This story as a whole isn’t the most uncommon thing. A young boy almost in his teens is moved up to classes with the older kids. He has surpassed his peers academically and has moved onto higher level stuff. While other kids his age were still doing fractions and regular math, he was doing algebra. When he was bored at home, he would go online and play math games and stare at math questions he didn’t understand just for the fun of it. The boy would sit quietly in the back of class everyday taking notes while the rest of his classmates would chat with each other. It’s possible that the older kids thought that he was only being quiet because he didn’t know the answers, but what they didn’t know is that he always had the answers before anyone else did. He was simply too afraid to speak out in such an unfamiliar environment. This made the boy feel so upset that he now has to refer to these past moments in the third person in order to hinder his feelings of humiliation.

They all expected the young boy to fail in those classes, his friends and peers together. They are always loud in class and don’t listen when the teacher says something to them. They run around and cause commotion by yelling and screaming. They destroy everything that they touch. Their parents don’t do anything to discipline them. They’re too small and weak to compete mentally or physically with the older kids. They aren’t able to focus and do anything with detail. They wouldn’t understand anything until they were older like the kids in his class. While they struggle in class with the older kids, they just look at them and laugh, the look on their face saying “We knew you’d fail.”

I was more than ready to surpass their measly expectations. I was smart, I was prepared, and more than anything I was determined. When I would get home from school, I would hangout with my friends and occasionally watch some TV, but I typically spent my time focusing on math. When I wasn’t in my backyard or on the couch, I was sitting on my floor doing math problems. I focused on math so much that I was ahead of nearly every kid in my class and I was proving them all wrong. They didn’t realize that though, and when I would raise my hand and give a wrong answer they would still look down upon me. That only made me want to excel even more. I would read the math books, I would stay after school and do math problems with my teacher, I would come in during my study hall and practice for my tests. I wasn’t letting this opportunity go to waste. I would transcend expectations. I would thrive.