“You’ll never grad­u­ate from a four year col­lege.” Those words, albeit harsh and abrupt, were given to me by my high school coun­selor, her response to my deci­sion to drop my Alge­bra 2 class in favor of tak­ing Ceram­ics 101.

I remem­ber the day like it was yes­ter­day; a light wind swept through the cam­pus as I strode to the Guid­ance office to tell my coun­selor about my deci­sion. When I reached the office door I had a flash­back to my early years of education.

I’ve never been excep­tional at Math. Dur­ing my grade school years, my fam­ily moved a few times in those crit­i­cal years where stu­dents learn how to add, sub­tract and mul­ti­ply. When I was around 7 years old my par­ents divorced which had a pro­found effect on me, both men­tally and emo­tion­ally. The men­tal aspect affected my abil­ity to learn math­e­mat­ics along­side my class­mates, wherein inevitably I would fall behind.

I owe it to my grand­mother who did try her best to keep my “wits about me”. When school wasn’t in ses­sion she would home school my brother and I. Many times this meant wak­ing up early in the morn­ing, sit­ting down at the table and work­ing through 25 or so Math prob­lems after break­fast. Which reminds me, did you ever read the back of the cereal boxes?

Any­ways, when the words “You’ll never grad­u­ate from a four year col­lege” slipped from my coun­selors mouth and smacked me in the side of the face I looked back to the times where I tried my best to learn the mechan­ics of Math. Despite my attempts to resur­face what I had learned in grade school, Alge­bra and Geom­e­try got the bet­ter of me, to the point where I decided to drop Alge­bra 2 (of which I was fail­ing mis­er­ably) and replace it with Ceram­ics my senior year.

My coun­selor, a petite Span­ish woman with a slouch, peered through her thick glasses peck­ing at the key­board, grunt­ing under her breath. She slid open a drawer in her desk, retrieved a piece of paper and pushed it towards me. “You real­ize this might effect your over­all GPA? Drop­ping a class, espe­cially Alge­bra 2, will hurt you later on in life.”, she said try­ing to warn me of impend­ing doom on my part. I nod­ded and signed the Class Release paper, fill­ing in the replace­ment course with Ceram­ics. She clipped the paper to my file and added, “One more thing. The Ceram­ics class is full, which means you’ll have to enroll as a T.A. or Teach­ers Assis­tant”. At that point it didn’t mat­ter, so long as it wasn’t Math I was con­tent with what­ever sit­u­a­tion lie ahead.

At the end of our lengthy and drawn out con­ver­sa­tion, as I walked out of the door­way, she reminded me once more, “You’ll never…”, but she never was able to fin­ish because I walked away. When I got to my Ceram­ics class, fully pre­pared to assist the teacher, I won­dered if other high school coun­selors were as “encour­ag­ing” as mine.

Look­ing back I can’t wait to prove that lady wrong. I have every intent to obtain my degree and send Mrs. Orso a let­ter describ­ing how I avoided her advice, but thank her at the very least for pro­vid­ing an exam­ple of what a bad coun­selor can be. After­all, these are peo­ple who are paid to guide our chil­dren through­out their aca­d­e­mic careers, not with words to crip­ple their aspi­ra­tions, but advice to pur­sue suc­cess with every intent to become a bet­ter person.