his peers down peg by peg. Downsizing. Some of us (myself included), come out of middle school having played a high school varsity sport, been a straight A student, played in music groups, while managing several extracurriculars. In fact, for a while, I honestly did believe I was a pretty darn outstanding student.
Coming to PA changed this. I was thrown into a community where everyone was as outstanding as I was in some way or another. It’s harder to pull off A’s, sport teams are infamously competitive, music groups are harder to get into, and it’s much harder to organize a club/event. When Mr. Hurley told me this, I was shocked at how true his statement was, “And it happens here at Andover as well as the Naval Academy, you come here from the top of your class and then peg by peg you’re taken down. That’s when you learn that you have to fight for everything you want”.
While Mr. Hurley is right in saying one will have to fight harder for what they want due to the increased competition, I also believe it provides insight for extremely well rounded students about what they truly excel in. Being at the top of the class is good for a bit, however, for me, it was difficult to sense what I was truly good at. At Andover, I’m figuring out I really have to fight for whatever I want. It will make the time between each of my major accomplishments longer, but it’ll be well worth the fight. I go back to the quote I mentioned in an earlier post: Nothing worth having comes without struggle.
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