Live a Full Life or Not, the Choice is Yours
Some 2000 years ago a Roman poet was talking with his vampy friend, Vladimir Longtoothski about his bizarre phengophobia. “Vlad,” Horace the Geek began, “I realize you’re a creature of the night but you need to catch some rays, man. You’ve been looking a little pale lately, you need to get your blood boiling and get some color in your cheeks.” Exasperated with Vlad’s nightowl existence, Horace the Geek uttered, “Seize the day, Vlad!” “Bloody good prompt,” responded the incisive Vlad. And for the next 2000 years, teachers everywhere encouraged their students to write about the importance of seizing the day if you want to live each day to the fullest. So check out the following seizures.
The year: 1959. The place: Welton Academy. It’s a strict prep school run with military precision almost like Harlingen’s Marine Military Academy or the La Joya ROTC program. Passionate to the extreme, maverick English teacher John Keating urges his students to break the rules, to break with tradition, to break up their routine life, and dre...
In Dalton Conley’s memoir “Honky”, written in 2000, Conley talks about his experience of switching schools to a primarily white elementary school. He discusses the major differences between his prior, very diverse school and his new, primarily caucasian school. He focuses on the main topics of race and class, and how they enhanced the differences between these two schools.
The story seems takes place at an all boys catholic high school named Trinity. They are in the season of Fall and it takes place in the early 1970’s. Trinity is where our storyline takes place. At first it seems like a regular school but as we dig deeper into the minds and narratives of the students we discover Trinity’s dark secrets such the clubs,Brother Leon's unusual teaching technique, and the student hazing done by the school's secret group the Vigils.The time period which they are in is described by the lack of modern technology.
When Butch was nine years old, his mother sent him away with a quarter and told him never to come back. He rode the subway for days, until he was picked up by the police and taken to court. This was in August 1950, he was sent to the Children’s Center. It would be the beginning of a lifetime of institutions for Butch. Butch had to learn at a young age to defend himself. To be the toughest kid in the institution. He had to strike first or he would get hurt. He was all he had. His mother did not want him. He learned early “that a willingness to fight was essential to survival.” (1) Butch became hard to handle at the Children’s Center. He was then sent to Wiltwyck, another institution for boys. “Wiltwick had become nationally renowned school, officiall...
This novel is based in various High Schools in New York City. One of the main characters Paul, just moved to New York from Saskatoon, Alberta. This novel takes place in the mid 1980’s. At this high school, Don Carey High, none of the students or teachers care about anything that goes on within the school. They have no team spirit at all, there are no teams or clubs because no one shows interest.
The setting was Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School. 1957 was the year; it was like a major bastion of white segregation in the South because it was ranked among the top high schools in the country. And it was where the elite children of Little Rock attended school. And it was, one believes, the last place they would have wanted black children come. And in order to stay there, get there, and be there, President Eisenhower, indeed intimately had to send soldiers- warriors. September of 1957, we’re really talking about the whole period because in 1954 Brown vs. board of education said, “ Separate is not equal”, and thus began this whole event of the south to integrate, and not to integrate, and this whole almost warring like environment or atmosphere- where in most cases white people said, “ NO, we’re not going to integrate. We don’t care what the Supreme Court says”. And federal court judges said, “ Yes, you will integrate”. And so then e...
It is common for human beings, as a race, to fall into the comforts of routine – living each day similar to days before and days to come. Unfortunately, it is often too late before one even realizes that they have fallen into this mundane way of living in which each day is completed rather than lived, as explained by David Foster Wallace in “This Is Water”. This commencement speech warned graduating students of the dangers of submitting to our “default settings” of unconscious decisions and beliefs (Wallace 234). However, this dangerous way of living is no new disability of today’s human race. Socrates warned the people of his time: “A life unaware is a life not worth living” and who is to say he wasn’t completely right? A topic of long debate also includes the kind of influence that consciously-controlled thoughts can have on the physical body. A year after Wallace’s speech, neurobiologist Helen Pilcher, published “The New Witch Doctor: How Belief Can Kill”, which explains the influence of the mind and individual beliefs on the quality of one’s life. Together, both authors illustrate how detrimental a life lived unaware of one’s own thoughts and beliefs can be on the body and spirit. And though it is easy to live by
The high schools are made up of cliques and the artificial intensity of a world defined by insiders and outsiders. (Botstein pg.20) The insiders hold control. over the outsiders because of good looks, popularity, and sports power; the teacher. and staff do nothing to stop them, the elite.
+The existential position toward Susan Orlean’s essay “Saturday Night” is one that rejects the dehumanizing state of “Saturdayness” and man being defined solely as the hedonistic Being-for-St. Elsewhere (Man as Future-State Man). Her guidelines for Saturday night directly contrast the existentialist ideals of freedom, the individual, and living in the present, and the philosopher Jean-Paul Satre surely would agree. *Even Orlean herself admits “chronological time is a sort of an anachronism these days”: the “Fun Imperative” has been replaced by the “Fear Imperative” (AIDS); and the living-for-the-future syndrome is a Satrian act of “bad faith” and must be acknowledged as such.
Kauffman, J. M., & Landrum, T. J. (2013). School and Culture. In S. D. Dragin & M. B. Finch
This story takes place in a New York City school in Manhattan, in the nineteen- sixties. The book covers the span of one school semester form September to February.
The 2007 movie Freedom Writers gives a voice of hope and peace in a fragile environment where hate and sorrow battle in the life of urban teenagers. This drama film narrates the true story of a new English teacher, Erin Growell, who is designated to work in an inner-city school full of students surround by poverty, violence and youth crime bands. During the beginning of the movie, the teacher struggles to survive her first days at this racially segregated school in which students prejudice her for being white and ignore her authority in the classroom. The teacher encounters the life of students who are hopeless for a better future and attached to a delinquency lifestyle of survival. In addition, she confronts a reality of lack of educational
Many of our today as “normal” considered values are everything but self-evident. One of the most striking aspects in the novel is time; and our relationship towards it. “ We yearned for the future. How did we learn it that talent for insatiability. ” In this particu...
The film begins with a new teacher, Jaime Escalante, arriving to Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. On his first day he comes to find out that the computer science class he thought he was going to teach doesn't exist, because the school has no computers. In turn he is assigned to take over the general algebra class. From the beginning the film portrays the school as one on its downfall, and with students that are facing poverty. The class he receives is full of students who, according to other teachers at the school, are unintelligent and incapable of learning much of the material. Students cannot be expected to learn material when the teachers themselves do not believe in the stude...
because he or she is studying like crazy and during six years the only thing
students snuck out to read poetry and in "Day of the Last Rock Fight" they went