Passing through the pumpkin decorations in the science building, I had a certain feeling about me. It was my last year at this school, and I was ready to be done. In fact, I had been done for about 3 years prior to this day, just going through the motions, bored out of my mind. But knowing that the end was finally near, and any grades or anything I do here anymore probably doesn’t matter made my heart stress-free and my mind clear. So what else was there to do? Obviously, planning on doing computer science, I had to try and hack the school.

Walking into my overheated 5^th period, passing the rows of outdated windows computers, I thought to myself, where better to learn than here? I could ask questions about the individual coding problems I would have, keeping the illusion that I was just messing around with code, maybe my teacher would even like me because I wasn’t playing games like everyone else. Rather than just blatantly asking “How do I find your password?”, my questions would be more specific, such as “How do I automate typing?” Easy, right?

Well, apart from my vast underestimation of the school’s security, it appeared I had a different problem. While I used to be my computer science teacher’s favorite student, my general apathy for his instructions over the last couple years had apparently got to him. Instead of answering a simple question, he awkwardly laughs, hands on hips, doing his best to tower over me with a 5’4” frame and says, “What do you want to know that for?”

What? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I had semi-bad intentions, but there are other uses for what I am asking other than some password guesser. It wasn’t rare for teachers to treat me this way, so I was well prepared for this, but had any other student in the class asked this I’m sure he would have happily answered.

After making up some nonsense about auto-writing essays or something like that, he’s still just staring at me, awkwardly smiling. It’s like I can feel his animosity bursting through his wrinkly eyes and forcedly upturned lips. Eventually he says, “No, that’s not possible to do in Java.”

Not 5 minutes later, after a couple Google searches, I find it is incredibly easy to do in Java, there is an entire premade API for it. Confused, I start to wonder why my teacher wouldn’t just tell me. Obviously, he had seen right through my false reasoning, but why not tell me anyways, if I had wanted to work in cybersecurity, I had to know how it was done, right? Was he afraid of what I could do with it? By my calculations, my eventual password guesser would have taken 8 years to guess even some of the simpler ones. So why wouldn’t he tell me?

It was at this moment I realized, my education is all down to me. If I couldn’t even trust my own teachers to be straight with me, if they were going to stand there and treat me differently than everyone else, why put them on a pedestal? This didn’t exactly translate into stop being so lazy at school, but it did teach me that my education is mine to take. What was important was that I learned it is necessary to learn outside of school, that school is just a small fraction of my education, an institution which I had unwittingly given complete control of my education. With this thought in mind, the school’s word no longer became law. If a teacher told me the best way to solve a math problem, was that really the best way? Why not just do it the first way I thought of? If I’d been lied to once, what would stop them from doing it again? So, in a way, my computer science teacher sponsored me, not by teaching me, but by refusing to, telling me that high school wasn’t the source I thought it was.

With a fresh chip on my shoulder, this inspired me to do everything I’m sure he didn’t want me to. Tired of slumping around in class like everyone else, I got to work. Opening up tab after tab of how to pages, hacking tutorials, etc. Waiting on school to bring me something new for so long, this finally felt like it, I was invigorated at my chance to show them that I didn’t need to follow their rules to learn.

While this may sound incredibly anti-school, that is not how I feel. School is another way of me advancing my education, but it’s just that, another way, not the way. This expanded my literacy for education by making me realize that it is not entirely dependent on other people, I do not need to sit and wait for someone to lecture me, if I want to know something, I will look it up, watch videos about it, read about it, etc. It gave me an entirely new way of looking at the school system, just another source, nothing more, nothing less.