Plastics Jania Stevenson

Fourth grade was probably the worst school year I've ever had. I had a first year teacher, who was awful by the way, and I'm almost positive they put every child with behavioral issues in my class on purpose. One girl stabbed me in the leg multiple times with a pen, this other kid started a game where everyone in the class threw freshly sharpened pencils at each other ( This got me stabbed again), and then this one girl decided she absolutely hated one of the guys in our class, so she beat the crap out of him. Even though all these kids were terrible, their craziness made our teacher furious, which was hilarious. I loved seeing the look on her face after somebody did something stupid, so I decided I wanted to join in on the fun and be one of the reasons why my teacher got mad. That was a terrible decision, because I got sent to SAFE more times than I can count. One time I got into so much trouble my mom had to come to the school and give me a little talking to. It was during that talk that she told me that instead of doing what I was doing, I should try to "be a leader, not a follower". It took me a few more SAFE visits to finally figure out that she was right. Being a follower was super fun, but it wasn't getting me anywhere. I needed to step up and finally be the leader I was supposed to be. It's been seven years since that talk, and to this day I still try to be a leader and not follow whatever everyone else is doing.