Challenge overcome

For Jordan's second middle school application essay he had to respond to the question, "What is a strategy you use to overcome a significant challenge?" He was very resistant to answering this question: he could not think of anything, and got blocked and mad, and we both had to walk away from it. But a few minutes later he was ready to try again, and worked with me to write the following response:

Learning to ride a bike was a significant challenge for me. We tried with training wheels, but that wasn’t helping at all; I could ride, but I had no idea how to balance. Because my bike had gears, Dad could only put on one training wheel, so I always leaned to one side, which sometimes was the wrong side and made me go very slowly. After a lot of practice I was getting faster, but not any better; I had to slow way down at the corners and I still had no idea how to balance. 

One day, Mom and Dad made us learn how to bike. They said that they were going to take off our training wheels and our pedals, which would let us put our feet on the ground and walk while sitting on our bikes. This did not sound super exciting. We were going down to our nearest playground, which is one block away from our house. My little brother Aaron wasn’t liking the idea of learning how to ride when he’s heard horror stories of people falling off and getting seriously hurt. For some reason this made me feel better. Sometimes feeling that I’m not the worst one, I’m not the person at the bottom of the team, it makes me feel better. It doesn’t make me feel better literally but it makes me a little bit more confident. Mom also was bribing us with candy: whenever I coasted for a couple of seconds, or made a certain number of laps, or something else I had not done before, Mom would give me a half a Hershey bar or some other small piece of candy. Before we had started without bringing any materials, but after we started getting into it, which was only two days (Aaron spent half of the first day arguing), Mom brought cones and crackers. The cones were for going in between them, kind of like a slalom. Sometimes I would have to go through the cones and run over the cracker. It was pretty hard.

At first I didn’t exactly like the idea. I just wanted to have one of those easy days, without any homework, just a nice calm day, a day open for anything. I was considering learning riding a bike to be like homework, so I didn’t exactly like the idea. I don’t remember exactly how I felt but Mom says I was really mad. But since I am really good at keeping feelings in, it doesn’t exactly look like I’m super super mad, or sound like it for that matter. Meanwhile, my little brother Aaron was crying loudly against the fence. He is almost the complete opposite of me: he is pretty sensitive to his own feelings, which makes him show them to everyone else. But I still have tons of fun with him.
For learning how to ride a bike, one strategy that we used was biking with training wheels, but that didn’t work. We overcame the challenge by taking off our training wheels and pedals to learn how to balance, because pedaling is pretty easy. Another strategy was bribing us with candy and challenging us with cones and crackers, which made it feel kind of like a game instead of boring homework. Another part of my strategy is to keep my feelings in, because if I let them out then they kind of get a hold of me and make me simply not do it instead of not wanting to do it but doing it anyway. They make me feel reluctant even if it’s fun.

Because of all this, riding on the bike became fun! It was actually fun in the first place, but it’s never fun if you don’t think it’s fun and you don’t want to do it.

This essay talks in terms of a specific challenge, rather than how to overcome challenges in general, but I think that is appropriate for a ten-year-old. It was hard for him to see the strategies involved, but I think we got there: employ a good technique, make it a game, improve your attitude.

I could write a meta-essay about how he (and I) overcame the challenges of writing this darned essay. I tried to make it easy by using a helpful technique (letting him dictate), and projecting a cheerful attitude. But before he was ready to write he had to get through his own emotional response (about being required to do something he didn't want to do, especially a writing thing). Eventually, we actually had fun with it, and I think he experienced some of the satisfaction of articulating something about yourself through reflective writing. But it's not fun as long as you don't think it's fun and you don't want to do it.