Year: 2018

The Beginning to an End – Bronwyn Warnock

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I’m only a junior. Junior year comes with high expectations and lots of responsibilities. It’s the first year that you’re an upperclassman. But, in a way, being an upperclassmen is the beginning of the end. The college pressure arises, the work-load increases, and the intensity sky-rockets. With everything whirling by, some things going high and others low, you manage to make it through.

I take Advanced/IB English and the glorified and wondrous college essay process has begun. As a writing center intern, I have already read and looked at a large quantity of college essays and this has helped me tremendously. Last night, when I sat down to write my college essay, I was stumped. It is so much harder to write a college essay than I expected. Realizing I was stuck, I went into first-drafts mode and simply wrote down whatever came to mind regarding my topic. After editing and re-writing and re-writing again, I finally came to a rough draft I was okay with calling my “first” college essay. I know that I will most likely change and re-imagine my original ideas dozens of times in the future. Oddly enough, my first rough draft of my college essay was under the word limit almost by one-hundred and fifty words. Usually, I can flood essays and papers with ideas but not this time. All I know is, no matter what, my college essay has a long writing journey ahead.

While I was writing my college essay, I was thinking, but not just any kind of thinking. I was pondering what my future holds. As junior year begins, the end is coming closer and closer. An end to my childhood and years spent in high school. I’m starting to look onward, and towards what life will hold in the years to come. Life after high school has always sounded exciting to me. I’ve known for quite some time that I want to be a neonatal nurse, but as the time steadily approaches, my mind is conflicting. So many future careers sound fascinating to me and it shocks me that we live in a world where individuals are expected to know what they wanna do by the age of seventeen or eighteen. While I am aware that my future beyond the high school is so close, I am still not entirely sure about what I want to do. And for right now, that’s alright.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Real Scare in Halloween by Abigail Beard

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Image result for commonappIt’s time to talk about the REAL scare in Halloween. not horror movies or haunted houses or being forced to share candy with your family. No, the real Halloween scare is getting those applications in by the November 1st deadline. Please, please do not wait until that last minute to get your applications in. It will be a real horror when (when) the website crashes on the night of the 31st. I’ll be rubbing my hands in evil glee from my rooftop perch, looking in as the screen shows the infinite loading loop.

Just kidding! I know what it’s like to sit in bed and feel the insurmountable pressure of the future. Getting college apps finished is no small task. It took me a full afternoon to fill out all of the family data. Mom, what is your job title? When did you graduate from college? What degrees did you get? Then you have the flurry of questions asking you to self report your test scores and list the activities that you participated in year by year, as if you remember.

In my opinion, the scariest part of the CommonApp is the minute after you submit it. After that, it’s over. But then you have that split second terror coursing through your veins: Did I mistype my name? Was I off when I reported my SAT scores? Do I even go to this school!?

The good part is that, once it’s done, it’s done. No more stressing about college until later in the year when the regular admission deadline comes up. You may have even gotten lucky, getting all of your schools applied to before thanksgiving break. To you all that have submitted your applications: Congratulations! Now you can focus on even more senior plans, like senior project, the FAFSA, the CSS profile if you opt to do so, and of course, the crippling realization that, after this year, you are on your own!

Wannabe #planneraddict by Ava Byrne

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I love planners. I spend hours on Instagram scrolling through pictures of perfectly color-coded planners with loopy calligraphy, practically drooling over my phone screen. I admit that the inside of my planner looks nothing like the ones on Instagram. My handwriting is unpredictable, I have never attempted calligraphy and don’t plan to. I envy the people who have the patience and artistic skill to decorate their planners. As much as I want to make my planner look like a Pinterest-ready masterpiece, I would only end up getting frustrated that my decorations don’t look the way I want them to. The planners on my Instagram feed are beautiful, but if I spent all that time trying to make my planner look like that, I would never get the tasks in said planner done.

My planner is my security blanket. When I’m overwhelmed with my workload, I immediately reach for my planner and start listing what I need to get done. I think it’s the consistency that I like about it. Writing down my assignments in silky gel pen gives me the sensation of control when I feel like I’m falling apart. Even if I don’t complete all of my assignments, it just makes me feel better to have a list. I’m not one of those people who has to log every second of their day in advance, although sometime I’d like to be. I write down just enough in my planner to make me feel organized. It’s what works for me and has continued to work for me all of high school.

My planner isn’t pretty and it’s not trying to be. I can appreciate the planners that dot my feed yet also appreciate my significantly less pretty planner for what it does for me. So for everyone out there with messy planners, this is for you.

A Plane Landing by Claire Ockner

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After a long night in the city, my mom and I returned to our hotel in Boston: the Marriott Copley. We walked down the hall, which was mostly silent, but for the muffled voices coming from inside the rooms. We approached our room, one of the many voices distinguishing itself from the rest. It was the voice of a woman in the room next to ours, presumably talking to a friend or partner.

“I have no problem with the Jews,” she said. Her voice was scratchy and high pitched and she sounded to be about 60. “I just don’t understand why he would want to convert. Who would do that?”

At this point, my ear was pressed to the door, waiting to hear what she would say next. My mom chuckled. I was born into a Jewish family, as was she, along with her parents and my grandparents’ parents, and so on through the generations of Platts and Ockners. My mother’s name is Hynda, which is Hebrew for female deer (which is probably why she named me Claire, a more basic name that is way less likely to be made fun of).

The woman continued her slightly antisemitic ranting. “I know that G-d will give the Jews a second chance… but if they still don’t accept Jesus into their hearts, they’ll be damned.”

Now my mother and I were both laughing. We knew that this was a widely held belief; hell, there were even people who thought the Jews ate children. It was funny. Not because we saw antisemitism as a joke in any way, but because we usually don’t hear those things within our “Shaker bubble”. As I lay awake that night, I returned to the question; Why would anyone want to convert? I didn’t know the answer. I was born Jewish, I never made a conscious decision to be what I am. How can I possibly know why people believe what they believe? I fell asleep.

The next morning, we boarded a plane leaving Boston. Planes were, at the time, my greatest fear. I would replay the images of planes falling from the sky over and over in my mind, almost obsessively. The turbulence was especially bad that day. Every time the plane jumped or turned even slightly, I would think to myself, this is it. You’re going to die. You’re going to die and everyone else on the plane is going to die and you have no control over it. When the plane landed, I felt a rush of relief. I made it all the way to Chicago in one piece.

Quickly, however, I began to wish I was back up in the air. I wished that my phone didn’t have service. I wished that I didn’t have news alerts on my phone. But I wasn’t up in the air. I was on the ground, staring at a news notification from CBS: Eight Dead in Shooting at a Pittsburgh Synagouge. Over the course of the day, I watched the death toll rise from eight to eleven. My mom texted her friends in Pittsburgh to make sure they were alright. They were.

As I sat, waiting for my next flight, I realized that I was no longer afraid to fly. I was not afraid of falling out of the sky and dying on impact. My fear had been replaced by something far more terrifying: being killed for being who I am.

Farewell to the Raider Marching Band by Ian Marr

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A high school senior’s year is bound to contain countless opportunities, as well as painful farewells. For me, possibly the most profound parting I’ve endured has been from the Shaker drumline. It’s been four long football seasons that I’ve spent with these musicians rehearsing and performing at halftime shows. We’ve played at community events and pep rallies, and we’ve paraded across Shaker Heights on Memorial Day. At the end of each season, I’ve stood on the sidelines, watching the senior percussionists proudly marching across the football field with their parents on Senior Day. That’s what I’ve done for three years, and during those times it seemed to escape my mind that eventually I’d be one of the musicians being celebrated for all their hard work put into the band.

Growing up with the percussionists has been nothing short of inspiring. Even through frustration and impatience, I can’t think of a group of musicians that I’d rather have spent my games with. Once you’ve stood outside in 35 degree weather at 7:00 at night in the wind and rain, you realize that the people enduring it right there with you are really the best comrades you could ask for. Thanks to the Raider Marching Band for making it an amazing last season for me.

(Until the Italy tour in spring 2019, I’ll be waiting.)

Planning For The Future by Tomasina DeLong

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I am a junior, looking forward to the prospect of going to college. I am however, extremely stressed about the “Where?” “How?” and “For what” questions. With every adult I speak to, the second or third question is always, “Where are you going to college and what are you studying?” In my head I respond, “How do you think I am supposed to freaking know?!?!” and honestly my facial expressions probably say some of that anyway. I usually respond with an overwhelmed look on my face, saying, “Well…I haven’t decided yet, because I am keeping my options open and I’m not sure what I definitely want to study.” I understand that people are interested in how I am planning on spending my life after high school, but I feel like sometimes we can spent so much time planning that we let the beautiful moments, happening right now, pass us by. I have friends and I have a job and I have school. I have a life! I understand that right now, my life is focused on setting myself up for college, but isn’t college really about setting myself up for life? In all honesty, isn’t life essentially about setting yourself up for retirement?

I think that as a society, we are constantly so worried about the future that we are letting go of what we planned for in the first place. If I spent all of my childhood planning for college, is college a waste if I spend college planning for life? I think that we should pay attention to what is going on now, because if we spend every stage of life planning for the next, then overall, from early childhood through old age, we are simply planning for death.

The Rust Belt by Miles McCallum

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It was coal, or steel. In some places salt, in others timber. And always along great rivers or lakes where nature provided the necessary infrastructure. Born from natural resources and geographic happenstance, cities in the Midwestern United States, from Minneapolis to Columbus, and from Milwaukee to Detroit, all share a similar character. Vibrant downtowns flourish, surrounded by decaying factories and remnants of past manufacturing, and from each city to the next, dotting the Great Lakes and Great Plains, great cities with great centers remind us of a long history.

Travel across the Rust Belt and in every city, you’ll find some similar fundamentals. Libraries and museums built with Gilded Age grandeur, professional sports teams that maintain legacies often nearly a century deep — histories that we’re all familiar with. The great capitalists, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford, and their various gospels! The “miracle” game where that last minute shot, run, or goal led to zealous fervor across the city! But it’s in the outskirts of these cities where derelict foundries represent histories paved over by the passage of time. Histories still present, granted, forgotten.

 

 

Cliches: Avoid them Like the Plague by Astrid Braun

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When I began my freshman year Journalism I course, one of the first lessons was to eliminate all cliches. This shocked me, because, like many other new rules established by Natalie Sekicky, the journalism teacher, it contradicted everything I had learned before. Writers imitate what they know, and I had grown comfortable with my collection of phrases, picked up over time from everything I had read or heard before.

Freshman year was the first time I had experienced any pushback on those phrases, and it left me struggling to fill holes that once were so easily patched with the words of writers who came before me. The blank spaces confounded me. I gradually cut the cliches out of my writing repertoire and, over time, found it easier to convey meaning through simpler words.

Now, even as I write blog posts, English papers, or journalism articles, I have a mental block against writing anything that sounds too familiar, and too simple. But that doesn’t solve the problem on its own. Cliches help us express concepts that are difficult to fit into the definition of one word, and to express them using separate vocabulary means forcing yourself to truly think about what the meaning of that cliche is.

I don’t like reading Orwell, but in his essay Politics and the English Language, his attitude on cliches mirrors what mine has become — that they are too easy. One cannot write only to write. We write to convey the thoughts in our heads to others through vocabulary that we’ve created in order to do so. Cliches attempt to connect different human experiences through one phrase, and to think that the cliche has only one meaning is to discount the individual experience of the user.

My goal when I write is to express exactly how I think and feel in words, and it is an unreachable goal. But at least when I attempt to use my own words, and not the words I’ve been spoonfed, I can strive to attain such a goal.

The Ups and Downs of Regatta Season by Grace Meyer

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Imagine waking up at 5 thirty in the morning on a weekend far away from home. A few of your teammates, about two or three, share a hotel room with you as the alarm goes off. You have about thirty minutes to get dressed, have breakfast in the lobby and check out before the charter bus leaves. Although you are exhausted from traveling the night before, you get out of the silk sheets and get ready to race.

After leaving the hotel, the sun hasn’t risen yet. Most of the team is trying to get sleep in as much as they possibly can to prepare for the long day ahead. You do the same.

This scenario is quite common on rowing teams across the country. Most people believe the stereotype that rowing is like kayaking and canoeing, but they would be dead wrong. Crew teams devote their time to constantly working out both on and off the water, using the rowing machines (called ergometers) to stay in shape. The competitions, known as regattas, are days where teams prepare from hours on end. Going out of town is quite a process, and getting ready beforehand is crucial.

I know a reader like you won’t enjoy reading paragraph upon paragraph of my blabbering, so I’ll keep this short and sweet. When leaving home for an away competition, a trailer brings down the slings and Ts used to hold the boats. A truck hauls the strapped down boats to the regatta sight. It takes fundraising money and donations to pay for charter buses there and back. As you can see, everything takes time and effort.

There are two types of racing: head racing and sprint racing. During head racing, which takes place in the fall, the boats row single file until one comes up from behind, passing the other. These courses are longer in length, usually around 5000 meters. On the other hand, during sprint races in the spring, all of the boats start side to side at the same time. These courses are much shorter, about 1000 to 1500 meters in length. All the teams can see who is ahead and who is behind, so competition is in full swing.

Don’t even get me started about rowing up to the starting line. My role as a coxswain, the smallest person in the boat, is to steer the boat, give commands (often technique fixes) and motivation to the other rowers. Many times, we are stuck sitting in one place while making the necessary adjustments when the current moves us. Before reaching the starting area the teams are very disorganized. A ref tries to move them into position, which takes time and patience.

However, once we are off, none of this matters. The adrenaline of racing flows through our veins as the exhilaration heightens, and everyone wants to win for their team. Because of all the preparations made from hours on end, our boats are sure to succeed.