Who Knew Our High School Teachers Were Right?!

Everyone's experienced it at one time or another. You're sitting in class, learning something so boring you'd rather pull out all your eye lashes one by one than pay attention. Once the whole class starts dozing of, your teacher goes on some long spiel about how "you'll need to know this for college" or that "you'll use this later in life". We all know that we obviously need basic skills in math, writing, grammar, etc., but let's be honest, no one believes them about needing to know anything more complex than that.

Throughout this past week, I've become much more appreciative of my teachers from high school (well, most of them). There are two very specific examples that keep recurring to me. My senior year English teacher made us memorize hundreds of vocabulary words, some of them being among the strangest words I've heard. Some of the words were common knowledge, but none of us really expected to hear that many of the more obscure words outside of that classroom. Within the past week, I've heard at least two dozen of those very words being used, and I actually know what all of them mean. It makes me feel so much more intelligent and like I have an advantage in the class. So the countless hours I spent last year cramming all of those words into my head, really did pay off.

Since I'm majoring in Journalism and Media Production, I have to take a film class. In said film class, we have to watch movies; not in the manner that most people do, but really dissect them and uncover all the hidden techniques within the films. It just so happens that my tenth grade English teacher spent half of a semester teaching us about Alfred Hitchcock, a very significant film director, and all of the various film techniques he used. We watched a handful of Hitchcock's movie and dissected them very similarly to how I will in my current film class. We'll also be watching some of the movies that I watched in my high school class, so I'll have some knowledge of what to look for. I feel like that really gives me an advantage in that class because I already know some of the specific ways of watching movies and the "invisible" film techniques that are used in the movie industry. Sorry if I rambled, but I just wanted to share my excitement and new-found gratitude for some of my former teachers.