Sink or Swim?

Walking into class on a grim Monday morning, the best thing to hear was Mrs. Valentinos welcoming voice softly shouting, “Everyone sit down and put your phones away! Not in your pockets, AWAY!”. Contrary to my original thought process, we weren’t taking an assessment, we were watching a movie. I was excited to sit back and relax watching another horrible school movie, but hey, it was better than actual work. As the plot began to thicken I realized that this wasn’t just a shitty boring school movie, but rather an interesting one. On the first day of watching the movie when Yusra and Sara jumped in, it really opened my mind. I didn’t understand the deeper meaning until our Thursday seminar, but even as I tried to explain it to my classmates, it sounded like a slur of incomprehensible words. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it I would like to share. In life, you put yourself in situations where you can either let yourself sink, or you can swim. At the moment Yusra and Sara chose to jump in, they made the decision to either work hard and swim, other wise they could have quite literally drowned in their decision of jumping in. To understand it better, I would like to connect this to my life. When choosing my schedule for junior year, I chose some pretty challenging classes. I could have chose to drown in the classes by not working hard, and making excuses about how they are ‘too hard’, or ‘they take too long to understand’. Instead, I chose to swim. I spend everyday doing homework, and working hard to make sure I have good grades in the classes, and to stay afloat.

Comments

  1. AnonymousDecember 11, 2024 at 5:12 AM

    I was also very happy when Ms. Valentino said we were watching a movie. Maybe a little too happy…. I also like how deeply you connected with the movie as it was definitely impactful, you definitely fell into Ms. Valentino’s trap of subconsciously taking the movie a step further and really understanding the importance of the film, and even connecting it with your own life.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Long Day.

  A Long Day.     The alarm blares loud and early, I wake up to turn it off, only to go back into my bed. In what seems like 30 seconds, that devilish noise is ringing throughout my room once again, but when looking at the clock I realize I've clicked snooze 3 times, and I'm already running late. I run to the bathroom in a hurry, sprint past the kitchen and drink half a glass of milk as my breakfast, only to arrive to my car with a frosted over window. I turn on the defroster and race to my two friends house to pick them up, and I finally arrive to school with barley anytime to spare. After surviving the daily morning Troy High parking lot fiasco, the worst of the day is still to come, with 6 and a half hours of grueling class time lays ahead of me. I push through the first three hours, running off a couple hours of sleep and a half glass of milk, just have a whole hour until my designated lunch time. As I sit in fourth hour zoning out focused on nothing but the empty voi...
Read more

Duality; Life is Red.

  Duality; Life is Red. This week in class while reading Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, we went over many things from this story as a class. One thing I noticed was that the narrators hopes of shifting towards a more modern society is represented by the name of the chapter in the book, “White Tigers”. In traditional Chinese culture, White Tigers represents the west in terms of direction. This is shown through their hopes of being westernized, and falling under the western culture. Another theme that we spent a lot of time on throughput class but I never got to share, was the duality in the story, mostly represented by the color red. In the story it talked about how she wore a pleasant red dress, but then Fa Mu Lan also wore red to represent blood, something disgusting and gruesome. Another thing to the point of its duality, is the fact the in Chinese culture, the color red represents good luck. The contrast in the two meanings is incredibly ironic, and I feel as if it accur...
Read more

Washington DC

Image
The Symbol of American Memorials        When thinking of memorials, cenotaphs, and catafalques, my mind often goes to one place. A place in our country that is full of many different kinds of connections to our nations long and brutal past. The place I'm talking about of course, is our nations capital, Washington D.C. This week in class, we learned about different types of memorials, and how they all have their own sort of representation. When I learned I was going to have to complete an assignment based on a memorial, I immediately began thinking of my time in Washington D.C. When visiting the capitol for our 8th grade trip, we went to numerous memorials which at the time held little to no meaning to me, besides the fact that they honored important dead people. Throughout this week, I realized how the different memorials all had unique ways of representing the past. Some of these memorials include the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the L...
Read more