Personal Narrative: Copper Sun

Before coming to kents hill, I had one view school. It's always been something that I dreaded and something I couldn't wait to be done with. Moving around from school to school never seemed like it was helping and I was falling into a deeper pit each time. After starting at a new high school freshman year, I finally thought that things might change, but that was far from what happened. Every day was unfufulling with school days consisting of crowded classes, drugs, and racism. I wanted out but I didn’t know where to go, and that’s when I made the decision to come to Kents Hill. over the summer before coming here I made a ideal version of what I wanted this school to be and although it turned out to be far from my made up version, I can say

coming here has definitely changed me for the better. I always thought english class only consisted of writing longer that they should be essays, and reading books that never seemed important. I was dreading english class because of what I had heard about this school with the long classes and the seemingly never ending homework, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Throughout the year we have covered many important current event topics such as slavery, gender violence, mass shootings and racism, but the topics that most stood out to me were immigration and gender violence. I also took away things from each of the books we read through the year.
In the fall we started off the year having read Copper sun over the summer, and my mind had been opened so much to the horrible lives slaves had lived.

I knew they were usually treated like property and not human beings, but I never knew they had to go through so much. We did several activities with Copper Sun including found poems, character mandalas, and essays, but the main thing I took from it was the found poems. After we read Copper Sun we moved on to another, althgought none less terrible topic by reading Sold, a book about a young girl who lives in poverty in nepal and gets sold to a brothel by her stepfather. She thinks she is going to the city to be a maid and work so she can send money back to her family, but really she is forced into horrific situations and was constantly forced into doing sexual acts against her will. In the end of the book a group of americans comes and saves her from the brothel, but not everyone's story ends as well as Lakshmis. Gender violence and sexual slavery have definitely come a long way since it first started, but the battle for gender equality and women's rights is far from over. In the united states alone, over 800,000 people are raped or sexualy assualted each year. After we read Sold we watched a documentary called Girl Rising which is about a girl from Cambodia who was the victim of slavery. After being freed from the prison she had been living in, instead of taking her experience and turning into something negative, she is resilient and now liberates other girls who are in a similar situation as she was

in.
After reading Sold we moved on into looking deeper at gender violence specifically gender violence in the media, and soon learned about a area of abuse and mistreatment, sexualization and the standards that are placed on women by the media and advertising companies. Our main project for the winter and this unit were to create a podcast in groups with several topics, my groups being gender violence. We talked about how the media objectifies women, placing absurd, unachievable standards on them and the damage it does to them. We also talked about the advertising companies and how they find flaws in women and tell women all the stuff that's wrong with them in order to sell their products. We also talked about how men see women because of how the media and advertising portrays and treats them, and how men see women as objects and not humans. The last thing we talked about in our podcast was how music objectifises and sexualises women. I knew that this was a issue in today's society, but I never knew that the issues were as big, and as ongoing as they are. I really got a lot out of this project, and hearing everyone’s views on issues like this really made me realise that more has to be done.
When we came back from March break and had started the spring trimester we were asked which book we wanted to read and told we were going to do a book club project. I chose to read American Heart, a book that I had been wanting to read ever since we talked about it back in the winter. Throughout the year we had been talking about immigration and migrant, and I think that's why this particular book stood out to me. I wanted to understand better the reasons behind why people migrated, and why people would just decide to leave everything they’ve known and move somewhere else. The book american heart is about a girl who never knew a Muslim, or an immigrant and had always just accepted what society, the media, and the people around her had said about them, and she believed all the stereotypes that were put on them. One day her brother comes across a Muslim immigrant trying to escape the detention centers and get to her family in Canada. She agrees to help her get to Canada, but with her views on muslims they never seem to be able to connect, and the main character even blames “her people” or Muslims for it without thinking simply because she doesn't know any better. After spending time with her, she begins to realise that the standards that are placed on people, specifically Muslims are often wrong, and that really we only do that because we feel the need to blame something, and they are a easy target. By the end of the booker views on Muslims and their culture is completely changed and different, and she realises that she was wrong for assuming everything about her. We did several harkness discussions about the books we read, and came to the conclusion that the main theme through our book is change, more specifically that change is not always bad. I came into english cass with a closed mind, not wanting to put in the work I knew I needed in order to be successful in class, but once I realised that you shouldn't let past experiences determine what you do with the future, I realised that I got a lot more out of this class that I had initially thought.