Tag: Student

Ten Things Curently I hate

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Credit: Google

I feel like I don’t hate a lot of things, but I do have random things I just don’t like right now.

  1. College Applications (they make my pockets hurt)
  2. College Writing (It makes me feel like over sharing to a randome person )
  3. Homework (I just don’t like homework, and the senioritis is getting harder to resist)
  4. Math (I miss when there wasnt letters in math problems)
  5. Not having money to spend (I’m just broke)
  6. Taking out my hair after having braids (It’s disappointing to think my hair grew a bunch, only to find out it grew like a centimeter)
  7. Having to take care of my hair (Spending 4+ hours gets aannoyinng really quick)
  8. Not having superpowers (I wish I could fly, so I wouldn’t need to spend money on a ticket)
  9. Having only twenty-four hours in a day ( I wish nighttime were longer)
  10. Having to completely grow up ( Taxes, bills, and other things, also just how much money goes into being able to live, and just finding a job in the current market)

Sick

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Credit: Google

I hate being sick. When I’m sick, everything sucks. From the never-ending headache all the way to the sore throat. It’s that one minute when you might feel fine, and the next you feel like your body is made of lead and weighs 3,000 pounds. The thing I hate most of all is the sore throat. It makes me feel like you have just swallowed a million glass shards, and each one is getting stuck in my esophagus.

The pain feels never-ending, even when I find a way to relieve it, it quickly returns. My solution to this is usually to drink the hottest thing I can get my hands on, from just regular hot water to tea with honey. It isn’t just the symptoms that make getting sick horrible; it is also the days you miss.

When you’re sick, you miss out on a lot of things, too, from homework to current events. When you do get better, you realise you still have to make up for the work you missed and hear everything that happened second-hand.

My “Student” Character is ending…

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Starting from my 9th grade, I can feel the time passing so fast. Every year passed with a blink. I kept complaining about school and life until recently I noticed that I only have a couple of years left being a student. I started to like being a student actually, the only struggle is homework every night. Otherwise, I can just have fun and do anything I want with my family and friends. With my work experience before, I imagine in the future, I will need to wake up so early and do my work until 9 pm. When I get home it’s probably 10 pm, plus, doing some stuff and taking a shower will be at 11 pm; Afterwards, I need to sleep at least before 12 am so I won’t be tired from tomorrow’s work. I also imagine that every day will feel the same. Nothing surprising will happen to me. It all just feels so complicated.

In this case, I want to give myself a goal. Although I might be busy working in the future, I still want to do something that I always wanted to do, which is to become a Youtuber. I’m not sure about when I am going to start, maybe from college or maybe after college. I love taking videos and editing them. Some of the successful jobs started from interest, and my interest is editing videos, so I give myself a goal to start the action and share those videos I made with everyone. I’m thinking the content of the video I will be posting is about a vlog or some prank video with my friends. To be honest, I haven’t started yet so I don’t know what the content will be. However, I wish I could do or even try anything I want to do before I get old and couldn’t move my body anymore.

Photo Credit: BBC News

What college to go to?

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I have no idea what college I’m going to. I mean I have another year to think about it but like I don’t even have a dream school. And tuition fees are just going up and up with a lot of schools charging 70-80,000 dollars a year. Everywhere is so expensive and its harder to get in to places. I dunno maybe I’m overthinking all this but I really have no idea where I wanna go. There’s so many cool places with awesome programs, but not all of them have good scholarships. My mom tells me I shouldn’t worry about the money side of things but we can’t pay for 80,000 a year without student loans and FRICK student loans. The wage and finance system is rigged against the working class and I am the working class. But I guess I’ll figure it out when I get to it.

The Faults of Living (at school)

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When I was younger, I thought that teachers lived at school.   I imagined them sleeping in the classrooms, pulling out the mats we used for nap time and creating comfortable beds.  I thought it sounded really fun and cool to live at school.  Now that I actually do live at my school, I have a better understanding of what it means and what you give up.
At OVS, there is a clear divide between the day students and the resident students. This is because the day students have time to see each other outside of school every day without the resident students.  Similarly, the resident students have a lot of time every day without the day students.  This has created a noticeable rift between the student body.  When you live at school, it’s harder to put aside free time for your friends.  With a schedule that maps out almost every minute of the day, it is a lot more difficult for residents than day students.
There are a lot of day students that I really like and want to get to know better.  However, as much as I wish I could change it, watching them drive away as I am confined up on the hill is pretty much standard procedure.

Admissions

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As far as our college applications go, I’m pretty sure that everyone is now stressed out and curious about how the college counselors would review our apps. It reminds me of a great movie I watched this summer – “Admission.”

“Admission” is a comedy directed by Academy Award nominee Paul Weitz, starring  Tina Fey and Paul Rudd.
Every spring, high school seniors anxiously await offers from college admissions. At Princeton University, admissions officer Portia Nathan is one of the counselors who evaluate thousands of applicants.

On her visit to New Quest, an alternative high school, she then meets with her former college classmate, idealistic teacher John Pressman – who has recently surmised that Jeremiah, a gifted yet very unconventional New Quest student, might well be the son that Portia secretly gave up for adoption years ago while at school. More importantly, Jeremiah is about to apply to Princeton.

Now Portia must re-evaluate her personal and professional existences, as she finds herself bending the admissions rules for Jeremiah. She recommends Jeremiah to all the officers who refuse to admit him. And the result does not change – he gets rejected. In the end, in order to get her son into Princeton, Portia steals Jeremiah’s folder and changes the decision into a “Yes.” Portia quits her job and starts a new life.

Even though the movie is mainly about love and family, I personal find it is also a fairly helpful movie for high school students to get more knowledge about the process of applying to college and more closely, about how the officers review our materials and make the final decisions.

If you haven’r watched it yet, I strongly recommend you to do so!
And also, good luck to all the seniors!

“There is no formula to get in. Just be yourself.”   – Portia

American Guns

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The White House just came out with this dashing photo of Obama shooting clay pigeons at Camp David.

I really love the way the White House is trying to look “pro-gun” by releasing this photo. There really shouldn’t have to be so much of an effort by the White House to try to convince so many gun-advocate dunderheads that their president isn’t going to come to their house and steal their guns when they sleep.

America has a weird fascination with guns. About 40% of Americans have guns in their house. This is one of the only developed countries on the planet where the citizens feel the need to own assault weapons and as many magazines as they can handle. There really is no reason for people to own these types of weapons. The only benefit of an assault weapons is that they don’t leave time for people to think in between shots.

Take Australia for example. My cousin, a police officer in Tasmania, came over to California just after the Sandy Hook shootings. He and his entire family really could not understand the gun laws here in the States. In Australia, no one is allowed assault weapons, guns must be kept in locked containers and police officers check to see if your house is suitable for guns. I asked him if there are many shootings in Australia, and he replied, “Um, no. Of course not.”

What a luxury it must be to live in a country where shootings aren’t something common. It really is not hard  to make that dream become a reality. America could take a page from Australia’s law book. This is something that can happen, it’s just a matter of how much people care about saftey.

The Last Blog

yrreskrapLeave a comment

This is my last blog of the year-the last blog as a junior.

So should I write about?

Well, I can write about almost anything. About how my friends are leaving in a eight days, or how maybe I found out that I became president. I could write about how I will be going to Chicago this summer for a medicine forum. Or I could talk about unicorns and how much I ABHOR butterflies. Ick.


But, I feel like my last blog should be more substantial than my usual potpourri. My final blog should be more.

This blog (my last blog) is a tribute to a very special person. A teacher to be more specific.

I have had him teach me in a subject every single year that I have been here at Ojai Valley School Upper Campus.

The greatest thing about this man is that he knows when and how to push me to my greatest potential. I don’t think I have learned more about my own limits than I have when I was learning from this teacher.

He has an interesting way of teaching. History, which is the subject he teaches, happens to be the subject I hate the most. But, when I learned it from him, it was my favorite subject. It was because of his humorous way of teaching that engaged all of his students and made everybody love taking his class. But this teacher is not just jokes but he knows when to be serious and knows motivate his students to do their best.

Mr. Alvarez, you are not only my favorite teacher, but you are my coach and one of the people I look up to. You are great and I am happy that I was fortunate enough to take your classes every year. Thank you for being such an excellent teacher and for motivating me to always do my best. I can’t wait for journalism next year, during my senior year. Haha hopefully, you will be able to put up with my major college stress and senioritis.

One Man v. A Row of Tanks

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As I was working on my second Decades Paper for my history class, the dusty shelves in the memory department of my brain were revisited. My eyes fell upon a small paragraph, containing information that I would have probably just skimmed over had it not sparked something in the murky abyss of my memories. Two words reminded me of the struggles of countless students and even more so of one brave civilian who decided he had enough.

Tiananmen Square, 1989.

Students, mothers, fathers. Civilians alike banded together in the name of political reform. They had just lost a leader and strong liberalization advocate, Hu Yaobang, and felt it was in their hands to fight for the changes they wanted to see. And fight they did.

Through mainly non-violent protests, more and more people joined the cause for a more liberal government. However, the communist government fought back, mercilessly.

Buildings were on fire. Rubble and debris littered the floor. Many civilian lives were lost. However, throughout this fear for the government and citizen lives, one man refused to back down. One ordinary man who did an extraordinary act.

This is a video of the man who courageously stopped a row of tanks.

It’s quite breathtaking. To have the strength to go alone in front of tanks that can crush the human body in a matter of seconds.

Silently, I scolded myself for having let the dust collect over such a power event in those shelves of mine. So I decided to blog about this single event. This event happened 21 years ago, way before I was even born. I had almost forgotten this important moment as I am sure many other who will read this blog have as well. I am writing this blog to remind people that such bravery exists in today’s society and to inspire those who have never heard of this man-whose name I don’t even know-that stood against the row of tanks.

To learn more about this event watch the following video:

Roommates.

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When I first went to OVS I had no idea how I would live with another person in the same room as me. The last time I did that was when I was eight and shared a room with my big brother. It was almost a year and a half ago when I met roommate. I walked into the room, number 207, with no idea of who would be in there or how I would react to them: that was when I met Polina.

She was relatively quiet at first, and I only really heard her talk when she was on her phone at night, speaking rapid Russian to her mother. But we slowly grew closer to one another, starting our conversations about music and then leading them on into the unknown. She became one of my closest friends.

When we had separated from each other at the end of our freshman year, her going to Russia and me staying in southern California, I didn’t know the effect it would have on me. I would be talking to my friends about school and instead of calling Polina, “my roommate,” I called her, “my Russian.” (I later found out that she refers to me as “my Aria” when she’s home in Russia)

This year, I was very grateful to have Polina as a roommate again. We already knew each others likes and dislikes, we never had an argument, and we practically knew what the other one was thinking. We had already been through and gotten over the awkward faze of living with a new person, and I never thought I’d be able to get on so well with someone so different than me.

I don’t know how I would have been able to make it through the long years at OVS without my roommate to help me through them.

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