I Am Thankful

Ahh... Thanksgiving.... turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy, some of the best foods, and a great four day break is definitely something to be thankful about.  This holiday makes you really think about what is means to be American, and that you have so many things to be thankful for.  When you think about it each and every one of us is lucky to live in this country, where all over the world people have it much worse, and we should be thankful to go to Whitney Young.  Aanyway, in this class there are many students I am thankful for.  Emmet Drea, who I know from gradeschool is that kind of guy who can make the whole class funnier with just one comment, like one day when he decided to talk native american, and he can sometimes have these completely random deep philosophical statements that make you think.  Briana Hammons always knows whats going on with what we are doing in class and that can be very helpful in some situations, and she always has a funny sense of humor, and her argumentative attitude can be entertaining.  Lauren Jeon always has that nice cherry blossom hand cream, and she is also very funny. Overall this is one of my favorite classes and I am thankful to be in it.

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!

I am a Plow?

Today when I woke up,  I was a plow (whats up with that?).  I was taken out of the barn and hooked up to some oxen and they started pulling me along rough dirt... talk about rugburn.  These oxen were going like 1 mile per hour and after five minutes I was bored out of my mind.  It's not like I could just get up and walk away, as I was now a plow.  When you are a large metal object, you finally realize how hot the sun could really be on a hot sunny day.  The oxen took a break to eat, and while they did that, I was put down under a tree by the farmers.  Little did they know I was a real person, and I realized that being a plow was not very fun at all.  Then I was grinding up the dirt for a few more hours, and put away at twilight.  The farmers then went on putting seeds where I just had plowed up the dirt, after all that work, they were just going to put some little things in the ground and bury it back up?!  They put me back in the barn and locked it up, which is probably unecessary, it's not like I can get up and walk away anymore.  After this long day I now see that it would probably suck to be anything other than a human, I didn't have any fun being a plow.  Anyway how am I even talking and thinking, aren't I an inanimate plow?

Classroom Improvements

Your (I'm talking to you Mr. McCarthy) classroom doesn't have that many problems. Maybe you could make the grading scale a little easier like 93-100 is an A and 92-82 is B etc, because the current grading scale is super crazy. We should definitley watch even more movies.  I think you should completely get rid of note taking when we have to read books, like House of the Seven Gables, and our Independent reading books, I'm pretty sure its unanimous that every student hates taking notes, but if we still have to take notes, you should at least let us use them on the tests, if we take notes and then don't use them for anything they are useless and a waste of time.  I think you shouldn't make us do Independent reading projects, it's no fun reading a book for fun if we have to to projects and work about them.  I like how you let us choose the House of the 7 Gables over the Scarlet Letter, and I think you should let us choose what books we read by a certain author, for example: Edgar Allen Poe: Book a, Book b, or Book c.  You should also give us less reading to do, 20-50 pages is crazy for one night I think 20-30 is better, some of us have other classes that also give large and unreasonable amounts of homework, and sometimes its hard to do it all.  Besides this, you have a great class, I have lots of fun in it, and I am happy to be in it.

Modern Day Slavery

Even though slavery is abolished  in all countries, it isn't really completely gone, as some people have "jobs" but they are practically working as slaves.  In countries like China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and many countries in Africa, people work in horrid conditions for little pay.  They work in sweatshops and receive practically no pay, and are doing hours of labor in bad conditions, and get no bonuses or Unions to back them up, they have to work for their families and to survive.  Another type of slavery is another grim aspect in impoverished countries, the problem of human trafficking.  In places like Mexico, people pay most of their earnings to be brought illegally to America, and once they are here they might be subjected to harsh working conditions by their "guides" or traffickers, with threatens of being deported.  Luckily though, these modern types of slavery are recognized and national and international organizations, like the United Nations, who are trying to work with national governments to put an end to these sweatshops and trafficking practices.  Although we like to think that slavery is not around in America anymore it still might be around in other parts of the world.