Tag: school

My Summer in Paraguay

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This past summer I went to Paraguay for seven weeks as part of a program called Amigos de las Americas. After a one week training period in Houston, TX, I flew for 16 hours to the country’s capital, Asunción.

From there I met with all 50 of the volunteers, who were from all over the U.S. We then went through a more in-depth training, got our partners, and left for our communities.

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My partner Elizabeth and I were in a community called Costa San Blas, in the Department (kind of like a state) of Paraguarí. It was a beautiful, rural community, with roughly 800 people. We lived with our host family, which consisted of a mom, dad, two sisters and two brothers. Normally, only the mom and the sisters were around.

The community is living in poverty, but we were lucky enough to have running water and other appliances. We had a shower (though no hot water) and even had a washing machine! Surprisingly, we also had a T.V. and huge speakers, almost as tall as me.

A big part of their culture is music and dancing, so they would constantly be blaring their favorite songs and dancing as much as possible. It was so cool to experience.

As Amigos volunteers, Elizabeth and I were required to implement a project in the community, work with our partner agency, SENASA, to provide latrines to those in need, and hold camps for the younger kids at the school.

It was a busy summer!

The seniors at the school were building a playground for the younger grades to play on, and we adopted their project as ours. The kids still did all aspects that they planned – our job was to fundraise and buy paint to add some color to the playground.

We fundraised by holding a soccer tournament in the field behind our house. With the help of the senior girls, we made empanadas which we sold, along with other food and drinks at the games.

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Teams were charged, and the losers bought beer for the winners. With the money we made, we went out and bought paint!

For the latrines, we went around the community and met families in need, who we then taught how to construct the facility. Elizabeth and I helped distribute the materials, and the latrines were built!

Out of all our duties, the camps were my favorite. Held at the school while it was in session and behind our house over break, we worked with children from grades K-6 for two hours each day. We would play game after game, including duck-duck-goose, and games just from their community.

I loved spending time with the kids, and getting to know them all. They always looked forward to the camps, and it was the cutest thing ever.

At home, Elizabeth and I mainly hung out with our host sisters, Leila, 11 and Rocio, 6. Feisty but adorable, they would take us around the community, showing us every nook and cranny, and introducing us to different community members. Back at the house we would also play cards – I must have played at least 100 games of UNO.

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I know I made an impact this summer, and that’s an awesome feeling to have. I have a sense of accomplishment that I couldn’t achieve in any other way.

The fact that I built relationships with so many people, all in a different language and living so differently than what I’m used to, is pretty incredible to me.

I may not have changed the world, but I think I’ve impacted the lives of a few. And I’ve had an experience unlike any other, which I think is amazing within itself.

How can I focus on anything but grades?

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“Don’t focus so much on your grades.”

Teachers have said this over and over again since I started high school.

They constantly tell me to not focus on the end result, but to focus on the material, to develop an interest and study it out of enjoyment, not because I want to get a passing grade.

I don’t understand that at all. Why am I being told not to care so much about my grades or to not study only because I want a good grade, when in reality everything comes down to “intelligence” being perceived from a grade.

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They say that the grade you get isn’t the important part, so why do we get grades at all?

For a teacher to tell me to calm down and relax and not concentrate or obsess so much over what my grade will be, is hands down the most frustrating thing a teacher can ever say.

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It is simple, if teachers don’t want me to focus so much on the grade, then don’t “reward or punish” with a grade.

SAT TESTING ROUND TWO

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Photo Credit: http://www.educationnews.org

Today I came home to hear some of the best news I have all week.

President Obama hates standardized testing almost as much as I do.

The Obama administration has come up with a new plan for standardized testing; capping standardized testing to 2% of classroom time.

Someone finally understands the pressure.

I have spent the past week agonizing over my latest SAT scores.

After receiving a score that I believe it so sub-par to the standards set, I sat in my room for hours and considered my options: maybe I won’t get accepted to any colleges, maybe I should just give up now, maybe I should spend an extra three hours a day studying for this test.

For this is a test that does not demonstrate the magnitude of what I have learned throughout the course of high school, but a test that displays how well I can adapt to it’s irrelevant questions.

Questions that are completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things, questions that do not reflect how intelligent I am, or how successful I will be in my college career.

Rather, this test gives college admission teams the ability to put my knowledge into a category of advanced or average.

The pressure I have felt throughout the past four years of my life to meet the “above average” score of this test is obscene.

I have spend countless nights laying awake in my bed wondering if the work I have completed in the last four years will be dismissed because of an average test score that I have earned through sitting at a desk for four hours.

The standardized system is flawed.

There is no standard anything for a million adolescent brains that function at different paces and in different ways.

Hurting is not Flirting

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Photo Credit: thedailylove.com

As a young girl when a boy would pick on me on the playground I was told it was just because he liked me.

As a young girl when a boy would hit me on the playground I was told it was just because he liked me.

Photo Credit: facebook.com

Where do we draw the line? If a punch leaves a bruise and a girl goes crying to a nurse, does the excuse that “he must really like you,” make the bruise diminish? Like the size of a bruise or the deepness of a cut shows fondness to a young girl.

The sad truth is that we have taught boys the idea of violence and taunting is a way to show a girl that you like her.

Society has a serious problem in the way that we define masculinity. Young boys are shown that they should hide their emotions and the only manly way to display those suppressed feelings is through violence. Because for some reason acting “feminine” is a worst case scenario.

 

Homecoming

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Photo Credit: reflector.uindy.edu

This past weekend many schools held their homecoming dances and games.

A time in the year when school show their spirit and during their dances the student body dresses up and post on Instagram how they got asked to this “magical” night, most likely to spark a flame of jealousy into their hundreds of followers.

Photo Credit: twitter.com

At OVS we don’t have homecoming, for a couple of reasons.

First, we don’t have
a football team making those ever so famous homecoming scenes, where the home team pulls through when their star player is injured and the water boy ends up making the game winning touch down – impossible for us to recreate.

Next, we are a school of less than 200 people so it makes little sense to have a dance where only twenty people who really want to be there.

Homecoming is a time when of the student body comes together as a community and shows their dedication to their school, but since OVS is already such a tight-knit community we don’t need a dance or a sports event to bring us together.

 

What Ojai Valley School Has Taught Me

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It’s no secret that I hated OVS in the beginning of the year.  I carried an air of superiority with me, and I looked down on everyone else, thinking they were all kids with “messed up lives”  from “messed up families”.

On the second day of school, I had a very serious discussion with my advisor during which I explained to her my new theory:  OVS was actually a therapeutic school in hiding.

Looking back, I can barely control my laughter at how ridiculous I was.  My year at OVS has been one of the best experiences of my life.

Before I came to OVS, I wasn’t very mature, although I thought I was.  I didn’t have a grasp on what’s important in life, and I was too involved with materialistic thoughts.

After being at OVS for a year, I can confidently say that has changed.  OVS has taught me what true friendship is, how to stay motivated, and how to be honest.

It has also taught me a lot about myself and how I operate and work.  These are skills that I will always carry with me wherever I go.

It didn’t really hit me how much I would miss it here until a few days ago when I was driving on Wilshire.

Don’t ask me why that’s when it hit me- I have no idea.  But it hit me hard- as I watched someone make an extremely illegal u-turn, I realized something- I would really miss Jeff Lin.

This shocked me a little bit, but it makes sense.  Although one of the biggest things I learned about myself is that I like to be on my own, I made a lot of friends here that I didn’t even realize I cared about this much.

I’m not the best at goodbyes, so I’ll probably end up leaving without telling anyone.

I really just want to thank OVS for helping me find myself.

I was off course when I got here, and I had been for a long time before that.  I’m now finally beginning to get back to who I once was- the little blonde girl who wanted glasses to make her look smarter, who read the Harry Potter books over and over, who got made fun of for being the teacher’s pet.

I lost my motivation these past few years, and I think I secretly always wanted to be that person again.

OVS allowed me to be that person, and even embraced that person, and for that, I am forever grateful.

From The City to The Country

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After living most of my life in the city, sounds of sirens and car horns are just background noise, and the smell of gasoline simply means I’m home. Now, living here at OVS I’ve learned an entirely new way of life, for I have a better chance of seeing a grizzly bear than a bus.

At home, I wake up to the sounds of garbage trucks and school busses, and I fall asleep to the screech of distant sirens and car alarms. And quite honestly, it’s comforting.

Photo Credit: autoparkchryslerjeepblog.com

Now I wake up to birds chirping outside my window, and fall asleep to coyotes howling just a little ways away. And although that sounds beautiful, like some poem or romantic story, those birds are loud! And obnoxious. And constantly make a racket!

Photo Credit: community.secondlife.com

As for the coyotes – who knows what they’re barking about! As far as I know, they could’ve just killed their prey and are celebrating before they enjoy their feast. I’ll take a multiple-ton, killing machine on wheels any day.

I know that both the city and the wilderness come with their fair share of dangers, not one more dangerous than the other. I also know that OVS isn’t actually the wilderness, but compared to the city it sure seems like it! Personally, I prefer living in the city, but life at OVS has opened my eyes to what else is out there.

Burnout

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School is hard.

Don’t get me wrong – education is supposed to be challenging. But more frequently I’ve heard people say “Is he okay?” Following comes the response, “Yeah but he’s all burnt out.”

Burnout is real. It’s a state of chronic stress that can cause lethargy, depression, and general numbness and not a care in the world. (I suggest you read the link given below.)

“Burnout happens when you’ve been experiencing chronic stress for so long that your body and your emotional system have begun to shut down and are operating in survival mode,” says Dr. Sara Denning, a clinical psychologist based in Manhattan who specializes in dealing with stress and anxiety. “You numb out because you can’t think. You can’t even make decisions anymore.”

Further delving into the article reveals that burnout symptoms were arriving in younger and younger people, as early as college freshman. Which is where I will be next year. And it’s also where I feel like I’m heading next year.

There’s something called Senioritis, and it’s, as described as me, “a high school senior lacking in motivation because WE’RE GRADUATING OMYGOSH.” The symptoms are similar to a burnout, lacking motivation, lethargy, etc. The difference is that Senioritis isn’t usually stress or depression caused. It’s just that knowing how I won’t be here next year to deal with consequences makes me want to… Slack off.

I’ve gotten off topic.

Burnout.

If a college freshman is already feeling the symptoms of burnout, then what does that say about the education system? Are we supposed to be holding these children over a fire with a stick? Maybe. But are we then supposed to let them slow roast until a perfect, golden brown –

Photo cred; Cook In / Dine Out
– or let them catch on fire and watch them try and quench themselves?

Photo cred; Dreier.com

Graphic image aside… There goes my two cents. And I don’t care enough to get them back either.

It’s a Small World

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When I was in first grade, I went to school in Hangzhou International School. The classes ranged from preschool to twelfth grade, totaling to about 312 students. At least, that’s the only number I remember.

HIS is a small private school with students from Japan, Korea, Germany, Australia, you name it. It was a day school, ending at 3, and uniforms were required. Nobody got dress-coded, and each class became very, very tight.

One of my most vivid memories is walking down a long, white hallway decorated with life-sized paintings of dinosaurs. It was an empty hallway with big windows and no doors, so we could be as loud as we wanted. And with 25+ students in my grade, we were definitely loud. We travelled from class to class as a pack, because in lower and middle school, that’s how classes worked.

Photo cred: Byrne Robotics

I was at HIS for 8 years. Leaving China to go to Ojai Valley School was probably the biggest change in my life.

There’s only 114 students at OVS. At least, that’s the only number I remember. We have a dress code and students that ran around campus in all different directions to different classes.

It’s wide, crazy, open, and very, very, very small. You’re basically forced to  get to know the people here because we’re kinda-sorta stuck on top of a hill together.

The two college dorms I applied to, Skarland and Moore, with 100 and 322 students living in them. Which are the sizes of the only schools I have ever been to. I guess you can consider me a small-town girl.

It was a small world for me. This school, with about 9,000 students, is going to be an entirely new galaxy for me.

Time Out

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People wonder why teenagers get sick so often, and I think I have found the answer.

We are constantly being run into the ground, overwhelmed with task after task.

I will use myself as an example. I go to school, do my homework, and go to volleyball. Everyday. No breaks in between.

You would think I would get used to it, and I do in some ways. But sometimes the lack of a break catches up to me.

Getting home at 10pm in need of a shower and a snack does not let the teen body get the rest that it needs to stay healthy.

At our age we are growing so much mentally and physically.

If we take the breaks that we need, we are scolded for being lazy or not trying hard enough – but if we do too much we are told that we need to “slow down”.

Confusing, right?

So much is asked of the high school or college student, and yet whenever I say that I can almost always hear an adult scoffing and making some snide remark about how “we have it so easy”.

And perhaps in a lot of ways we do.

I know that I don’t have to worry about paying the bills at the end of every month – and I am so grateful for that.

But I do have to worry about my grades, sports, getting into colleges, trying to maintain some kind of social life, and a lot of other factors that are major stressors.

So why is anyone surprised when 1/3 of the junior class gets a cold, or a fever?

Some of us get only three to five hours of sleep per night because of the work load that is put on us.

Everyone needs a break now and then, and when that break isn’t taken, the human body will find a way to take it.

Our systems are beaten to the ground. And while we may not have to same feats to overcome as some, we have our own.

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photo credit to: http://www.static.guim.co.uk