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How Private School Shaped My Life
I recently had a phone conversation with my mother about my childhood education and she casually told me that I was reading at a high level by the age of three. I was shocked because for as long as I can remember, performing well in school has always been a challenge for me. It was because of these early signs of promise that she enrolled me in a Head Start program so that I could get used to a classroom setting. I must have breezed through Head Start fairly quickly because I entered kindergarten a full year before most kids my age at the time. This may seem like the start of a cool story, right? It's more of an appreciation of the struggles that I have endured throughout my experience within multiple academic environments.
I mentioned that I breezed through Head Start and then on to kindergarten, but what I didn’t mention was that kindergarten was the start of a long stretch of challenging educational experiences. I went to kindergarten at a public elementary school, which was located in the neighborhood of my great-grandparents. This school may have been about 85% black, which was not an issue for me because at that age it was pretty much all that I knew. My teacher was an old white lady who seemed more concerned…
