MORE IS IN ME Than I Think

In my sophomore year of high school, I was selected to participate in a unique educational experience called R.O.P.E. It stands for Reaching Our Potential in Education and was offered to 18 students per semester, selected in part because they represent a diverse group of students from all factions of high school life. I was one of only two sophomores. The rest were juniors and seniors.

- Natalie Rivera

The best way to describe this class is to say it was a wilderness survival class. But, that doesn’t really capture it. The program included four weekend trips and requires no homework, no papers, no desks and no grades. While not on our adventures, we learned about surviving in the wilderness and actively practiced group problem-solving. We focused on questioning our self-imposed limitations and boundaries. In this class, the subject was me and the tool for learning was survival.

I survived it, barely, but in the final weeks of the semester, I did not feel I had accomplished anything. I had mixed feelings about the experience because some of it was wonderful, while some of it was horrible. My final exam was to write a speech that I would present to my class about what I learned during my R.O.P.E. experience. I sat down to write my speech. This is what I wrote.

I had run through my head a hundred times all the things that had happened and all that I had been through in those few months. I weeded out the most significant and even some insignificant things that happened that I thought would best illustrate what my experience in R.O.P.E. had been. Trying to arrange them in a logical manner on my paper to form a speech proved much harder than I ever thought writing could be. Something was missing. A list of events and a lot of complaining was not enough. There was something in those jumbled words, those confused thoughts, trying to get out.

There had to be some purpose, some realization, something more. The problem was that I did not know what it was. So, I started writing and hoped the meaning of the speech, the whole meaning of the class would reveal itself to me as I wrote.