“There is no way I can pass this class,” I told my mom after my first week of Small Engines, a class I had signed up for in the previous year. When I signed up for Small Engines, I thought that it would be cool to be able to work on things like lawnmowers and dirt bikes. I had originally planned to sign up and get in the same class as one of my friends, but when I walked into my first day in Small Engines, he was nowhere to be found. The majority of the class was all upper-classman, and there was only one freshman besides me. It seemed like everybody except me already knew everything about small engines, so I knew I had a lot to learn. 

When our teacher started going over what we would learn in the class, I realized that I had no idea what he was talking about. He said to pass the class, we would have to take apart a working engine, identify all the parts, then put it back together and have it still run. I couldn’t even name one part of an engine, much less know every part and where they all go. Our first project was to learn all the parts of an engine. I was nervous but willing to give learning this new skill a try.

Learning every part of an engine was the most difficult part for me in that class. It seemed like everybody else already knew everything, but I had to take notes and study a ton just to get mediocre scores on the tests. Often I would come home complaining about how hard the class was, or how I didn’t like the amount of homework it had. Once we were finally done with all the part identification, it was onto the shop room to take apart the first engine. Once we started taking the engines apart, I realized that I knew everything that was inside of them and how they worked. That is when I started to see that maybe I wasn’t so bad at this after all.

Learning the parts and working on the first engine took the majority of the semester, but we still had our final. I had been dreading our final since the beginning of the semester, and it seemed like such a huge and difficult project. We had to take a working engine, disassemble it fully, identify all the parts, put it all back together and have it still run. I was nervous, but I had learned a lot leading up to that point in class, so I was prepared to give it my best shot.

Once I got my engine for the final fully disassembled, I needed to take a quiz on all the parts of that engine. I got one of the best scores in the class, and with the confidence from that, I started rebuilding the engine to the best of my ability. With the engine fully rebuilt and all the parts identified, the only thing left was to see if it still ran. I was very nervous at this point, because I didn't know if it would break, or maybe even blow up when I tried to start it. At first, it didn’t run, but after a few small tweaks, it started on the first pull. That is when I saw that I can be good at things that don’t come easy to me.  

Small Engines was my favorite class this year, and I think I learned a ton. I am now open to trying new things, even if they seem difficult at first. The skills that I learned in Small Engines I am now putting to use in my life. I recently fixed my dad's lawn mower when it stopped working, and now whenever anybody in my family has questions about anything related to Small Engines, I am always the person that they come to. Now I know that even if something is hard at first, with a little bit of determination and persistence, I can do just about anything.