I spent my formative academic years in Yeshiva Ketana of Long Island, which back then inhabited a dank and musty synagogue basement. It was a new school, all-male and quite small. The highlight of our playground was an unnecessarily large dumpster area that jutted out in middle of the kickball field/parking lot. When we weren’t cavorting through piles of trash, we were invariably discovering another pastime equally unsuitable for small children, whether it was climbing drainpipes to the roof or transporting each other via the ancient dumbwaiter. Needless to say, the lack of supervision was rather exciting for the first several years.

As the years progressed, however, I began to realize that all of this admittedly enjoyable disorder was coming …show more content…
I kept getting good grade, but my days of extra-curricular learning were over. It was painfully easy for me to maintain top grades in my classes, requiring only the minimal effort that my peers couldn’t be bothered to muster up. There was, however, one area in which I was painfully lacking: my Judaic studies. As I matured, my questions about god and religion grew more persistent and nagging until I could no longer ignore them. The yeshiva that I was in was rampantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic. I was horrified at some of the extremist concepts that seemed to be taken for granted by everyone except myself, and began to conscientiously object. It was easily apparent that I was not fitting into their mold. The school’s dress code at that time was somewhat lax- button down shirt, no jeans or sneakers (although in subsequent years that changed to only white shirts and black pants). I fully conformed to those rules, yet I was sent home several times for wearing shirts that the principal deemed “too gay”. My iPod was taken away because it contained Beatles songs (when I told the rabbi that my parents had introduced me to the Beatles at an early age and did not view them as offensive, the rabbi looked at me with a mixture of suspicion and pity). I cannot recall writing a single essay in my first two years of high school, although I might have had one or two. One day, after I had expressed my desire to go to college, my principal …show more content…
I flourished academically, and discovered that despite the still-mediocre secular studies, the attitude towards education in the new school was drastically different. Our English teacher did not at all teach us to write, but at least he had us writing. I had no technique and received no criticism- I essentially used hoity-toity words and got As in return. On my SAT, I got a perfect score on the math section, one question wrong on the reading, and ended up losing the most points in the writing section. I’ve always recognized how crucial solid writing skills are, and I realized that despite the perfect grades that my teacher was giving me, it was still my weakest area. The fundamentals of grammar came relatively easily, my spelling was usually accurate, but I had no writing strategy- I just wrote the way I