Last Quarter!!

               The end of the school year is approaching! I've made many mistakes, and you know what they say.............................new quarter new me!! (was meant to be corny)  My goals for this last quarter is to have close to no absences and to have very good grades to pass.  I am positive that if I set my mind to it, I can pass and go up and above.
             
            The way I will make that happen is to try to fix my sleeping problems.  I can try to set louder alarms and motivate myself to get myself out of bed every morning.  I can try to make more positive changes in my life.  I can try to eat healthier, have more positive thoughts, surround myself with more positive people.  I'm sure in some aspect, indirect or not,  those three factors all affect sleep. 

              

              The way I can make my goal of having better grades is to just to attend school.  I think that if I fix my sleeping habits, in turn, my grades will go up.  I can also put effort into how focused I am in class.  I can also try to stay out of trouble and bad situations that would impair my ability to function.  Other things I could try is possible joining some programs to pull me away from distractions and get a chance tio educate myself further. 

Behavior Plan

Behavior Plan

       If I were the dean of Furness High School the way I'd also have a sort of lunch detention or a sort of 3 chance thing in place for more minor offenses such as being late after 8am but before 8:30am.  I think that its odd that the same punishment is delivered for those who bully, disrespect, and make chaos and to those who are waking up late and just finishing breakfast. I also think when dealing out punishments, authority figures in the school should listen more to the students side of why something happened and the deans should be less belligerent to those who don't disrespect them.  I think there should be more mutual respect and when there is discipline involved, and there should be a much greater effort to talk person to person rather than adult to child.
      

 Challenging Beliefs or Ideas

       My friends' birthday is around Christmas.  I was attending his birthday party, And after the party was over me and a small group of friends were hanging out, sorta like the "after party" except more of a gathering than party.  This was about two years ago.  We were lying outside, on the grass, gazing at the hundreds of stars above us since we were away from the city lights in the suburbs.  Then Kyle, the birthday boy, asked us all if we believed that there was some sort of god or deity out there watching us, and if so, why?  We all thought about it, debated about it, and that's when my beliefs were challenged.  What is it that makes me believe that there is something out there?  The biggest argument saying a God exists was: "How did we come to be? How were we created and why do we have the intelligence to do what we do?" The biggest argument against the idea of a creator was: "Science says everything came from the big bang.  They have evidence of of the big bang from radio waves, and, according to these waves, the Milky Way is one of the oldest galaxies in the Universe. And if there is a God, what created it? 
       The result of that one night of questioning the existence of god is that I'm left doubting if there is one.  Sometime certain amazing, seemingly impossible things, will happen, and my faith is revived, but then I remember how miserable so many people are, and then I think, if there is a god, why is he letting this happen? So my faith is pretty rocky.
      The courage to challenge beliefs is important because sometimes if you don't challenge beliefs, you'll stumble blindly through life.  For example, if you live life with racist, sexiest beliefs and you don't stop for a moment and question, why do I believe this? Than you'll just be an ignoramus for the rest of your life.  Maybe if you question your beliefs hard enough, you'll find out what keeps you ticking everyday!  

My New Years Resolution

       My two personal New Years resolution is to reach my goal of a 18-20% BMI and to bleach my hair and turn it silver. To acheive my first goal, I could start eating healthier to get my metabolism steady.  I could also workout to get my body toned and fit.  I could do cardiovascular exercises to increase my metabolism to encourage weight loss and muscle gain.  To reach the latter goal without going bald I could take care of my hair.  I could grow out my roots more (the healthiest part of my hair) and when I bleach it, there will be less of a chance of hair loss then bleaching dyed hair. Then I'll be able to destroy it some more. :)

       

       The two academic goals I have this year is to do better in school and get more motivated.  I could try to get more motivated by thinking about my future and visualizing the consequences that come with bad decisions.  Once I have achieved that goal, I'm on my way to doing better in school! It would be like a chain reaction, I'd be afraid of the future and I'd try my best to prevent anything that would get in the way for me to have a happy ending.

Down The Generations

     With every generation, people make new discoveries, make advances forward in technology, and are always finding new ways to make life easier.  But as more and more generations pass by, we become more dependent on technology and the social acceptance of certain expressions and ideas change.
     During my parents time, roughly 20 years ago, the concepts in technology were still the same, but it was way more basic.  People couldn't afford mobile phones and not many people could afford a computer. The internet was not widely used and there wasn't much information on it either.  In my grandparents time, the idea of the computer was not even conceived.  They had house phones, but even then, not that many people had house phones either.  People did not use machinery as much to do work, rather, they had more manual labor during those times. 
    In the generation I'm growing up in, we are more dependent on machines to do our work for us than the previous generations were.  In a way, that's good because it reduces our workload and  not as many people go home suffering from fatigue.  In a another way, its bad that we depend on technology so much because what if there comes a day where we cannot use machines anymore due to lack of resources? We wouldn't know how to do manual labor because we would have forgotten how to do it. Our dependency on machines also makes us lazy and we don't see the value in physical labor anymore.  We won't be able to take pride in our work anymore because the idea of taking pride in your own work will be lost eventually.   
     Another way that my generation is different from the past two generations is that we have created new medicines for many diseases many suffer from. A way that is a good change is that many don't have to worry about  getting sick and dying from illnesses that used to be deadly, such as the flu.  A way that us creating new cures for diseases can be seen as a bad thing is that new, deadlier strains of viruses come up.  As we create these new cures, we become more dependent on them and our immune systems get weaker.  This is bad because our immune systems are becoming weak and new strains of deadly viruses and bacteria are coming up.

Self Assessment 

The classes I take are:

        1) American History

       2) Chemistry

        3) Chinese

       4) AP English

       6) Algebra 2

       7) Junior Seminar 

Im doing well in my first period class.  I think I'm doing pretty well in chemistry too.  In Chinese I'm doing the worst because almost the entire grade depends on behavior and homework.  Same goes for AP English. In algebra 2 I'm barely passing.  Although I did most of the classwork and excelled in my test scores, I didn't do any of my homework which resulted in my barely passing status in that class. In junior seminar I do most of the work so I'm passing.  I'm pretty sure I understand most of the things that are being taught to me but I'm just lazy so I don't do the work.  This has resulted in my grades dropping.  What I could do is find some motivation and stop slacking so that I could bring my grades up.  I do the work in the classes that I like, so I guess what I could do is learn to appreciate the subject I don't like? Maybe that would be the solution to my dropping grades. 

Settling For Mediocrity

       There are many ways that I've settle for mediocrity. For instance, I'm aiming for my diploma rather than doing well and choosing to excel.  Another example of when I've chosen mediocrity is when I've gone out to eat and rather than spending more money for better food, I chose to save and have the more mediocre food.  I'm sure my life would definitely be different if I made different decisions, like my stomach would have been happier that one time if I wasn't afraid to spend more money and I'm sure I'd probably have an easier time right now if I wasn't afraid of not knowing what could happen in the near future.  Allow me to clarify.  I'm scared of not doing something that would make me happy now because I don't know what could happen in the next minute, the next hour, or even the next week.  So many things could happen to you, like you could suddenly be crushed by a building tonight, hit by a car, experience spontaneous combustion.  I'm afraid of failing to do something that would make me a less happy person were something to happen to me.  My life would probably be much more simpler, although a lot more dull, it would probably better in certain aspects.  Ways people can overcome their fear of failure is people could simply care less.  Other ways is to look forward to the future and think of the positive consequences to what they are afraid of failing to do.