My Constant
By Michael C.
My NSA story has not been a fairytale, far from it to be honest, but I have enjoyed my time at NorthStar. This is my third year at NSA, but only my second year taking classes only from NorthStar. The three-year journey until now has been full of hardships, but there are many fun memories. My tenth grade year in particular has been full of changes, yet there has been a constant, the Navigator.
Prior to NSA, I was enrolled in an international school where I lived. However, the school followed a British curriculum which did not include high school credits. During my seventh grade year, my mom was already thinking about putting me in an online school in my eighth grade to go ahead and start getting high school credits. What she did not know was that I would be doing online school regardless because during my eighth grade year, which was 2020, the world fell apart. I took Algebra 1 at NorthStar, and did my English and history at other online schools to see what I liked the most. NSA won, and during my ninth grade year, I did NSA exclusively.
I would not say ninth was a breeze, but it certainly was not overly difficult. I did limp to the finish line that year because getting distracted earlier in the year and procrastination caught up to me. During my ninth grade year I was taking English 1, and while doing the journalism assignment, I found out about the Navigator. I was surprised how many articles there were and how professional it all looked. When I went to a brick and mortar school, they had a newsletter club, and it was extremely disappointing. I wrote more articles than anyone else, and nobody else took it seriously. Also, we only published twice a year, and there was only one copy of the publication. It was more like a semiannual magazine. So, I was very excited about the Navigator.
Live meetings are not my favorite, so I was a little intimidated at first to meet a bunch of strangers. Everyone seemed to know each other for years and had all these inside jokes, but I survived that first meeting. My articles at the beginning were not great, they either were not interesting or a little controversial. I was around veterans who had been writing for years and there I was struggling to meet the 400 minimum word count. Meanwhile, tenth grade picked up right where ninth grade had left off. I got distracted a lot and procrastinated even more. This year, however, there were autozeroes. My grade dropped significantly during the months of October through December. This reached a peak during December when the Dean of Students emailed my mom as my grade in one class got below a twenty. I was failing tenth grade because I was over ten weeks behind in almost all my classes. I have been catching up like crazy in the months since.
Looking back over my tenth grade, it hasn’t been easy, but the biggest blessing in the past year has been the Navigator. When I was overwhelmed back in early January thinking about the 27 weeks of school work ahead of me, it was so nice to go and interact with students who had similar struggles. They had to deal with auto zeroes and binomial theorems. They knew what it was like to be behind. The Navigator class has been my constant, the live session happening every other week. It kept me going through hard months, not to say I haven’t forgotten about a session or two. My articles are slowly but surely starting to get better. The Navigator has been a constant blessing to me, and I am forever thankful.
Columns: 🗞️Staff Stories
Michael C. currently lives in North Carolina with three siblings and mom and dad. He has been at NorthStar for three years and has recently started writing for the Navigator. He enjoys running, reading, and geeking out about Lord of the Rings.