Link to "Being 13: Inside the Secret World of Teens". From Mike

If any of you want to watch parts of the documentary again, or share it with friends or family, here is the link.

https://youtu.be/t-9LtTtkg04?list=PL-WnhqkddCM01-Fcn0qbyWP7hkilqi00h

This film really made me think about our cultural habits and some of the challenges and pressures our young people are faced with.  I think it's a good resource and starting place for a conversation about technology and social media use.

All my best,

Mike

Anderson Cooper.

Adding Research to Active Reading Exercise. From Mike

We will create and brainstorm a list of good research questions for today's profiles.


Do your work on the profile question that you take, and post your research findings in the Comments section here.  What did you discover?  Where did you find your best source? How does this help us understand the profile better?

See you in the Comments section below. . .

Brainstorming Post for collective good Interview Questions. From Mike

Students, using the Comments section below, please post your the four best interview questions you have based on the themes of ECCENTRICITY or DREAMS.

This way we have a multitude of questions to pick from, rewrite, and use for our interviews for the last Creative Profile essay.

Beauty in the struggle

I will always hold onto my love for the sport of football and basketball, i will never and cant ever let my passion for sports go. Sports are full of emotions, passion, edge, and fight. Sports are about working together as a collective unit for one common goal, and that's winning. Being active in sports can also test character in many many ways, how do you work with others? can you be trusted to do your assignment? will you battle every play for your teammates? if you can truly be a dependent teammate and player then you would be viewed as a high character player, because you will sacrifice for others and do whats best for everybody. Our coaches always would preach "We put players in positions that we think is best for the team, team over me" football is a sport that can bring a group of people very close together, and that's part of the beauty. My senior year in high school i was the running back and linebacker, Our first scrimmage of the year changed my senior season forever and i would've never expected it. I was having a great scrimmage until one play changed my season. I was running the ball, i broke through the line like a inmate breaking out of jail. As the play continued a safety came out and took my knee out. I tried getting up and walking put the pain was too much.The trainer asked me "Wheres the pain at austin?" i pointed to the inside of my kneecap, the pain was too much for me to speak. The trainer eventually revealed to me that he thinks my MCL was torn. I missed half of the football season.

When i first heard this news i was really frustrated/upset. I felt like my whole season was ruined, then i remembered to stay strong because that's the best thing to do in tough situations. This injury would keep me out for a few months but when i started to come back from the injury i was going to work as hard as possible to come back better, and stronger than i was before the injury. I felt like this injury tested my character, not only because it was my senior season but because I've had an injury before take a season away, and i never wanted the feeling again.  I was faced with this situation and i had to deal with it as best as i could. I felt i had as good of a season as i could, pending the situation.


words:430

Snapshot 6 by Naomi Hillman

Writer Come’s to Life

When I was in junior high I had loved to write short stories. I would always find the perfect time to write a short story, at lunch, recess and, even during class if we weren’t doing anything. My first book that I had written was based off a Japanese Music video. “ Vestige,” it was called. I love that song so much that I decided to make it into a book. I was going to call it Vestige but that name was already taken so I had to come up with a better title and “Burning Flower,” was the name I took. I could picture the cover of the book now, “Burning Flower by MsAlice Nishikawa.”

MsAlice Nishikawa is my alter ego, its a character I give myself every time I write. Sounds silly, I know but I think its cool. I call it my stage name. As I grew up I got into more reading and writing. In High School I mostly spent my days after school at the library since I volunteered there. Volunteering has its advantages, I would ask any of the librarians to get me the newest comic book they could find. I like to read Japanese comic books also known as manga. As I read them I started to think, hey I want to write something like this. When I write I tend to put a little bit of fantasy or even science fiction like unnatural creatures. Super natural was the word I was looking for.

Been writing ever since, never had anything published yet, but that’s because my writing isn’t up to that level yet. Every day I would read one of my books and think to myself, man I really need to improve my grammar. My dream is to become a professional novelist. I guess you could say I’m holding onto my books and dreams. Reading manga inspires me to become a novelist or maybe I could write my own manga. I dream about writing my own manga then after that it can become an Anime (Japanese Cartoons). I have over 15 unfinished books and only one finished book. Funny right, I have all these books but only one is finished. Even a creative person such as myself can have writers block. Right now I’m currently writing another book, I wont get into details about what its about but, lets just say vampires are involved.

Since I wanted to become a writer I decided that my major for college was going to be English. I picked English as my major because I want to better my vocabulary for when I write. I’m an amateur when I write I’ll admit which is why I picked English. I heard in college that they have creative writing courses. Oh boy! Cant wait to get into that course.

I want to say that my treasures are my books that I write. Some of them are very old and some are new. Every time I get an idea I write it on paper and before you know it I’m already writing the third chapter to the book. I have a big imagination when it comes to writing. My imagination tends to grow as the day goes on and no one can take that away from me. I’m holding onto my creativity. 

Freddy Jr.- Carmen Curtis

I feel like the thing that I am holding on to is my brother. I was diagnosed with PTSD when I was a junior year in high school. My brother had died when I was five and ever since then I have been holding on to the few memories I have of him.

4 years’ old

I remember him always being really protective of me and my sister. There was this time that my mom brother and I had gone outside of Children’s Hospital because it had been a nice day. We were in this small part of the stone path that broke out into a circle that had a round short stone wall around it and a grassy area that centered around that that contained benches and a few trees. I was off playing on my own when some boy had come up to me and started to be mean. He ended up pushing me down. I cried because I had scrapped my knee. My brother had seen the entire incident and had come over to where I was on the ground to help me up. After my brother had helped me sit down on the stone wall he told me to stay where I was. At the time I had found it weird that he hadn’t stayed to sit with me. I watched him as he walked up to the boy that had pushed me and punched him. The boy went and cried to his mom about the fountain of blood pouring from his nostrils. My mom had stopped talking to my dad on the phone and realized that the boy’s mom was talking to my brother. I feel like the only reason that she hadn’t been yelling at him was because she realized he had no hair. She had been telling him very sternly that he couldn’t just walk up and punch people. When my mom came and asked what happened the lady told her that Freddy had punched her son in the face. My mom looked at him with a bewildered face and asked him why. I remember that after he had explained himself the other boy was getting yelled at and the boy having to apologize to me and the women telling my brother that she had been wrong and that he should always stand up for his little sister.

5 years’ old

I also remember the time I realized that I realized that my brother loved me a lot more than he could ever say. It was the fourth of July and Freddy was sitting in his hospital gown next to me. He was playing Donkey Kong on his play station while I was coloring in a coloring book. As I looked over and began to watch him play I thought about my new Barbie snowboarding game mom had just bought me and asked if I could use his play station. He said I could as long as he got to color me a picture. I agreed and let him have my coloring book then put in my new game. I was so excited I didn’t even stop to see what my brother was doing. I was too engrossed in the game on the screen to see that my brother had found a picture that he liked in my coloring book. My brother had always been the kindest person. He would always do anything to make my sister or me happy. When he gently pulled on the back of my power puff girls shirt with his fragile fingers I turned around only to see that he had closed the book and that he was done with his picture. Even at a young age my brother had been a gifted artist. I knew that the colored picture would be beautiful but before I could grab the book my brother started acting weird. He started shaking really bad and hyperventilating. His heart monitor started beeping fast. My mother shoved me off the bed and me and my sister were rushed from the room in a panic I began crying asking if he was okay but no one would answer me. My aunt who had visiting that day brought us over to our room at the Ronald McDonald house and calmed us down. My mom and dad never came back to our room that night to tuck us in but my aunt said, after a long talk on the phone later that night, that we would see them in the morning and that my brother was fine. I never got to see my brother the next day my mom said that he was in recovery. The next day when I seen my mom I ran up to her and she gave me my coloring book. I searched through it frantically trying to find the picture that my brother had drawn for me when I stopped on a colored picture of a rose that said “I love you.”

16 years’ old

I was rummaging through old boxes in the side attic of my house looking for glass jars that I could use for my biology project when I came across a box that I just had to open. The box itself wasn’t all that interesting but what intrigued me was that on the top in my mother’s handwriting was the name Freddy. My brother had died from cancer on July 31 when I was five from squamous cell carcinoma. When I opened the box that was basically falling apart on all sides as I went through the box I found a folded up piece of paper. When I opened I couldn’t contain my happiness. It was a small picture of a cartoon rose that said “I love you.” I began to cry with joy but also with sadness. It was a bittersweet moment looking at the colored in cartoon. 

The Library - Miranda( Snapshot six)

I am holding onto the past and how things used to be.  I treasure the old time building's and the paved brick roads along with house appliances from over one hundred years ago.  I love cleaning my grandmother's house and finding a surprise in every box or book.  It's so interesting to see her childhood right before my eyes from books from the 1800's, wooden toys, black and white photographs, and so many more treasures. It seems like I am the only one in my family that cares about these old and dusty things but for me they're what my grandma had and now I have them and will pass them down to my children eventually.  One scene is when I found my grandmother's old Quiver , which is her senior year book from 1939,When I was down in our basement, in our library. I was rearranging boxes upon boxes of books. There had to have been at least 20 boxes of books and I had finally had enough of not being able to walk across the floor from the tumbling boxes stacked in front of the bookcases and in the middle of the floor. So I started opening the boxes and stacking the books inside on top of our long bookcases to try and make floor space. As I opened the boxes I ran into silverfish, which are a small silver book worms but I found roughly 11 which is a huge accomplishment from when we first inherited the house when my grandma passed away in 2007 and found a few hundred silverfish under every box. The boxes were dusty, and coated with cobwebs and many boxes had small brown worm/caterpillar hybrid looking insects within them. By the time I got to the 7th box I had stacked nearly 175 books, some as old as 1852 and some as new as 2006. The older books had been ruined as the silverfish had ate all of the glue in the binding of the books, but also they were coated in mold because no one else but takes care of the library and we don't have a dehumidifier in there to reduce the moisture in the air so it ends up making a lot of the books to grow mold on the outside and along the edges of the pages. It is really disgusting to think about and to deal with including the bugs and mold, but someone has to organize the books and take inventory of what is there. We keep the books although they are gross because that is the one thing my father asked for is that we do not throw out any books, so my father is also holding on to the old books that he grew up with. We are holding on to the house and the memories made there as he helped my grandparents build the house in the early 1970’s and we both grew up there. I hold on to my father’s and grandmother’s childhood by keeping the papers and hidden treasures and am holding onto the old days, photographs, books, toys, saved and collected by my grandmother which will all to be passed down and cherished for decades to come even though the rest of the family over looked the stories these items have. I hold onto the house for all of it’s glory in the eyes of my grandmother for how she saw her treasured home.

Total words (574)