This I Believe

Hard Work

I remember it like it was yesterday, for the first time in my life I had lost my appetite. I was at lunch dwelling on the fact that I had just completed one of the worst tests of my life in algebra. It was another awful year for me in math. And no matter how hard I tried to improve them, my test scores were dismal. I was the bud of jokes, a piñata from my classes to verbally assault back and forth. Even my teacher said that I was a lost cause so I started to believe that too. Then my older sister Sahar came into town the weekend leading up to my math final and I desperately need a good grade, but when she offered to help me study I refused I refused telling what my teacher had told me; that it as a lost cause. At that moment she looked at me in the eye and said, “Enough BS! BRING ME YOUR BOOK! WEVE GOT A LOT OF WORK TO DO!”So I went to retrieve the book that was a constant reminder to me of all the hours, I thought at the time I had “wasted” studying, the book that drove me crazy for the first 90 school days of my eighth grade career! I ended up getting to know that book even better over the course of the next 48 hours because I didn’t let It leave my sight, seeing as my sister wouldn’t let me go anywhere without it. I studied like my life was on the line for those two days. Eating and sleeping were rare commodities for me to come by for those two days. Heck I’d even with me to the bathroom. My sister kept writing down problems for me to solve on a dry erase board and every time I got one wrong id has to solve five problems in row just like it correctly before being allowed to move on the next problem on my study guide. At first I was still making the same old careless mistakes I had been making all year, but my sister was very patient with me and took me through each of the problems step by step and eventually I got better and better at doing them. And then finals week came and when I got my mat test back I wasn’t quite as nervous as I usually was, and my newfound confidence was a validated because I got an A!! My classmates and teacher all interrogated me after the saw proof of my improbable feat. They asked me questions like, “why didn’t you tell me you stole the answers to the test!”And “Who’d you copy off of!” I simply stated my newfound belief to them, “Hard work pays off.”