I’ve been at OVS for five years now. It’s safe to say that I can call it home away from home and a place that has played a major role in shaping the person that I am today. From age 12 to 17, a person in most easily molded due to being in the formal operations stage of cognitive developement. A normal teenager wouldn’t dream about spending this much time at ‘home,’ but here you don’t really have a choice.

In a normal household, in a normal life, you are exposed to the outside world. You see tragedies happen first hand and just simple little realities of life. Up on a desolate hill with less the 125 people it’s like living in a zoo. We have absolutely no clue as to what’s actually going on in the real world.

Can’t we watch the news during breakfast?

Every morning a constant flow of students make their way in and out of the cafeteria, some staying for a meal and others rushing through. Would it be so much to ask to turn on the news to see what’s going on outside our little world?

Just last year when the oil spill off the coast of the Mexican Gulf, most of the students weren’t aware of it until a while after. I found out because I was in Advanced Placement Environment Science, but I’m pretty sure that most of the foreign population had absolutely no clue about it.

It’s so silly! Why can’t the news be turned on in the mornings? I can say that if the news were to be played I would actually eat breakfast and not rush through. I’m sure that a lot of people would. Hell, it’d educate us, not distract us. There really isn’t a reason not to turn it on in the mornings!