Focusing For The First Time

With the class just starting, and nobody paying attention to me, I can freely take a seat, without no one even looking at me. Oh, I know, because I actually look around to see if anyone is judging me, but no. I don’t know how to feel about that, but I guess it’s a good thing. Regardless, I take out my books, my pencil case, and I start taking notes of everything the teacher explains, and I mean everything. I’m so far behind that I need to do the almost impossible to get my grades up. But just as I start paying attention to the class for once, which is a miracle, someone is already trying to distract me. And that someone can only be Sunny, who sits right beside me, and who is now trying to whisper something to me.

—Hey, why did you come early? I just told you about coming to class—

Sunny sounds very frustrated at me for not listening to her, but for once, I think I have a good argument to give her, even if she won’t believe me at first.

—I was just talking to someone…—

—Oh no, did they do something to you again?—

She immediately worries about me getting bullied again, which makes sense, because I don’t usually talk to many people. Talking to someone has become a synonym to dealing with bullies, which I’m hoping I can change. But since I can’t explain it to Sunny right now, I just try to leave this topic for later.

—No, I was talking to a girl. Now stop distracting me, I want to learn…—

—Hey-... Wait, what? You were talking to a girl? Wh-...—

Sunny tries to chat more, but being the responsible student that I am now, I know it’s disrespectful for our teacher. I’m sure my best friend is very curious to hear more about what happened, but I don’t think telling her in the middle of class is a good idea. I’m actually not planning to tell her, but knowing Sunny, she will probably find out on her own, so I don’t need to worry. So instead of whispering back and forth with her, I ignore her. She still attempts to get my attention, but I’m now so focused on the lesson that I don’t think about anything else other than science.

But to be honest, I don’t understand a single thing in this class. I got lost with this subject a long time ago, and it seems like we are now seeing very advanced stuff. I don’t have any notes from past classes, I just never did anything in this class, apart from watching all of the experiments they did. Yep, I’m pretty much fucked here, but let’s see if I can make sense of something here. After trying to concentrate in the class, I lose all focus when the teacher starts explaining some concepts that sound like complete gibberish to me.

I can’t understand any of this. Even when Miss Sophie is a very good teacher, and she is quite clear about everything she explains, I still can’t comprehend a single thing in her class. It’s mostly my fault, since I probably need to have some prior knowledge of previous material to understand this new one, but I feel like it’s also the teacher’s duty to make sure all of her students understand her class. And she does actually ask if there are any questions. She takes a brief moment to clear any doubts, and I almost raise my hand to ask her to explain everything for me again. But since that will clearly leave me looking like an idiot, and there’s no way I will understand, even if she explains it, I just decide not to.

And the thing is that I think Miss Sophie would actually take her time to explain it again. Sure, she would make a witty comment about me not paying attention, or probably call me out for not attending her class, if she even remembers. But even if that makes the whole class laugh at me, knowing her, she would still try to make me understand. That might be the only likable quality of hers, because to be honest, she isn’t that attractive. She is a great teacher, like I said, but her personality and attitude can be a bit unappealing sometimes.

Miss Sophie is not the type of teacher to make friends with students, and probably not even teachers. She is not very kind, she isn’t forgiving, so when you have a bad grade with her, there’s no way she can help you. I mean, she does actually try to help you, by making you study more and giving you more assignments, but she doesn’t give free credits. She is very similar to our math teacher sometimes, except without all of the sweetness and personality. And unlike our math teacher, who is a very pretty, young lady, Miss Sophie is kind of… repellent, to say the least.

I mean, comparing her to our math teacher is ridiculous, she has no shot against her. But even when judging her as a woman, Miss Sophie has so many traits that make her very easy to hate. I personally don’t hate her, but I do know some students have a lot of problems with her. And I can definitely see why, but I have hope that I’m able to get on her good side, if there’s even one, and get my grades up. The only way I can do well in her class is if I put in the work, if I really focus, if I do all of her assignments and homework, which there’s a lot in this class.

It also means I have to do well in all of her experiments, which I’ve never been good at, and also pass all of the exams that are probably waiting for me at the end of the week. Yep, I’ll probably have to take all of them this weekend, before more pile up, you know. So I need to study hard, and focus harder in class. And as boring, but mostly hard to understand as this class is, I have to catch up to everything, which I’m sure no one has tried to do before. I mean, it’s pretty much impossible to do that. How could you learn everything in a final year of science in just one or two weeks?

But what sounded impossible, I managed to pull off. Partly, since I did kind of learn a lot from this class. I used to only come to science class when they did something fun, so that’s why I missed so many classes and learnt nothing. But now that I actually tried to pay attention to the contents of this class, I found it quite interesting. It’s not because they are fun things to learn, but because they look so complicated that I’m just curious to know more about them. Sure, I still don’t understand half of what Miss Sophie is saying, but at least I’m intrigued to learn more. And I believe if I study hard, I will be able to learn everything easily, then I probably won’t have much trouble taking all of the exams. But I don’t know, we’ll see.

Class ends, which means my brain can finally take a break after focusing so much for a whole hour}. But it also means that I have to take my next step in this plan. Going to class was the first one, although I did kind of skip one when I talked to Jocelyn. But now it’s time for the real step, one that I’m very afraid to take. But as I walk out of the classroom, I see Sunny walking slightly ahead of me. She is the perfect person to have by my side when doing this, I decide to catch up to her. If there’s anything that goes wrong, I can always count on her, because now it’s time to go to recess, which will probably lead me to facing my enemies…