I always kept this in mind and when I started high school I quickly learned that my parents were right and I had to work extremely hard to be in AP classes and get into college but it all pad off in the end. I attended Jane Addams Vocational High School in the South Bronx; my school consisted mainly of African American and Hispanic students. In my school there was a very big and visible divider between high achieving students and students who were “average Joes.” In my high school all the teachers would have competitions of who had the best students and who could teach better and make their students learn better. Every teacher wanted to teach the AP and honors classes and no one cared about the students who really needed the most help because they viewed these students as the “dumb kids.” Teachers would always put down the “lower achieving” students and compared them to the AP students. This constant war between the teachers also caused students to have issues. Students were constantly calling each other names, such as “dumb” or “nerd,” and insulting each other.

I think that the actual visible divider that separated the two groups of students was the outside of the school and the inside of the school. Outside of my high school we had trailer classrooms that were used by the lower achieving students this is where they had classes and they were only allowed to come inside the school building for lunch. If these students tried to come inside the school before it was their lunch period the alarm would sound extremely loud and people would automatically know what was going on. I always thought that this was a very discriminatory system because we were all students in the same school and just because those students needed more help than others; they were treated like outcasts and were basically humiliated when they tried to enter their school. What would also upset me about this situation was the fact that the teachers, the people who were supposed to be educated and intelligent, would do nothing about this. On the contrary they wanted to teach only the AP students and didn’t want to deal with the other students.

In high school I quickly learned that I had to do things on my own if I wanted to go somewhere in life. I realized that I couldn’t count on my teachers to help me when things got tough because they were only there when you were doing well. I also learned that there is still a great deal of discrimination in the world and it doesn’t always have to be racial.