Swimming across the Ocean

WORD COUNT: 300

It was pitch black when we pulled my dad out of the ocean. Other than the lights on the boat I was in, there was only darkness. The thick fog blocked the stars. Pulling my dad out of the water happened quickly, he almost unconscious and extremely hypothermic.

The possibility of this was certainly something he had considered over a year earlier when he had come home and told my family that he was going to attempt to swim across the English Channel. Being a person who sets lofty goals, my father had become obsessed with the idea of completing the 21 mile swim from England to France. While my dad nearly qualified for the Olympics in pool swimming twenty years earlier, he had barely been in the water since. Over the next year I witnessed my dad log endless hours in the pool swimming distances that were mentally and physically exhausting. The drive he had was incomprehensible. I remember asking him why he was doing this even though there was a real possibility of failure. He said that setting a goal that you might not achieve is better than living your life in fear of failure.

Early one morning after much waiting, my dad left the shore of England and headed across the ocean with me in the boat beside him. Conditions weren’t good. It was extremely foggy, the water was 60 degrees and there were large waves. Still my dad took stroke after stroke and kept swimming for twelve hours. One mile off the coast of France we pulled him out barely conscious but still attempting to swim. Even though my dad was disappointed in failing he took pride in staying true to what he believed and I will always be proud of what he did that day in the middle of the ocean.


The Point: Setting big and risky goals and not achieving them is better than being too afraid to set goals at all.

Stories of Good and Bad Educational Experiences in School

Best

When I think back on my best educational experience there is one particular class that comes to mind.  It was physics class in twelfth grade, which was supposedly the hardest class in my high school.  My teacher was very outgoing and told us we would have to work very hard to succeed and if we didn’t then we might as well drop the course.  His constant motivation and pushing us to succeed, combined with his great teaching helped me work harder than I ever have and achieve a good mark in a subject that I struggled in.

WORD COUNT: 97

Worst

One of my worst educational experiences occurred in my tenth grade math class after my teacher was involved in a car accident.  As it turned out the car accident was a fender bender in the school parking lot, however this did not stop my teacher from blaming her increasingly poor teaching on the crash.  She would frequently make mistakes, snap at students over nothing or just fail to show up and then blame her behaviour the “traumatic” crash.  As a student that normally excels in math classes, I had a difficult time in this class essentially teaching myself the material out of the textbook. 

WORD COUNT: 100