Suburbs

Suburb (n.) - a district lying immediately outside a city or town, esp. a smaller residential community.

Having lived in a suburb for the majority of my life, I have only a fraction of the desire many teenagers have to leave the "Burlingame Bubble." As Louis Simpson says in "In the Suburbs," there is no way out; lives are wasted and spent in a boring, middleclass life. I do agree with these people when they say that the suburbs don't expose us to the "real world," but I believe it protects us. I don't think many of us are old and mature enough to experience the real world; well, at least I don't think that I am.

Then again, adults think teenagers are ready for a lot of things far beyond their maturity level. Not only do they expect us to change our lifestyles from a safe environment that we grow up in to a completely different one, but they expect us to know what we want out of life (declaring college majors). Personally, I don't think I will be ready to leave the "Burlingame Bubble" for an extended amount of time to attend college, but since society deems us ready, I will do my best to prepare.

College Expectations

Colleges expect way too much out of its students almost to the point of ridiculousness. It makes me upset that to get into any sort of competitive college, we need to be taking every AP class offered along with participating in ten different extra-curricular activities. They say that they want well-rounded individuals that will add to more than just the numbers of the school, but is that really what they want? Let's take Stanford for example. If you look at the academic profiles of the last few admitted classes, each student probably has a 4.5+ GPA, 2300 SAT scores and the ASB president at their respective school. My point is that colleges can't expect us to be well-rounded individuals if all we're focusing on is things to put on their college application. With such high competition, all we're doing in our high school years are studying, studying and studying with some E.C.s thrown in a couple times a week. Is it really worth giving up developing social skills and having fun just to get into Stanford? No; high school should be something that we all look back upon with positive memories and a smile knowing that we could be real teenagers.

Presentations

Today during presentations, I enjoyed Alessandra's group's discussion regarding reason versus passion. This is something I have always kept in the back of the mind, but I never really took the time to analyze and decypher what it really meant. The Greek tragedy Antigone displays the balance between reason versus passion as this concept relates a lot to the difference between doing what the law tells you and doing what one thinks is right. Antigone decides to do what she thinks is right by burying her brother, which opposes what the law told her what was right. She chose passion over reason in this instance, and it results in her death.
I like to find a balance between reason and passion in my life; reason to be accepted into society and passion to make life meaningful. When I make a decision of any kind, I usually think about reason first, as it generally would be affecting people other than myself. Then I look at how it may benefit or hurt me in the short or long run. I think that I am more of a reasonable rather than passionate decision-maker, though I try not to think about myself in the process.

Free Will

Free will is the ability to make one's own decisions voluntarily. I find myself exercising free will a lot of the time. A lot of the time, my exercising of free will involves dancing and singing. I cannot dance. I have fully accepted this fact even though I find myself busting a move at times. I was not meant to be a dancer in life, and I was not given a dancer's body by my parent's chromosomes. However, every time I dance, or make lame attempts at doing so, I feel I am exercising my free will. Furthermore, I feel that I am not a very good singer, which is part of the reason that I am in band instead of choir. My glass-shattering voice does not stop me from singing boistrously to my favorite songs. I even joined the A Capella Club (a singing club that uses no music to guide the singers). Free will is apparent in this example as I keep on singing despite my voice. Fate is not holding me back in my musical ambitions.

Villains

With every protagonist, there is an antagonist. When the antagonist takes the form of a character, this character is usually referred to as the villain. To most viewers, the villain acts primarily as a character designed to create conflict and to complicate the plot. This is true, especially as viewers become attached to the protagonist and hope for their success. However, the role of the villain serves more than these purposes; the villain is designed to better understand the protagonist of the story. Generally, the reason that the conflict between the protagonist and the villain exists is that they have opposing ideas and morals. The villain is ultimately a foil for the protagonist as they accentuate the positive qualities in the protagonist so that we as readers support their success.
Furthermore, the villain gives the reader an idea of reality as the world contains both good and bad people. Were there to be no villain, the story would be hardly anything like real life because the heroine would be able to succeed without opposition. The villain complicates the plot, but in the sense that people don't get what they want with such ease in real life.

Academic Literacy

• More and more students are entering college with an overall lack of desire to advance their abilities in the area of English Language Arts

• Students seem less capable to perform at a higher level of thinking and analyzing than previous generations

• Professors want and need to see that their students care and that they are able to work at their expectations, which have been developed over many years in educating.

I agree with the ideas in the excerpt due to the things I have observed over my years in high school. I feel that the students in our generation do whatever they can to get into the best colleges. The lack of desire and possibly effort could be attributed to this. The excerpt says "students today seem unwilling to engage in the hard work of thinking, analyzing, unless it is directed to their most immediate interests." Colleges are so difficult to get into nowadays that kids will do close to anything to get into the best ones there are, whether that be cutting a few corners or just getting the work done. The competition of college has made students lose sight of the purpose of what we do in high school English, which is to prepare us for college. We do not go to high school to just breeze through every class in order to start learning in college; people see it as more of a step to college rather than a ramp as high school slowly but surely brings you up to that level of understanding.

"Wanderer above the Sea of Fog"

Looking at this painting, I can see that it represents me as well as where I am in life. Currently, I am beginning my senior year in high school, the final year in a string of thirteen in which I was sure of where I was headed. My path was laid out before me a long time ago as I was aware of what intermediate and high schools I was destined to attend. Now I find myself at the end of this path, represented by the edge of the cliff that the man is perched upon. The man seems to be unsure of his future or where he will be headed next, as most of my classmates and I are unsure. Most of us do not know what colleges we will be going to next year, but come next spring, the sea of fog will clear and each of our individual paths will be right in front of us. We will be ready when this time finally comes.