Home Stretch

It's crunch time for high school students everywhere. There's finals, quarterlys, and etc coming up. Seniors especially have it the worst. They're excited because they're finally done and can't wait for the teachers they see everyday to become distant memories. It's what most people tend to call "senioritis." Am I experiencing it? Why yes I am, but this is probably the point in the year that requires my focus the most. It's so hard with track everyday, senior trip in two weeks, and both prom and states being on the same day. Keeping focus is nearly impossible, but that's the life of a high school student. I see it as good time management practice for college. God only knows that it's going to get so much harder from here. This is exactly why I say track is life. In track there are those days where you might have to do 3-4 events in one meet, but you've got to learn to take it one race at a time or else you'll do terribly. High school was a lot like my first event of the day. I did the long jump. Ironically it's a short event like, high school. You expect it to be forever, yet before you know it it's over. I expect college to be a lot like my 2nd event the 110m high hurdles. They scare most but those who overcome this fear are bound to overcome any trial and tribulation to come across in their life.  My 3rd event was the triple jump which symbolizes the period in time where I'm finding out who I am. I'm going to go through different phases like the triple jump until I become the man I was always meant to be. My last event of the day was always the high jump. After every height you can only go up from there. In life I only plan on moving forward and not back tracking.

"Detention"

What's the point of detention. I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've been written up in my life. Some people are in detention like it's a religion. For someone like me, detention makes want to never be late to school because its so annoying, but to others it must feel like some kind of hang out spot. Have you ever really broke down the reasoning for detention, or wondered if it actually has any meaning or affect to students? I think about the same thing every time I have a detention once in a blue moon. What is this actually doing for me? Maybe when I was younger, my attention span was so short that I squirmed and twirled in my seat so much that I never wanted to do anything bad ever again. Now I feel like it's truly pointless. All I do is sit here for here for 45 minutes and then I'm told I can go home. What's the point of that? It doesn't refine me in any kind of way, and it most definitely isn't going to turn a so called "bad" kid into a good one. They really should come up with an alternative to detention. I'm not saying just let kids do what ever they want, but I am saying they should at least be getting something out of it. I remember my first real detention in middle school. I went to Winslow Middle School and there had to be at least 700 kids there. There were so many kids that we had to get out of school at 1:30 just so there wasn't a traffic jam when the high school let out. My detention was for 2 hours all because of a friend of mine and his girl friend and I some how got involved. They made up us copy down the Declaration of Independence the entire time we were there, and if you didn't write enough, you had to come back the next day and do it all over again. That was by far over the top, but it was something different. After this year I probably won't hear the word detention again until I have kids of my own, so I do hope they come up with something new instead of these medieval forms of torture.

Spring break!

What did I do for spring break? Well, Larry and I had gone on a college visit to Alvernia University in PA. We stayed from Sunday night until Monday evening. Our guide was this short guy who ran track that was no taller than Larry. He gave us a tour of the school and answered pretty much every question we had about college. It was a great experience. I met my future track teammates minus our freshman class, and sat in two college classes. We went to a marketing class and an English class. The marketing class we sat in is actually a required course I'll have to take when I get there so it was quite exciting for me as well as educational. They were talking about information that I was already familiar with. The English class put into perspective the amount of reading that a college student assigned which is a lot! Students there gave us a lot tips on how to stay on top of the work assigned. The main tip was knowing how to manage my time. In college you have a lot of free time and the key is to know what to do with that free time.