Monthly- Archives: June 2012

June 20, 2012


GRACE G

More to Come

 

Seely Place was a second home to me,

From the best first day of kindergarten,

To the day my first baby tooth came free

To the day I learned to read, but then

Came sixth grade as well as graduation

It was time for 7th grade and middle school

This new school brought some frustration,

But soon the two years flew by, oh how cool.

However, there was more to come my way,

In a short few months, high school will begin

A private school, quite the distance away –

Where thousands of new faces will have been

The new names and hard work will be ok,

I’m waiting anxiously for that special day.

June 19, 2012


HANNAH H

A Review of Freshman Year: Lessons Learned

 

I was at a diner with some of my friends from school (one of them being the girl Jordyn I wrote about in my “first day of school” piece— it turns out I actually had spelled her name wrong there) and we were eating plate after plate of savory waffle fries with cookies n’ cream milkshakes on the side to help wash them down. We were joking about how healthy we were being— vegetables (fries), dairy/protein (milkshakes) and fruits (ketchup) make for a well balanced meal— and it felt as if nothing really mattered at that moment. We had just completed our freshman year and not a single thing could have ruined our day and our plans to go to the beach that afternoon.

Well, nothing except a thunderstorm.

And so, with heavy sighs, we decided that the beach plans we had made would have to be rescheduled (we were sad… but not too sad because come on, it was the first day of summer break). I called my mom and told her the news. She said she would pick me up from the diner in twenty minutes. One by one, my friends left. After five minutes, or so, I was alone. It was just me, staring out the large diner window. As I sat there waiting, I started reflecting on the year I had just completed.

For starters, the mere fact that I had a whole group of friends to go to lunch with was something that I couldn’t have done in September. Actually, up until around November or so, the number of friends I had at Greenwich Academy that I could honestly say would ever invite me anywhere was a number I could count on one hand. Wait; scratch that— it was a number that a person who accidentally cut off his own thumb and pinky could count on one hand. In the first few months of school I was very self-conscious and shy around the people at Greenwich Academy. GA is a school with predominantly wealthy students… very wealthy students; this can get very intimidating. Not just that, but the whole atmosphere of GA, though the kids were generally welcoming, was and still is very pressuring. My personality was not able to shine through because I felt as if I needed to conform and try to blend in with the other students. I wanted to shop on Greenwich Avenue every day because that’s what the other kids did (Greenwich Avenue, or “the Ave” is a street in town lined with high-end shops and gourmet restaurants and basically everything that cost more than that poor dismembered guy with no thumb and pinky can count on his hand… multiplied by 300. It was where all the GA girls shopped, so whenever I ventured into a boutique on the Ave, I bumped into a classmate.) Stores like J. Crew, Vineyard Vines, and Lilly Pulitzer— those were the stores I wanted to shop in, just so I could be like everybody else. Turns out, I don’t even like their pastel, oddly shaped clothes! This may sound cliché, but when I kind of gave up trying to just fit in, making friends became so much easier. I began to tell jokes that I found were funny, and talk about topics that I liked to talk about— and apparently other people found my jokes funny, and liked the topics I liked as well! Many of my classmates have actually told me that my individuality was one thing they liked the best about me! Who knew?

Another thing that had been happening a lot during freshman year was that I was arguing a lot more with my parents, especially my dad, over trivial things. The arguments were annoying me because I didn’t always come out a winner, and because I do not like to accept defeat. Even when I knew I was wrong, I would just continue to argue because I felt my pride was at stake. I’ve always considered myself a pretty good debater, so sometimes I could hold on for a little with my illogical points. However, each time I would eventually just end up spewing out nonsensical words. These pointless arguments frustrated my parents, and they were taking their toll on me as well. I felt as if each time we fought (though we made up each time), the distance between us was getting larger and larger. Somewhere along the line, I began to understand that the fights we were having just were not worth it— for example, is it really worth it to argue about how loudly my brother can talk in restaurants? More importantly though, even if we did argue, if I knew I was wrong I should have just said “you’re right”. I learned that it is actually better to admit that you were wrong and accept that, than to continue. It is not even losing, its merely realizing you were wrong and being mature about it.

At the same time that this was happening, I was learning another, completely opposite lesson— to speak up. While I am brave (and very headstrong) around my family and friends, among others I can be quite shy and timid. I’ve always struggled with answering questions in school because of doubt. Even when I knew I was right, I would still doubt myself. What if I’m wrong and everyone judges me? What if the teacher judges me, I was always thinking. Especially since I was new at GA this year, these questions floating around in my conscience shot through my body and inhibited me from answering a question I knew I knew the answer to. Each time this happened it was like some force was pushing down on my arms to make sure I could not raise them and at the same time zipping my lips and throwing away the single key. And each time, someone else would answer the question correctly with what I considered my answer. I think my turning point was when I got back a biology test and looked through it. Immediately, I realized that the teacher had marked one question wrong when it was actually right. I wanted so badly to just ask her to check it over one time, but my body was refusing to cooperate. Somehow, I built up enough courage to raise my hand, but when the teacher called on me, everyone stared. Those same doubts flowed up to my brain again. What if the answer you wrote was wrong and everybody laughs, my mind asked me. Yet my mouth just started moving and before I knew it the teacher was checking that question and changing my grade.

I’ve always had the tendency to procrastinate. While I do not get homework done the morning its due, I’ve never been the type of person to get a huge assignment done the first week, or to start studying for a test three days ahead. My grades are not typically affected by that… at least they were not in middle school. High school, that is a different story, but I believed that it wouldn’t be. Right away I started noticing changes. The workload was much heavier, my free time was lessening, and I was getting more and more (and more and more and more…) stressed. I began having mental breakdowns in my room— literally, I would start shaking and pacing. Yet my habits remained the same: I fooled around during study halls, I studied for tests the day before, and I acted as if nothing had changed. That worked for one month and then it started really affecting me. I decided it was time to change my attitude towards schoolwork. I began to start planning out my schedule at the beginning of the week and studied for tests not just the day before. These strategies really helped me adapt to ninth grade, high school, and GA in general. (And another plus: I haven’t had another breakdown since October!)

Unarguably, the biggest and most important lesson I’ve learned this year is one that encompasses all the other lessons mentioned here. That lesson is that there are always going to be decisions you, and you alone, will have to make. Decisions like making the choice to just be yourself even though it is easier to be everybody else. Decisions like when you know you are wrong, choosing to be quiet; but when you know you’re right, choosing to be vocal. Decisions like choosing perfecting that history term paper over watching that one episode of the horrible-yet-AMAZING reality television show because you know it will help you in the long run. Decisions like choosing not to drink even though everyone else is. Decisions like choosing to swim the extra lap or run the extra few meters even though your friends all “have to go to the bathroom”. Those decisions will not always be easy to make, because yeah, the Bachelor is an addicting show. And yeah, chatting with friends in the bathroom is SO much more fun than pushing through grueling exercise. And, many times you will come across decisions that are not exactly black or white. But do what you think is right, and most of the time you will be satisfied with your decision. Do not avoid the decision either, because then you will end up in an area that is the equivalent of “uh” and “um” in writing and speaking. An area where you are not going anywhere, where you are not getting anything done. Even if you make a couple of mistakes it is fine. Mistakes can be recovered from. Those wrong turns can have a positive ending.

Just when I finish reflecting, I get a text from my mom— it is the same text I got from her at the end of every school day. It says two words: I’m here. I walk outside, and the rain has slowed down a bit. I flashback to the first day of school. It was raining then too. I’m not sure why but remembering that made me so happy. It was as if the year had finally come full-circle.

These are the lessons I’ve learned in my freshman year. I cannot say that I have mastered them yet. I still need to work on participation sometimes, and I still occasionally refuse to admit I am wrong. But I’m okay with that. That means there are still more lessons to learn.

June 16, 2012


HARRY W

Frogs


What are frogs? What is their life cycle? How do they mate and lay eggs? What are the new types of frogs, and why do they keep appearing? How long have frogs existed on our planet.

Frogs are amphibians. That means their young live in the water and as they grow up they will change to live on land and instead of gills, they will use lungs to breathe. A frog’s life is started out as an egg. Once the egg hatches, a tadpole emerges. The tadpole feeds on algae on the rocks. The tadpole will keep growing and changing and eventually it will grow legs; after its legs have finished growing, they will start to grow arms and the tadpole will slowly lose its tale. The tadpole frog will be able to go on land and go into the water. Another thing that changed in this process is that when the frog was born, it used its gills to breathe. And then when it grows up, it will use lungs to breathe.  

Frogs eat insects, sometimes snails and worms; the bigger species can eat lizards and even sometimes they eat other small fish. They help us make sure that there are not too many flies in our world, just like spiders and chameleons do. Most people think that frogs chew their food but they don’t, just like snakes, alligators and komodo dragons. Frogs wait patiently for their prey. When they see it, the frog will unroll a long sticky tongue and catch their prey. Sometimes when frogs eat fireflies they will glow and they will look like a light bulb that is jumping around in the dark!

When frogs grow older they will have to mate and lay more eggs. The male has to find the female and mate with her. When the two mate, the female will lay eggs. In some species, such as the African reed frogs, Hyperolius viridiflavus ommatostictus, males have the ability to turn themselves into female frogs and mate with itself and lay new eggs! Other animals and plants can also switch their gender: shrimp and orchids do it, and even some tropical fish do it too. But it’s not only the males who can do that. Female frogs can also change their gender and successfully breed. The scientific name for frogs is anura so if you ever see the word anura, just know that means ‘without tail’ in Latin.

In the future I think there will be more frogs than before because in a book called National Geographic Kids, 2013 I heard that some extinct frog species were coming back to life, and in fact last year we found a new species of frogs that was once mixed as a leopard frog and in 2010 there was a new frog species that could make its croak echo from afar, so it could confuse its predators. Some scientist have said that people have found frogs with more than 4 legs and the common frogs are disappearing

And the rare frogs or extinct frogs are coming back! Scientists think that this might be because frogs breathe and drink with their skin, so they have to keep their skin damp. Because fertilizer and pesticides affect their lives, and because frog skin is very sensitive, it is important to note that frogs act as harbingers for our future. So if there is a major change in our planet, frogs will be the first to show it.

June 16, 2012


SAMMY X

ttSideways

Three Limericks

 

There once was a man named Watt,

Who always devised cruel plots,

One tragic day,

Watt turned to clay,

So we hid him in a yacht.

 

 

There once was a cat from Muscat,

Who claimed to be thin as a bat,

After many years,

He ate human ears,

And became as fat as a mat.

 

 

Sammy was a boy that lived in Nepal,

And every single day he played baseball,

One unusual day,

Mr. Watt came to play,

And that is what caused Mr. Watt’s downfall….

June 15, 2012


ERIC Z

The United States government hired over six thousand writers to create guidebooks about each state’s history. This project, the WPA American State Guide Series of the Federal Writers’  Project was produced in the 1930s. Some of the finest writers in the nation researched for hours about their state. In the end, each state had its own guide about their history, some over five hundred pages long. The guides were about such things as public transportation, industries, agriculture, and the arts, whether it be theatre, basket weaving, or Mardi Gras costume making. This project was long, original, and it had its own place in history. Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey were determined to rewrite the history for every state but this time, they wanted something more profound, personal, and more eccentric. They didn’t want any partisan arguments; they wanted “the good, the bad, and the ugly” from fifty different writers on all fifty distinct states. They didn’t want a list of facts; they wanted “a rowdy, idealistic, sometimes farcical experiment… that refuses to be forgotten”.

Let me introduce two fine writers among the fifty chosen to author essays for the book: Joe Sacco and Jack Hitt, the authors of Oregon and South Carolina, respectively. Joe Sacco was born in Malta, Europe on October 2nd 1960. At the age of one he moved to Australia where he spent his childhood, until 1972, when the family moved to Los Angeles. Then, he began his journalism studies in Beaverton, Oregon. Three years later in 1981, Sacco earned his bachelor degree of art in journalism from the University of Oregon. Later in his career, he found his work to have “no interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference”. So he decided to move back to Malta to continue his hobby, cartooning. Eventually, he moved back to the U.S again, in 1984. In the following year, he found a job at the Comics Journal in Portland, Oregon. He was also very interested in traveling and in 1988 he left the U.S and went to Europe. In 1996, he wrote and illustrated the famous American award-winning book Palestine. Joe Sacco currently resides in Portland, Oregon. When Sacco wrote his story, he divulged both his passion for the state and the state itself. His focus, preferring anecdotal to panoramic, excavates details that infrequently make it to the news or the history books. For example, in Oregon, it rains a lot. It’s rather simple to just say, “Oregon is a beautiful country and it rains a lot”. But the way he tells us that it rains a lot is more indirect. He gives many examples, implying constant showers. For example, Sacco tells us that there is a place that’s full of peril called the Pearl District. He uses an umbrella to protect himself from being jumped. And when he has to walk his awful embarrassing creature, the dog, he sometimes waits 20 minutes when there are clouds in the sky. Sacco also dislikes the heat. And when it’s too hot, his wife, Amalie, would want her tomatoes to receive hard heat for anther five or six days. Sacco thinks that it is unquestionably essential for a good writer to travel in various places and it is also ideal for him to visualize something when he’s walking around.

How about we talk about the splendiferous writer, Jack Hitt? Although he is a great writer, it was difficult to get his full biography, at present. He was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, and attended Porter-Gaud School. During his teens, he produced some of the finest haiku in Charleston. He regularly contributes to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and This American Life. In 1990, he received the Livingston Award for national coverage. One of Hitt’s more popular stories on This American Life was about a production of Peter Pan in an episode named “Fiasco”. Other piece includes his experiences growing up with transgender woman, named Dawn. Even another episode he created was about his life in a New York apartment building in which his superintendent turned out to be the head of a death squad in Brazil.  He won the Peabody award (the highest award in American journalism), in 2007. He is currently working with the national New Zealand radio.

Hitt seems to be very affected by architecture, and reveals much about the city of Charleston, SC, in his essay. “Charleston’s physical beauty comes from being an entire collection of modest, lovely things. Street after street of regular residences with side piazzas and old longleaf pine clapboarding painted so many times that south of Broad is a fusion of antique textures, mottled bricks, tilted walls, comfortably settled foundations, sagging shutters, rusting earthquake rods, and shimmering old panes of glass.” Yes, Charlestonians were not able to spend massive amounts of money on their city, but after Hurricane Hugo hit, it seems as if Charlestonians knew exactly what to do. The real fact is they had money, and lots of it. “Now Charleston was on the receiving end of all that insurance and federal money [FEMA]. Within a year, the town was more spruced up than it had been since Benjamin Franklin started a newspaper there… the number of super-wealthy software jockeys and corporate chieftains who wanted to own a ‘Charleston house’ overwhelmed downtown.” The conclusion was that subsequent to the hurricane, a colossal amount of money was acquired by the Charlestonians for rebuilding, and rebuild they did, which completely overpowered the old Charleston, and forced poor families to move.

There are 49 other authors (Washington D.C. has an essay too) in State by State and this is a profile of just two. Overall, State by State was an entirely new rebuild of the Federal’s Writers Project and each essay was thoroughly written by prestigious authors who carried out the true inner essence of the state assigned.