Attention

        During my early school years, especially in first to fourth grade, I found myself striving to excel in lessons and working hard to grasp the subjects being taught.  This quickly led to my getting the title of “Teacher’s Pet”, which I did not mind at all.  As I got older, however, I found myself in that tricky spot where being the teacher’s favorite wasn’t the cool thing to be.  Oftentimes the class clown or troublemaker seemed to be the coolest person in class.  It quickly became clear to me that getting the attention of the teacher as the smart, participative, helpful student was going to really impact my “cool factor” amongst my friends and classmates.  I remember clearly a situation in the early part of my fifth grade year where my teacher was trying hard to get the class back on track while one of the worst behaving students was trying equally hard to disrupt anything having to do with learning.  The teacher was at her wits end, which was clear to all of us and made the comment, “You’re not funny, nobody in the class is laughing!”  I took this opportunity to jump in and try to be cool by starting to laugh.  Needless to say this did not go over very well with poor Ms. Garcia who quickly focused all her attention on me with a look I’ve yet to forget.  It was at that exact moment I found that I much preferred getting the teacher’s attention by behaving and being helpful, rather than joining in with the not-so-well behaved group of my classmates.  I stayed after school that day and apologized to Ms. Garcia and worked the rest of the year to get her attention for all the right reasons – which may have led to my losing cool points but definitely gaining smart points.