Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement?
Upon first entering high school, I was faced with the challenge of having no German teacher. At the time, I had been learning German for two years and was making good progress in class. Because of problems in her contract, we would not have our new German teacher until after we took our midterm exams. At first our German classes were administered by a substitute teacher who had no knowledge of the German language. This was particularly difficult because the only thing I could do to keep my language skills on par was the bootless assignments of the substitute. These assignment were not effective because they only covered material that was below the class’ level. In addition, we received no feedback so we could not learn from our mistakes and improve. Eventually, we were given a long-term substitute but the situation was far from optimal.
Our long term substitute did not follow the curriculum that we were expected to learn. I struggled everyday in class because, our substitute did not fully teach us a topic before testing us on it. This forced me to take responsibility for my own learning and thus, I took the liberty to self teach this topic by using learning websites. I owe it to these strategies and my own initiative for keeping my grade up in German.
When our permanent teacher arrived, my class was already significantly behind. There were a lot of topics that we could not cover that year which has affected my studies in subsequent years. I had to fully exert myself to keep my grade up in this class. Because I was not taught the topics in depth, I was forced to learn supplementally on my own to keep up with the curriculum. If I were to take one positive aspect of this experience it would be learning how to take matters in my own hands. This ordeal has taught me about self-discipline and the importance of looking after my own education.