Writings for School: CV

   Midway through 10th grade I moved to Bridgeville due to family issues and began attending Chartiers Valley High School. I found the quality of academics to be somewhat better, though the football team was a good bit worse (on that note, however, I must say I like the fact that no one sport completely dominates as is the case at WA with Coach Palko's team). Anyhow, I soon came to realize that it was still school, and thus, my creativity had to be somewhat compromised in favor of appeasing the bourgeoisie. I believe my writings here are a bit more mature than those that I wrote for West A, understandably; however, I've had less opportunities to write humorous pieces, as I did in Honors Civics and CP English, for example. Also, the collection of works here is more complete, as I made a point of saving my work after coming to CV.

• Honors English 10
  Teacher: Mrs. Michel

     This class was a bit overwhelming. My introduction to Mrs. Michel on the first day was being handed a textbook, with several pages of work on a post it note on the front cover; and two novels, with all this work being due by the end of the second nine weeks, which was in about two weeks. Yikes. Surprisingly I fared pretty well, though later in the year health problems had me absent quite a bit, which became problematic. Nonetheless, my ordeal did yield some quality works.

  • Term Paper- in which you're overburdened webmaster rambles on and on about the effects of propaganda on society. Personally I'm not too enamored with this particular piece. For some reason the date is incorrect, it was actually completed in March of 2001. I got a B+ on it, personally I think that was a bit lenient, I'd have given it no higher than a C+. Feel free to disagree, however, it might boost my ego a bit.
  • 2br02b Pronounced "To Be or Not (0= Naught)to Be"; this piece is a response to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction short story of the same name. As is the case with the term paper, I feel that the writing style here is a bit sophomoric, however the argument behind it is pretty solid. Can't remember what I got on this- I wrote it in late May, so at that point I probably didn't care.
  • On Imprisonment- in the figurative sense. This was written after we read a short story called "The Yellow Wallpaper" and an excerpt from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". The former work was a bit too bizarre for me, but I liked the chunk of "Cuckoo's Nest" so much that I went to Barnes & Noble and bought a copy the very next weekend- along with "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Spanish on your Own." (an impulse purchase that was made after a rather embarassing incident at Taco Bell). I don't remember writing this essay, but it seems like it could have used some revision.

• Honors World History
  Teacher: Mr. Brown

     This was an interesting class, though it was kind of hard for me to do the transition between the World Cultures and World History curricula, having missed out on a lot of info. I found the World War II unit especially interesting, and as part of that we visited the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., wich was a very profound and rewarding experience. We did a good bit of writing for this course, though it was nothing compared to what was in store in APUS.

  • Henri Petain We had to write a piece about a historical figure from World War I, for which I chose the French war hero-turned-Vichy regime Nazi collaborator Henri Petain. I actually enjoyed researching this one, the World Wars have always interested me a great deal.
  • Stock Crash=Depression For this essay we had to defend one of two points of view: whether the Great Depression was caused by the crash of 1929, or whether it would have happened anyway. I chose the former point of view, though it probably would have been a lot more interesting had I chosen the latter.
  • Search and Research Paper Floydiant as an accountant?!?!?! Let me explain. Part of Chartiers Valley's Future Life Experiences (FLEX) program, this paper entailed researching an occupation that interested us. I really had a hard time deciding on a specific career, so I went to Yahoo! Careers, and one of the first ones on the list (if not the first) was Accountant. So I said, hey, why not? I certainly have the dedication and work ethic for such a job ;)