Tag Archives: Books

The Junior Load

Junior Year

Junior Year

The great writers have said that hard work breeds a good work ethic and a good work ethic breeds success and success breeds greatness. Well judging by the strained and frantic faces of the students of the class of 2015, we are all going to be great because MAN they are working us hard!

I’m back Back to School only three days and already I feel the pressure. Seven academic classes are on my roster and not one of them offering any solace of ease or simplicity.All my teachers profess rigorous courses and hard grading, “You guys aren’t babies anymore…” One teacher said sternly the first day as he handed out a packet of homework to do over the weekend, “So we aren’t gonna treat you like babies anymore.”

The Stack

The Stack

Junior year is notoriously classified as the most difficult year of high school, and this week I have discovered that that reputation is not just a lie to scare freshman. Mounds of liberally doled out homework pile up in my backpack as the day wears on, while each teacher emphatically promise that their class will take all our work ethic and willpower to pass. Let’s just say the physical toll of their enthusiasm is already giving me aches in both my head and my back (its one thing to assign a packet from the textbook to a kid, it’s quite another creature to make that kid walk 1.2 miles uphill with seven such textbooks weighing down on their sore shoulders in the hot August sun… uphill, both ways, in two feet of snow with no shoes… Oh wait, that’s Bill Cosby… nevermind

Yes I cannot wait to get other means of transporting myself from school, as walking home, while it may be building my rather nonexistent muscles, is quite a trying affair after a long day of realizing I know nothing at all. Well, hopefully I can get my driver’s license in October and cease to be one of the carless masses.

 

But school isn’t all bad of course. I fact, I am quite enjoying this intense and brain-challenging curriculum so far, despite my more complaining muscles protesting the workload. All my teachers are the type that are fantastic and very involved in what they teach. Each poses their respective subject as a new and exciting way to expand one’s mind and become a more sophisticated and well-rounded person. My Chemistry teacher speaks of matter and bonds between elements as the basis of our world, my AP US History professor talks of making us informed and responsible citizens of this great republic, my French teach tells us in langue français that we will be able to speak with confidence in a language not our own, my Algebra teacher states with solid certainty that she will lead us through the doors of mathematical knowledge and show us the basic truths of our world through numbers, my AP Art History professor declares we will become cosmopolitan connoisseurs of complicated images from across the span of human history, my Journalism teacher tell me she will make a plucky girl-reporter out of me, and my AP Language and Composition teacher states his class will change our lives and mold us into free-thinkers who can write about the human condition in the same way as the titans of literature.

Study, Study, Study!

Study, Study, Study!

To each teacher, we are a brain to be shaped and filled with knowledge until our minds threaten to burst at the seems. We are not a commodity to them, I don’t think, but sometimes it feels difficult to reconcile the reality of life to what they say. Can I become a free thinker in 45 minutes a day for nine months when I am being shaped into an art connoisseur at the same time? Is my brain elastic enough to be pulled in seven opposite directions without tearing? Is my back strong enough to bear the brunt of the seemingly numberless tomes that are piled in my outstretched hands? Will my fragile and delicate GPA survive this dark night of a thousand facts clawing for space in my mind? Can I do this?

My English teacher said today that there were three reactions to the realization of how much hard work we were expected to contribute to this class. 1) Give up. Transfer out. Sue him for being too hard. 2) Go home and eat 50 Twinkies and cry over the misery of your existence. 3) Become hungry for knowledge and find the will to put in the extra 110%.

Well, when I got home today I felt like #2. Maybe when I started writing this post I felt that way too, bemoaning my existence and wishing for a less challenging year. But I don’t want to live my life in fear. I don’t want to be afraid of my GPA falling so much that I don’t try to aim for the stars. Even if that means I’ll be doing ten hours of homework every night, I am not going to take the easy route. That is not who I was taught to be.

I am going to give my all for the Glory of God and am not going to give up without a fight. Bring it on Junior Year! I am ready!

End of rant.

I Will Overcome!

I Will Overcome!

I Love Reading!

Typical Day At The Brentwood Library

Typical Day At The Brentwood Library

I believe God has made me a voracious reader. During my fourth grade year, I single handedly read all the books in the classroom and devoured whole sections of the library in middle school. I would read anything, from Tale of Two Cities to Jane Eyre to the Iliad and everything in between. Instead of grumbling and bemoaning my misery in life when my English teacher assigned reading books to us, I eagerly anticipated each turn of the page and lamented when they forbade me to read ahead. I have had a deep love of the written word ingrained into my very soul, and even now, at sixteen, I still fastidiously pour over books and articles with engrossing zeal. Nowadays, I choose to spend more of my brainpower on research, often by reading article after article on Wikipedia (which in my opinion, is an excellent and mostly reliable site) in what I regard as a guilty pleasure of absorbing information on a myriad of subjects.

My rapturous delight in reading mostly comes back to my parents, I suppose. Every night, and I mean EVERY night, my dad or mom would put me to bed and read me a book to sleep. Now although I’d like to say my parents were reading me War and Peace and The Wealth of Nations when I was just a little tyke, in actuality, my childhood perusal was more on the lines of Beep Beep Sheep in a Jeep and The Little Engine That Could. But regardless of the sophistication of my reading material, my parents certainly took on an often trying endeavor of instilling in me a love of education and learning. I looked forward to reading with my parents, be it scriptures from the Bible or National Geographic articles, with great anticipation and as my reading improved, soon I was reading to them.

My reading skills escalated when I graduated to chapter books and started reading the first Harry Potter book with my parents when I was seven. We were going through tough financial times then, and one of my most cherished memories as a child was cuddling up with my parents in their bed and reading the Bible, then we’d read a chapter or two of The Sorcerer’s Stone. I would beg my amused parents in vain that we read the next chapter, then wait in eager anticipation for the following night when I’d hear more about misadventures at Hogwarts.

I suppose the Harry Potter Series was like a gateway drug to hard literature because after that, I began reading all sorts of books, classics included. I quickly tore through the Little House on the Prairie series, then moving on to bolder fiction like To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein, All Creatures Great and Small, and The Swiss Family Robinson. I read the Bible cover to cover three times.

When I entered high school, the demands of classwork and my studies began to force me to postpone reading for a while, and I was devastated and suffering what I most keenly refer to as “withdrawal symptoms”. But being absorbed into the hustle and bustle of school did not mean I stopped reading, I soon took to pouring my entire devotion into my assigned texts. I compelled my mind to find harder, more blatantly philosophical books fascinating, like 1984, Catcher in the Rye, and Lord of the Flies. The more I read these more difficult books, the more my vocabulary grew until it reached its zenith with Pride and Prejudice, where I learned how to dance around a sentence’s meaning with long, descriptive words like “providence”, ”thus” and “hitherto” until it took my gracious readers a couple rereading’s to understand the stated sentiment of my declaration.

My love of reading is what I think has given me a love of writing. How else is one supposed to learn to do something well if one does not study the works of the greats? I hope I can impress in my children a love of reading and writing, because I believe that an appreciation of writing is essential in being a well-rounded person. I thank God for giving me a love of reading and wonderful parents who exposed me to it.

Please leave a comment with your favorite books!

"I would die without books" -Thomas Jefferson

“I would die without books”
-Thomas Jefferson