Report Card
Yesterday I got my report card. I got all A's and 1 B. I wasn't necessarily happy with my grades, but I wasn’t disappointed either. Last quarter, every class felt easy to me except for A.P US History, A.P Environmental Science, and American Literature. I got a A's in A.P US History and American Literature, which I was very happy with. But I got a B in A.P Environmental Science. I didn’t really mind that much, since it was an A.P class. But I still wanted an A. I need to work harder and study better because the tests were the ones that dragged me down. I’m aiming for all A’s this quarter.
Service For Peace
In order to graduate from high school, one of the requirements is 40 learning hours. I have 271 hours so far. This is because my dad is a director of Service For Peace, which is a program where people help the community. We do it every summer, for one whole week (Summer of Service), and few times during the year. We do all sorts of things, like painting murals, gardening, cutting down hazardous trees in forests, and etc. It's a voluntary work, no payment required, except for the Summer of Service.
It is a very good way to get service learning hours, but the point is helping the community and also learning something. We are doing Service for Peace on Martin Luther King Jr. day, which we do every year. I'm not sure where we are going and what we are doing, but I just want to help whenever I can. I want to help anybody with whatever I can, even if it's a little thing because the littlest things count.
http://serviceforpeace.org/
My love for Piano
One of the things I like to do while I take a break from studying or just bored, is playing the piano. It is amazing how you press keys and it makes such a beautiful harmony. I like to play the piano because there are many types of music that you can play. And another thing I like about piano is that by reading their rhythm, you can figure out how the person who wrote it is feeling and can also express my feelings by how I play.
One of my favorite songs is "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" by Johann Sebastian Bach. I like this song because it's very peaceful and reminds me of my grandpa's house in Japan because we have a piano that has the demo of this song. I also like "Für Elise" by Ludwig van Beethoven because that reminds me of my grandma, who passed away recently, because she taught my sister how to play that song when she was little. And I remember sitting in the room listening to them.
I also like the fact that music, or anything, can tell stories without any form of word. Like the piano, it tells stories by how soft you play, how loud you play, its sounds, rhythm, etc. I also like to draw whenever I have time, and most of the time I draw without thinking; I just let my hands flow. It mostly shows how I feel, and sometimes it tells stories like what happened at school. I really like to be creative and that's how I communicate with people.
Addicted to Entertainment
What do people usually do when they are bored and is just lying on the couch starring into space? Well, most people either watch the T.V or go online. What happened to the good old days when people read? That is forever gone. We are now in the age of technological development, where many new technologies are being invented, whether it is useful or not. Television is the most popular technologies in the world, where everyone in the world has at least one T.V at their house.
Television was invented in 1884 by Paul Nipkow, but didn't become popular until the 1940's and the 1950's. The effect of it was reflected in the lower SAT results during the 1970's, and the decline in verbal ability. But television was not always a negative invention. It made people able to communicate faster, like to broadcast the news, history channels, etc. All the other shows are just entertainment, which we are all addicted to.
In my history class, the class was told to fast from T.V or any kind of entertainment. I didn’t truly do it because my cable is cut off right now and I don’t listen to the radio. So I didn’t know what to fast from. I’m just wondering how the class did, due to the fact that they kept whining they couldn’t live without their T.V or their radio for a whole week.
Teachers
Sometimes, there are things that I don’t understand, like teachers. They were once students like us, so why don’t they know how it feels to have so much homework that you have to stay up till 1:00 in the morning? Or that we have classes after gym, so we shouldn’t do swimming? Nor know how pressuring school is? Don’t they realize that we’re still only kids and that we also have other things to do than just studying? We all need a little break at some point, right?
