Non Licet Nobis Esse Mediocribus

This used to be the motto of my first, and true, high school, Mt. Carmel High School. It means "It is not permitted to be mediocre." At the end of my junior year of high school, the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston shut it down, and I'm going to be honest: It broke my heart. It broke it, and shattered it into a million pieces of glass, then ground it into dust and threw it into the wind. Wow, I can't believe I admitted that, that it broke my heart. Throughout my life, the one thing that I could always rely on myself to be GOOD at was school. I was (am) smart, hardworking, creative, and I love to learn more than anything else. When I went to Mt. Carmel, I thought it was just a ghetto poor school that I had to settle for instead of going to the rich, "higher class" school that my single mom just couldn't afford. But after the first year, into the second, I realized that I loved it -- passionately. It allowed me to grow in a very unique way -- there was no hazing (the freshman fish fry), or hatred of freshman by upperclassmen. Everyone was cool with each other, and knew who everyone was, if not by name then by face. With about 200 students, we really were a family.

When my school was shut down, people began the renewed habit of labeling the school ghetto and that all the students were stupid. And I hated it! My friends and I were numbers 1, 2, and 3 in the class, and I can honestly say that in general, my class was probably one of the finest to walk those hallowed halls. The other classes may not have cared, but mines had it all: charisma, intelligence, character.

The high school I went to for my senior year of high school was nothing like Mt. Carmel, and BOY were they surprised when me, and number 1 and 2, decided to attend that school. Number 1 actually graduated in the top 10% of their class, to much protest from the students that had been there for 4 years and were bumped off. We took as many AP classes as we could, and we excelled. We were excellent, and got into the colleges that we always dreamed of attending. And why? Because the very first day of school, at Mt. Carmel, we were ingrained with the idea that it is NOT permitted to be mediocre. It is not permitted to be mediocre, or even just above average. We knew that we had to be excellent. And we were, not just to graduate in the top ten percent -- no, we didn't really care about that, it was just the happy consequence of excellence. No, we wanted to be excellent BECAUSE we needed to be in order to achieve our goals in life. Our desire for excellence was a purely internal force. It wasn't shoved onto us by our parents or the school administration or anything else, but our own personal desire to succeed. And the school fueled that desire by pushing our mental limits to extremes -- maybe not in every class, but there were a few choice classes that really almost kicked my butt.

And you know what? When we went to the new school for our senior year, we were almost a year ahead of everyone. I didn't pay attention in almost all of my classes, because I already knew the material, and there weren't any other classes available. The only class that challenged me there was Health, and that merely challenged my memorization skills. Okay, I'm done with my rant now :D Oh, and I made Honor Roll both semesters and ended up an 2009 AP Scholar, but again, not from anything that school did. It was all the work of Mt. Carmel High School.