Concerts

The stressful times of the school year when your band director announces a concert time.  With so many things happening it is hard to keep track of what's going on during the week and what needs to be done in order to be prepared for the upcoming concert.

Detention

               School discipline is always under debate by adults, but what about what the students think.  I do not speak for everyone, but I do speak for many when I say that students need discipline sometimes.  How else are we supposed to learn from our mistakes if we don’t even know what they are?  Teachers now hesitate to assign detentions because they are afraid of lawsuits and other unfair retaliations.
                Discipline doesn’t always have to be abusive and sometimes detentions aren’t enough.  What are adults supposed to do if students don’t care about detentions and only want to make teachers mad?  Well I have no idea, but sometimes I think that students respected teachers more when teachers were able to hit kids.  I am not saying that abusing kids is alright, but something has to be done about the lack of respect for teachers. 
                Getting sent to the office can sometimes help with punishment, but some kids get so used to that and see it as a way of getting out of learning in class.  Some kids just need to be put in their place and if fear has to be a way of doing that, then so be it. 
                I rarely get in trouble when I am in school, but one time I did get into trouble for no reason and I got really embarrassed because a teacher yelled at me in front of the whole class.  Yelling should never be allowed by a teacher towards a student and a student should also never yell at a teacher.  Yelling gets people nowhere and it only shows disrespect to both people.  I would say that for me to show someone respect, it would mean that they would also have to show respect to me.  Respect goes both ways and sometimes I think if rebel students would just get some respect and attention, then maybe they wouldn’t be so bad and would also show respect to the teacher.
                What other punishment should be done?  For me I would be devastated if I got any form of punishment, but some people just don’t care.  I would say that it is the parents’ responsibility to make sure that their student is good during school because how a student acts at school represents the home life. 
                How about lowering grades or not allowing someone to go to an activity?  That is already a form of punishment, but what more can be done legally?  Having teachers being able to hit kids with a ruler just doesn’t seem right, but it might be the only option left. 
               What if punishment is only making the kid want to rebel more?  Well in all reality, it is.  I read this one article and it has made me realize that everyone is different and what might seem like punishment to someone can feel like another reason to just keep rebelling to another person.  Children are hard to figure out and no specific thing is going to work for each person.  That is why I think each person needs and individual approach and maybe that is why the parents should focus on punishment at home and teachers should only focus on teaching.  Nothing against teachers, but I don’t think it is their place to discipline someone else’s kids.  Parents just need to get a handle on their children. 

Paying a Little Extra

       Private lesson teachers are costly, but effective.   To become better in music, it is almost necessary to invest in it.  Private lesson teachers are like coaches that keep track of how much you do and what you need to do to improve in music.  While it may seem like a waste of time (which sometimes it can be), it is needed to for even the best musicians that want to become better. 
            Private lesson teachers hold you accountable and can tell if you have practiced or not, they are like a weight scale when someone is on a diet.  If you step on the scale and the number goes up, the results would show that you haven’t truly put much effort into it.  It you step on the scale and the number goes down, it would show improvement and that practice or in this case exercise has been used to help a person get better.
            Private lesson teachers can be like your best friends and always chatty about the latest gossip during a lesson or they can be strict and always focused on music during the lesson.  I prefer in-between, but that type of person is hard to find.  Private lesson teachers can seem to be the most critical on you, but they are paid to tell you what you need to do to improve.  The truth can hurt sometimes, but often it is needed.  For a person to be a private lesson teacher, they would have to be musically qualified and better than the person they are teaching (otherwise both people are clueless).  Private lesson teachers can also encourage and support a person when they are going to do a competition or a performance. 
           During practice they may ask you to play scales, solos, or individual warm-ups.  A lesson is only as good as the person who is paying for it makes it to be.  If no time is put in between lessons, then the lesson would only focus on a particular thing until it gets better, and it would take more time for the lesson to progress onto other things.  Private lesson teachers are amazing and help each individual person become a better player.  It is definitely worth the investment and time.  If you found this post helpful and are interested in taking private lessons here is the link to a site that can get you started.  Have fun in the wonderful journey of paying extra.

Bullying

                Bullying is a major problem everywhere.  It not only occurs in the early years of a person’s life, but it seems like bullies never seem to go away even later on in life.  Being in school, I witness bullying every day.  I would be considered a bystander and sometimes bystanders are just as bad as the bully because they are letting the bully continue without doing anything.  I don’t always just watch it happen, but sometimes I don’t have enough strength to stand up for the person getting bullied. 
                It has always been taught in school that bullying is bad and that whoever is a bully will get in trouble with administration.  In some cases people do get in trouble, but not often enough bullies get stopped.  It is sickening sometimes to hear the comments of bullies and how they can make someone feel like they are dirt and don’t mean anything.  I feel like administration hasn’t done enough to deal with bullies.  So many kids go home crying and yes I have been one of those kids and nothing ever got done.  They would say take it up with their parents and sometimes parents don’t care about what their kids do.  Things like bullying need to be taken seriously and handled at a higher level.  We are all people and have meaning in the world.  Why should someone have to make another person feel like shit just so they can feel good about themselves?  That question will probably never be answered with the right response, but we should all think about what we say and do before we do it.  Just saying one word can be the difference between making a person’s day good or bad. 
                If you have not been bullied then you have probably been the bully.  I would consider talking behind someone’s back to be bullying so technically I have been a bully and I feel so much regret for ever making someone feel terrible.  Bullies need to commit to their wrong actions and fix what they have done.  Admitting that they and I did wrong makes the situation better and hopefully makes the person who was bullied feel better.  Being mean is unacceptable and yet it continues to this day. 
                There have thought to have been many causes of bullying and in this article it explains a few.  It think it all goes back to how each person was raised and what their family life is like.  Now if you are a bully you can’t blame your family for your wrong doing because you still have a choice to be naughty or nice.  I just feel like a person will be better at making good choices if they are raised in a caring family.
                Next time you see someone getting bullied please have the courage to stand up to that bully or to even tell an adult about it because something needs to be done with that bully.  Bullying leads to many poor decisions and no person should feel like they are worth nothing.  Everyone is loved and should feel that way.

Varsity vs JV

The nervous moment when your coach decides if you are varsity material or if you should still be in junior varsity.  Talking to my dad about this, many years ago when he was in high school the varsity team was only for seniors and the junior varsity team was only for juniors.  That can be good and bad depending on what kind of player you are.

Gym or Band

              Since I am in band I have a full schedule and am not able to take a gym class.  A common question over marching band and gym is if marching band students can get gym credit during marching season.  My school offers it while many schools don’t.  An article was published a while back and it mentioned marching to the beat is a great form of exercise. 
                Being a band member I know that the band gets a lot of exercise during marching season because of all the competitions and daily practices.  The problem is convincing over people to think that band members get enough exercise and don’t need any more by adding another class to their schedule. 

                There is a lot of physical involvement, especially for the lower brass instruments and drum line.  Carrying those big instruments through a seven minute show is pretty hard and almost everyone is panting and about ready to collapse after a performance.  My band director once said “You don’t get muscles like these playing the flute.”  I loved hearing that because often people complain about how hard it is to hold up an instrument and then all the low brass players (including me) look at each other and smile knowing that they wouldn’t be able to last a minute holding up our instruments.

               Total steps of a marching band member are almost three times higher than the average person because of so many practices and steps during a show.  During a practice there is always warm-up and people don’t just warm-up by playing music.  All the instruments get set down and there are stretches and jumping jacks.  It would be like a normal warm-up if a person was to take a gym class.  Each band practice is long and there is always a lot of marching with repetition.  Since things have to be repeated, a person would have to go to an original spot or a previous set (formation).  Instead of walking to that spot the band members have to run and get there quickly or the set will happen without them and they would get into trouble and probably owe laps.  Did I mention that people do laps?  If a person is late or not paying attention, they will have to do a lap or two around the track and possibly push-ups.  Band members may not do as much physical activity as the football team, but we still do more than the average person would do if they had a gym class every other day. 

Paying School Fees

It's almost the end of the year and slips of paper keep wandering into classes.  What are these slips of paper you ask?  They are the bills that still need to be paid before school ends.  In high school there can be many school fees. 

Graduation Parties

Plagiarism

                Plagiarism is not a thing to be taken lightly.  This one word could be the end of your academic future and success.  Cheating is another form of plagiarism, but plagiarism sounds worse.  I have dealt with two cases of a student plagiarizing in my academic career.  I was not the student who did that thankfully. 
                Of course there a lot more incidents of plagiarism, but no one ever got caught or the teacher just didn’t notice or care.  The first time that a student got in serious trouble was when I was in 10^th grade language arts class.  We were doing a research paper on the subject of a book of our choosing.  It was about a five page research paper with sited sources and the whole shebang. One student was so lazy that they bought their essay of the internet and turned it in.  The teacher noticed how advanced the writing was and ended up finding that same essay online.  It was a terrible incident!  The teacher then though every plagiarized and she typed everyone’s essay into a plagiarism search engine and found a few more people who had just copied and pasted stuff.  She accused half of the students of plagiarizing and she brought in administration.  That essay was graded out of 200 so that the people who plagiarized got a zero on that and failed her class.  That just goes to show that plagiarism is not taken lightly. 
                Another incident was this year in my AP Chemistry class and we were working on lab reports in partners.  One student was accused of plagiarism because he had the same exact thing as his partner.  It was really stupid because everyone worked in pairs and should then technically have the same exact thing, but the teacher was determined that student had plagiarized.  Both students got in trouble for no reason because the evidence she found was inaccurate.  Administration was contacted and one student was going to get suspended.  The student was tired of putting up with the false accusations so he stopped showing up to class and filled out a drop form.  That teacher was way out of hand and the student for sure didn’t plagiarize because every partner in a group should have the same answer.  That student was a senior and it would have been recorded in his school records, but thankfully him and his parents fought back and showed that the teacher was wrong.
                Plagiarism is a strong word and unless a person knows for sure if someone has done it, they should not use that word so freely.  Plagiarism and copying someone else’s work is still a major problem in schools and even in work environments.  This article discusses exactly what plagiarism is and how it is handled on different levels.

Written Spanish in Class

            It is a very good idea to take a foreign language in high school because a lot of colleges require a minimum of two years of foreign language to even get into the program you want.  It not only will help you in college, but you will also benefit from that knowledge in life.  If there was a Spanish speaking person who needed help and no one knew Spanish, you could be that one person that could possibly translate or help that Spanish speaking person.  It also helps in your career because people are becoming more diverse and global so there are many needed people for jobs that would involve working with another language. 
            While learning a new language is never easy, teachers expect you to understand what is being taught.  The first day I walked into Spanish class the teacher was speaking Spanish the whole time.  I thought my life was over and that I would never be able to understand.  I am now in my third year of Spanish and can understand and create my own Spanish sentences. 
             In Spanish there is normally a reading test, a written test, a multiple choice test, and an oral test.  All of these tests are important, but can be really stressful.  I recently had to do a written test and for that I had to write a five paragraph essay about my family in Spanish!  It's hard enough to do that in English, but Spanish made it even harder.  It took me two and a half hours to accomplish that and it was a relief to finally get it done.  If you would like to see that and find out more about me here is my Spanish document.  Warning, it is in Spanish.
            Me llamo Nicole Barrett y yo tengo dieciséis años.  Yo nací en el hospital St. Lukes en Cedar Rapids Iowa.  Mi cumpleaños es el veintiocho de Agosto.  Yo soy Irlandés, Alemán, Holandés, y Inglés.  Yo he vivido en Anamosa y Palo.  Yo había vivido en Anamosa por cuatro años entonces yo había vivido en Palo por ocho años.  Yo vivo en Cedar Rapids ahora y yo tengo una casa del lago en Montezuma Iowa.  
           Yo tengo tres hermanos y una hermana.  Sus nombres son Cara, Ben, Sean, y Nathan.  Mi hermana tiene dos hijos y mi hermano Ben tiene dos hijos.  Yo tengo tres sobrinas y un sobrino.  Yo amo a mis hermanos.  Cuando yo era niña nosotros jugamos los partidos y nos divertimos.  Mis hermanos jugaron el fútbol Americano en la escuela y ellos son atléticos.  Mi hermano Ben toca la guitarra y es muy talento.  Mis hermanos son todos mayores que yo y ellos no viven conmigo.  En los fines de semana nosotros vamos al lago y nosotros pasamos el rato.  
           Mi familia le encanta el lago y nosotros vamos allí todo el tiempo.  Mis padres tienen una casa del lago en el Lago Ponderosa y mis abuelos tienen una casa del lago en el Lago Thunderhead.  Mis abuelos tenían una casa del lago en el Lago de Ozarks.  En el lago nosotros vamos a pescar, pasear en bote, y caza.  Nosotros nos gusta al aire libre.  Cada año nosotros tenemos una reunión familiar en mi casa del lago y nosotros nos divertimos con nuestra familia grande.  Nosotros vemos los fuegos artificiales y tenemos fogatas grandes.  Para mí, el lago es una escapada de la vida.  
            Mis padres son muy viejos.  Mi madre tiene cincuenta y dos años and mi padre tiene cincuenta y cinco años.  Mi padre se llama Kenny y mi madre se llama Lynn.  Mis padres van a México mucho y a veces yo voy con ellos.  Nosotros nos gustan la playa y el océano en México.  En la playa nosotros encontramos los caracoles y nosotros tomamos el sol.  En la noche nosotros vemos la puesta del sol y pasamos un rato con los amigos.  Nosotros aprendimos el español por México y hablamos con las personas de México.
            Yo amo a mi familia porque nos divertimos.  Todas personas en mi familia le gustan la música porque todos hemos jugado un instrumento en la banda.  Mi madre y yo nos gusta jugar al golf, pero mi padre no le gusta el golf.  Mi familia le gustan los animales.  Yo tengo cuatro mascotas.  Yo tengo dos perros y dos gatos.  Yo amo a mis mascotas porque ellos son parte de mi familia.  En mi familia nosotros tenemos muchas personas y muchas mascotas.
            Did you enjoy translating that? Well I sure didn't.  I highly recommend that you learn a language that interests you because otherwise the information will be harder to learn.  Spanish is not just in Mexico and if you thought that then you must live under a rock.  Spanish comes from all different places and there are so many different forms of it.  If you would like to learn Spanish please leave a comment or check out this link.  Have fun and connect with different people by speaking another language.

Teachers Teaching?

What method of teaching works best for you

Choose Classes?

In my school I have the option to choose possible classes for next year.  While I may be limited on my options and have some classes that are required, it is still nice to be able to choose electives and the level of class that I will do in the future.  Some people abuse this right though and don't do what classes are best for them.  Choosing classes is a privilege and has to be earned through your school years.