Essay On 8th Grade Classroom

I remember my eighth grade year at Our Lady of Angels School quite warmly. The sense of community, the anticipation of graduating, and our upbeat classroom spirit are the first things I think of when I look back on my experiences there. Our eighth grade classroom may not look any different from standard classrooms; one wall displays a brilliantly bright whiteboard, the other holds windows which peer down onto the playground below, and various memos, posters, and particularly good assignments cover the remaining white walls. Outside, the bright afternoon sunlight glistens upon a square courtyard containing our lockers, lunch tables, and statue of Mary. However standard my classroom may seem, it is there that I felt a sense of comfort as I did my work, for the thirty-five students surrounding me …show more content…
Lowering my standards would mean demoting myself. In this eighth grade classroom, my grades had been compared to the people around me time and time again. Through our standardized tests, which gave you a percentage based on how many students you did better than, to our everyday assignments, which almost always preceded the age-old question, “What did you get?”. I constantly felt like I was being compared to my peers, and this made me become quite competitive, whether it was in a classroom or on the tennis court. As a child, winning or losing sports matches never mattered much to me, for I never felt the kind of immense satisfaction from winning these matches as I felt when I received an ‘A’. Every time I earned an ‘A’ assignment, a great rush of euphoria accompanied it. Over time, as I realized how much I enjoyed obtaining high marks in school, I began to crave this feeling of accomplishment through other outlets, such as sports. My competitive edge, once dull from lack of interest in contests, was honed down to a sharp