ESCALATION

Minkee Sohn, 8th Grade
San Francisco CA
The Nueva School

Do things faster. Everything’s going fast; if you slip, you’ll fall behind forever. You have to do more after-school activities, too. If you don’t get enough skills in multiple areas, you’re not going to succeed, you know. And if you don’t succeed, it’s the end of your world. A good high school leads to a good college, which leads to a good job, which leads to success, which leads to happiness. Doing homework is never enough to get to the top. You’ve got to do more, work harder. You’re just not good enough.

Sadly enough, these messages have been drilled into me and legions of other teenagers many times, embedded in our minds. Before I go on, I’d just like to say that I’m not targeting my parents when I say this. I’m referring to what society is putting upon us. Aided by globalization and breakthroughs in technology, the world is advancing at a fast pace. And it’s hard to keep up.

Well, to keep up with it and be a healthy teenager, that is.

And that leads to the thing that I would change about this world: If I could change something in this world to make it a better place, I would make it lighten up. As a society, we are growing much too competitive. I see examples all around me, and I’ll write just one of them here. My school hosted a student overnight last year for a novel-writing unit, and it just so happened that that was the day our parents received our SSAT scores. I had no idea that this even happened, so I was surprised when I heard some of my classmates discussing how well they did while we were eating pizza. I remember that one of my friends went outside to call his parents to find out what he got. When he came back, he was distracted and upset for the majority of the time we were given to work. Knowing how hard-working he usually is, he accomplished much less work than I know he easily and definitely could have.

And so questions arise. I can see SSAT scores are significant towards high school. But should going to high school, a continuation of our learning, really be such a stressful process? Are we going to succeed in learning if we’re tense and tired all the time from trying to stay on top? And what about socializing? Students are also supposed to make friends. But if we’re so busy working and don’t have the energy or drive required to build up good ties, isn’t that going to leave us missing something emotionally at graduation?

I’m not trying to dismiss competition as a horrible thing that is eating up students’ lives. Competition is healthy and we all need it. It’s the element that pushes us forward. Actually, competition can be thought of as a way we motivate each other. But at the same time, too much competition can be that “horrible thing.” Too much competition makes us lose self-confidence, feel inadequate, and slowly grow to resent ourselves for not “being good enough.”

While this kind of harsh environment and mindset springs up across most urbanized communities like the Bay Area, I have seen it especially prevalent in Asian and Asian-American families. Being Korean-American, I am familiar with the Asian cultural traits around me. I believe that we Asians are usually unified in sharing some traits, and one that we should be particularly proud of is diligence. I have seen many hard-working Asian-American families, and diligence should be valued. But another very important thing that we should be taking into consideration is balance. Most people are healthiest and happiest under a good balance of work and play, and we should accept it. The amounts needed of these elements changes from person to person, but we all need both in our lives.

A fast-paced, unbending society is something that forms through people’s wants, making it difficult, even for a community working together, to make a significant change. So my idea isn’t really one that can be realistically put in place. But a teenager can dream, can’t he? Societies usually change over time, and I believe that it’ll be when society grows too fast for comfort that we’ll start to slow down to a healthy pace of progress. But for now, in the real world, I think that it’s very plausible and beneficial to relax and slow down just a bit. Deep breaths, enjoying a fruit, saying hello to classmates, sharing things, sleeping a little more... things like that can really make a day, ease stress, and make people happier in general. And if even one person is happier than usual, things are more likely to go right in our world.

Learn from Each Other

Serena Ying , 2nd Grade
Saratoga CA
Argonaut Elementary School

Children Rock Band

An Asian children rock band electrify their audience with their guitar-playing skills and superb musical talents.

High Tech High

School: High Tech MiddleAuthor: Shani Higgins Subjects: ArtGrade Levels: 8th

How do we create values using only one color and black and white?
For their first project this semester, Shani Higgins’s eighth grade art students at High Tech Middle created “Larger than Life” Monochromatic Self-Portraits. They practiced by painting smaller monochromatic pieces inspired by Vassily Kandinsky’s abstract paintings. To start the process, Ms. Higgins took pictures of each student in the class. Students then used PhotoShop to alter images of their faces and used the altered images to create large drawings. Students projected their faces and traced the altered images from the wall. Working with acrylics, students chose their favorite color for the monochromatic study. Each face is at least 18 x 24”. They worked from light to dark, first painting the light areas and gradually adding small amounts of color and black. It was important that students paid close attention to line, value, and detail.In addition to the extenuated size, another unique aspect of this project is that the Art classes worked with the technology classes to make audio recordings of the artists talking about their work. We will have all of the work on display during Exhibition Night on March 23rd, 2006. Visitors will be able to sit down at computer stations, put headphones on, click on a web image of each student and listen to them talking about their work. As an audience, you be amazed at the kind of artwork these middle school students are capable of. Also on display during Exhibition Night will be sample work by every sixth and eighth grade student at HTM.

What Will Students Be Able To Do:

Alter images on PhotoShop. Paint image using acrylic paints and use a monochromatic color scheme for self-portrait.Recognize and create different values using one color and black and white. Talk about the process and reflect on their work.
What Will Students Know (content covered):

A Common Story

Albert Ai , 12th Grade
Santa Clara CA
Adrian C. Wilcox High School

In attempting to pinpoint the unifying source of poetry’s value, Perrine found that worth stemmed not from an imposition of the beautiful or distasteful, strange or common, joyful or poignant, but from the simple communication of human experience. Perhaps that is why my Asian American heritage can so powerfully color my outlook on life, but through no single identifiable path. Thinking about what my culture means to me conjures both the thrill of cultural celebration and the gravity of filial piety, both the bitterness of competition and the camaraderie of social harmony. Being a first generation Asian American raised at the center of Silicon Valley bridges me between the plenty of America’s most prosperous and the poverty of my parents’ rural origins.

But thinking about my heritage also brings forward the realization that my understanding of our family’s past is meager at best, simply because it was decided at some point that this story was too commonplace to be heard. I unavoidably pieced together a few details over the years: that my father had come to the United States without any assets or family to turn to, or even a strong grasp of English; that after earning two graduate degrees, he had first worked as a door to door salesman, selling copies of the Bible; that after his troupe had run out of gas, funds, and places to solicit, he had found work as an assistant chef making a dish called “cashew chicken” at a small restaurant in Missouri. How he had gotten there from Ohio, where he had earned his second degree, he never bothered to say. Only after moderate success at the restaurant was he able to save enough to come to California, buying an economical watch as a souvenir before he left.

After it was decided that this story, in completion, was too commonplace to be heard, I made the critical mistake of never protesting the decision until silence had become so firmly established that it became unlikely the complete story would ever be told. When I finally grew mature enough to understand why this was regrettable, I began to ask around, to hear the stories of others. To my surprise, their grasp of their own stories was as fragmented as mine: broken, vague, and distant. I listened as their voices dropped and they too admitted their meager knowledge about who and what preceded them. I then realized that my story, about the story that had never been told, was in fact an ordinary one. It was just one of thousands, belonging to thousands of other families respectively, whose unique stories had also been decided too commonplace to tell.

If I could change one thing to make the world a better place, I would have it that the stories of our past be heard. My father’s reticence has implicitly shown me that the wealth of unspoken meaning can only be discovered on our own, by our own desire. The necessity of such self-discovery may temporarily delay progress, but it is also by such discovery that whatever meaning we find becomes most deeply engrained into how we view the past, present, and future.

A few years ago, digging through an old drawer of odds and ends, I found that watch – the one my father had bought before leaving Missouri. It was missing its band, and had a crack over the third hour. Seeing this, he urged me to throw it away, but I didn’t. As a watch, I realized that it was worthless, and at best sentimental. But as a remnant of the past, it serves as a reminder of one struggle to overcome barriers of language and isolation, of poverty and opportunity; a relic of human experience, too valuable to be forgotten.

Save the Tamil (Children in Sri Lanka)

Omaelan Hariharan
Cupertino CA
Eaton Elementary School

My Pet

Darlene, portrayed by Bethel High School Senior Arielle Galleon, is bemoaning the loss of her beloved. A monologue from Roger Krashner performed in Vallejo CA.