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My relationship with Northville is something special and mysterious to me. I moved to this town with my family when I was in the fourth grade. My parents never considered Northville Public Schools as an option solely because my brother had gone to private school for his middle school years and was continuing his education in private high school at the time. I continued in this fashion through the eighth grade, but ultimately knew I wanted a bigger environment. I pushed my parents to allow me to attend public school to start the ninth grade, and to my surprise, they allowed it.
On my very first day at Northville High School, I was overwhelmed. I didn’t know the most basic things about public school. I didn’t know which bus to take home, how to buy lunch, where to sit in my classes, or how to travel through the massive school during passing time. My graduating eighth grade class was roughly twenty students; my incoming freshman class was about six hundred. I was both physically and socially lost for the first few months of school. |
Thanks to the graciousness of my classmates and teachers who reached out to me, I slowly started to find my place in NHS. I built a small friend group, learned to navigate my schedule, and discovered what I liked and disliked to do with my time. As an enthusiastic and social student, class didn’t always keep my attention. I found it difficult to pay attention and take notes because I was always so eager to talk to my friends or enjoy the freedoms that came with public education. So while I was no superstar student, there was one exception: English class.
I fell in love with the discussions and arguments we got to have in class. I was happy to do the reading if it meant sharing my thoughts and opinions when I got to school. Even as I struggled with math and science, I was eager to come to school just for my one block of English. By the time I hit sophomore year, I was packing my schedule full of English electives at every opportunity. Just one hour a day wasn’t enough--by the time I graduated, I had taken English 9, English 10, Modern Thought and Literature, College Prep Composition, AP English, Debate, Creative Writing (twice!), Now Poetry, Mass Media, and Individual Reading. My transcript speaks for itself: I found myself in these classes. My senior year, I applied to Michigan State University and wrote my admissions essay about the influential teachers I had at Northville. I had come to love English class so much that I wanted to find a career that allowed me to take these classes forever. It was only so long before I realized that being an English teacher made more sense than being a professional student of literature. On my first day of college classes (which happened to fall on my eighteenth birthday), I told myself that I would return to Northville High School after graduation to teach. |
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