“But Miss Star, I really have to go. If you don’t let me go now, I am just gonna go in my pants.”
“Okay Joseph. You can go in a few minutes.”
“It’s been a few minutes. Can I go now?”
“Wait one more minute Joseph! Someone is already in the bathroom.” I stood there and looked at my watch for a few minutes. “Okay. It’s been a minute. You can go now.”
“I don’t have to go anymore.”
After our bathroom break I took my third graders, including Joseph, outside to play kickball. Not five minutes had passed before he was at my side again.
“Miss Star. I just went in my pants.”
I looked down at Joseph to see a wet spot slowly forming on the front of his pants. As he began to cry, from embarrassment and the fact that he had wet pants at nine years old, I realized that maybe this was not the time to exercise my power. As a camp counselor, I had to find a happy medium between friendship and authority. On the first day of camp I decided that I was going to be the coolest counselor. I didn’t give any of my third graders rules or consequences. I let them do whatever they wanted and they didn’t get in trouble (by me at least). BAD IDEA!!!
When the time came to put my foot down about issues, such as Joseph, it didn’t work too well.
“Miss Star, I really have to go again.”
“No Joseph. You just went.”
We stood in the hallway and argued back and forth with fifteen other kids staring at us. They were amazed to see me, Star, actually angry at someone. “Joseph, just shut up and get out of my face! I don’t want to hear another word from you today and you can never go to the bathroom again!” Not the best way to handle the situation, right? If I had only set down ground rules in the beginning and let the kids know they couldn’t walk all over me this probably wouldn’t have happened.
The situation I just described can be closely related to the situation in Christian Zawodniak’s essay, “I’ll Have To Help Some of You More Than I Want To”.
Go Ask Alice is the diary of a young 15 year old drug abuser. At the beginning of the book, "Alice" is a typical, insecure, middle class teenager that only thinks with boys, diets, and popularity. She never taught of getting into drugs. This girl had a lot of self esteem, and was very happy. Her life changes for the worse when her family moves to a new town and she finds herself less popular and more isolated than ever before. That is why she buys this diary to express herself with personal taughts. She becomes unhappy in the new town, she is overjoyed to be allowed to return to the old town to spend the summer with her grandparents. During this stay she is invited to a party by an old acquaintance; there she unwittingly ingests LSD that had been added to random bottles of Coca Cola and distributed to the party guests as a game. The other guests had mistakenly assumed Alice was aware of what the "game" entailed. After this, she seeks drugs deliberately, and rapidly proceeds to marijuana, amphetamines, and casual sex. A pregnancy scare and the return to her new town encourage her to turn away from drugs; however she soon falls in with the drug crowd where finally she finds acceptance. She starts dating a drug dealer and sells drugs to grade-schoolers for him. After realizing he was using her, she turns him in to the police and runs away from home with her new friend Chris, moving to San Francisco. After being given heroin and then being raped by Chris' boss, Shelia and her boyfriend, she and Chris return home.
Both the volunteers and children were timid, but because of my natural imagination and easy-going nature with the children, I started telling silly stories they spent minutes laughing over and then watched them stretch their faces in front of my camera. I learned that I had a natural ability to start a movement, connect two different groups of people, and create bonds between them. Again, I was also shown with this ability when a fight emerged from my other group of younger volunteers. Many of them were angry at our group leader, all declaring to act out in some form of rebellion as revenge. Although I was angry at her myself, I respected my leader and refused to take a part of it. Instead of arguing, I talked to them and explained our leader’s possible situation. I have always had the ability to understand another person’s point of view, so I explained to them that taking care of twenty young teenagers is challenging and knowing each of our individual situations was difficult. Instead, I proposed we talk about our problems with our leader peacefully, which was what we ended up doing and created a tighter, stronger bond in our
The notorious witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts occurred from June through September. It is a brief, but turbulent period in history and the causes of the trials have long been a source of discussion among historians. Many try to explain or rationalize the bizarre happenings of the witch hunts and the causes that contributed to them. To understand the trials and how they came to be, we must first examine the ideals and views of the people surrounding the events. Although religious beliefs were the most influential factor, socioeconomic tensions, and ergot poisoning are also strongly supported theories. A combination of motives seems the most rational explanation of the frenzy that followed the illness of the two girls. This paper looks closely at the some of the possible causes of one of the most notable occurrences in history.
Her mother had died after being hit by a reckless driver. Alice, a fifteen-year old, African-American girl, was now without her natural and most influential guide on how to cope with the powerful transition from girl to lady.
Robinson, Enders A. The Devil Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1991. Print.
Have you ever dealt with so much in life that you began taking all the anger out on yourselves, especially since you're maturing into adulthood? "Go Ask Alice" is a non-fiction diary, written by an anonymous author in the late 1960's. Alice, the main character, begins a diary because she has no one else to talk too, and she spends her energy searching not for drugs, but for someone who will understand her. The drugs only create the temporary illusion that she is in touch with nature and people. Alice is a curious, committed young adult for three reasons. She runs away from home and begins a new start, she's been influenced on how good drugs are, and she's committed to stay off of drugs no matter what.
As quickly as he told Jotaro what he was going to do, he scarffed down his food and dashed out the kitchen. In this large house, Joseph often got lost, Jotaro was very tempted to help him but if they were going to spend all day together, he needed to get his normal things done as well as possibly scream in the shower for an
One hand propping the bathroom door open to leave, Weevil laughed. “Are you kidding me? Pipsqueak’s peeing his pants with all these cops around. Thanks, V.”
The shock wore off with time, from his paralyzation, and Joseph wasn’t as hateful towards his mom and Jocelyn. He still couldn’t accept that he could do almost nothing without the help of someone else and he and Jocelyn became friends, and as the days passed, they became closer. What used to seem like dreaded tasks, now seemed more like teamwork. It wasn’t always fun, sometimes they got into arguments, but somehow they always ended up making one another laugh.
In 1692, sequences of women had begun to have fits. Young girls who were trying out fortune-telling had begun to start acting as though they were being tormented. As well as the fits they were falling into, they felt as if they were being choked, pinched, and jabbed all over (Conforti). People started to question the way women were acting and assuming it was the works of the devil. Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba, a slave in a family of a girl who was one of the girls playing around with fortune-telling games and such, were all arrested due to suspicion of witchcraft (Gragg). Sarah Good pleaded herself innocent, but accused suspicion upon Sarah Osburn. Osburn admitted to suffering symptoms of bewitchment like other younger girls. She had a dream that an “Indian looking figure in all black pinched her in her neck”. Likewise Osburn’s dream, Tituba experienced a similar sighting but in her situation, there were “four women and one man who told her if she would not hurt the children, they will hurt her”. ...
Me and the other service members had the joyous job of getting them organized for the interactive activities we had planned. My composure was already slipping I was thinking to myself there is no way they will listen to me. As we rounded them up, I noticed a lot of them were staring up at me in awe, I was completely oblivious to the fact that they saw me as an authority figure and were waiting for me to tell them what to do. It turns out when you’re 6’2 and surrounded by little five and seven-year old’s, you aren’t viewed as a teenager, but as someone they have been taught to view with respect. It was a very shocking realization for me because I was rarely ever in a leadership position up until this point. As soon as we got all the kids to go to their separate activities, I had a small herd of little girls asking me to carry them or give them a piggy back ride. Naturally, I gave in we were supposed to keep the kids entertained so I saw no harm in keeping them amused. I was halfheartedly going along with what everyone else was doing, out of nowhere the same group of girls comes up behind me and start talking about how I needed some braids and accessories in my hair, they were also saying it would improve my
I am a 7th grader at Marin middle school. All the smiling faces can fool everyone but me. This place isn’t a happy place. In my mind, this is prison. I walk slowly to my first class, “hey guys look, it’s the bastard” says one of my female classmates. Everyone in class starts laughing and I am the only who thinks this isn’t funny. I turn around, sit on my desk and pretend that they are not laughing at me. It is a part of my everyday routine. I am starting to set up my desk with a paper and a pencil. Suddenly, one of the kid next to me just grab my pencil and throw it out of the window. Yeah, school has
Throughout Hamlet, each character’s course of revenge surrounds them with corruption, obsession, and fatality. Shakespeare shows that revenge proves to be extremely problematic. Revenge causes corruption by changing an individual’s persona and nature. Obsession to revenge brings forth difficulties such as destroyed relationships. Finally, revenge can be the foundation to the ultimate sacrifice of fatality. Hamlet goes to show that revenge is never the correct route to follow, and it is always the route with a dead
Teaching is a daunting task that I do not intend to take lightly. Becoming a teacher has been a dream of mine for several years. I always knew that teaching would be the career for me, especially when I began working in the school system as a substitute secretary. I loved working in the school environment; coming in contact with children everyday made me realize how much I would enjoy teaching a classroom full of students.
From the knowledge I have gained from my teaching experiences and graduate level coursework, I have developed a personal philosophy regarding what teaching means to me. Over time, I have also developed a goal for what I would like to take away from any extended education I receive in the field of teaching.