Morgan Wacker

The Transcript

What I want to know is what is going through my school district’s mind right about now. I mean, I love my school and all, but it’s not exactly always helpful. I went to speak with my counselor one day to see about getting a transcript for some upcoming scholarships I had. She told me to check back closer to the end of the semester for a more updated transcript, which is understandable since it only had one of my three ACT scores for one. But then she tells me that she can’t just print them off, make them official, and give them to me. She tells me then that I have to find time to log on to PrepHQ.com and request a transcript through there, she was basically telling me that I had to go through that process for all eight or so that I need. Pretty time consuming. Not to mention how long it takes her to actually get on and get it for me. I had previously gone on to request one to be sent to the university that I was applying to. She told me to go on there and request it and she would get on the next morning and send it out and it would probably make it to the school before my actual application since I mailed in my application. But after I did that, I received 2 emails from the university letting me know that they were still waiting on my transcript, it took her almost a week to get on and send my transcript electronically. Yea, that’s really the kind of impression I want to put on a school that I want to go to. And also, what she failed to mention to me was that I could request a transcript to be sent to myself on paper, I had only ever heard them talk of sending straight to the schools which does no good if wanting them for scholarships. So how was I even supposed to know?

So the last day of the semester rolls around and I forget to stop back by the office to try and get them. My mom had emailed her that day anyway and AGAIN explained my situation to my counselor, and asked if I could get some official transcripts for scholarships that are due over our Christmas break. My counselor’s response, however, was not very nice, when she finally decided to respond right before the bell was about to ring to end the last day of 2009. She told my mom that I should have came to her sooner because the bell was about to ring. She then went on to say that I could request them to myself on paper, which had never been said before.

My mom was not too happy with the attitude that my counselor had during their discussion, so she decided to take the situation to a friend that is a counselor at another school in the district. She couldn’t believe the response that my mom got when she read the conversation. She being as awesome as she is went back to her school and printed off my transcript  for me, although it’s not official without an administrator’s signature from my school. I thank her greatly for what she did for me.

The Scholarships

So you want to ask your counselor about scholarships, how and where to find them and what not? Well, if you go to my school, don’t bother, I’ll tell you what they’ll say, “Go look on PrepHQ”. That’s terrible. There’s a small-good number of scholarships that they’ve added for my high school to look through. You might look at the list and say, “Wow, that’s a lot of opportunities!” But once you get a closer look at them you realize that you may only be eligible for or qualify for one or two. So your counselor really only gives you one or two scholarships, but is that going to pay for college, if you even get them that is. I don’t see any of the new counselors really making an effort to help us to get into college, help me get to college.

I dream of going to college, getting my bachelors, and masters degree in Journalism and leading a successful like to make my family proud, but I can’t do it on my own, I’ll admit it. And even though my parents’ incomes may make you think otherwise, but I depend on scholarships to get me to college and to fulfill my dreams. I shouldn’t have to go out on my own to search for scholarships that I’m eligible for, but I do and I have to because the school is making no effort to help. And also double minoring will make things cost a little more with the extra classes, so scholarships are absolutely essential for me.

I hope the school gets better at this by the time my brother is a senior. If not, at least I’ve got experience in searching for them.

Tests

If I have a class and three class periods in a row basically I have three very stressful tests, then why in the next class period (the last day of semester and half day) do we HAVE to take another test. You say it’s because if we don’t have one then no one will show up that day, but that’s just plain stupid. Why would we skip a whole day of school just because we don’t have a test in one class, when we have tests in all of our other classes? I’m, of course, talking about my American Government class. We have to take (and pass) the United States Constitution Test, the End of Course Exam, and the Missouri Constitution Test to graduate. So since our teacher was told we HAD to take a fourth test so that we wouldn’t “skip school” we got a nice little four question test asking: What did you learn in this class? What topic do you wish we covered? etc. So it’s not always the teachers that are bad, it’s just that I think the administration needs a little work.

Cell Phones

If students can’t have cell phones then neither can teachers or faculty. It’s as simple as that. If there’s a problem in your life you can just as easily get contacted by someone as we can, and you really have it even easier since you all have these nice new shiny laptops that you carry around with you everywhere. (What percentage of your laptop is used to help educate your students? Isn’t that what you have it for? I don’t see that average percentage as very high among some of the faculty in my school.)

Bottom line is: students won’t complain as much about having to put their phones away if teachers followed the same rule.

The teachers

So people become teachers so that they can teach, and educate others right? Yea that’s how I thought it was too, but I guess now people just do it for the great pay? Yea, I’m sure it’s the pay. It’s not that hard to do your job after all those years of education and training. They even tell you what you need to teach, you know a curriculum…

So why, with all that’s given to you, do you walk in the first day and basically say “Go for it” with absolutely no instruction on how to do anything? It doesn’t make much sense to me. I may already know the stuff but everyone else is completely ignorant, and I have to deal with it all and try to fix it before it gets published for everyone to see. That’s a lot of work dumped on me when it didn’t need to be if the others knew what they were doing or if they would listen to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing all that, it’s what I want to do, edit and page design, but it’s not up for one person to do it all, and I shouldn’t have to basically write all the articles because they need so much work.

I should get paid to teach that class. I can definitely do it after who I had for a teacher my first year of the class, I feel I’m that prepared. But this year it’s slipping away with someone new.

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So all of this going on during my last year of high school isn’t very helpful. I think my school or maybe the entire district needs a little work. Well more than a little. You can’t blame the switching of software on all of these things, which is what some people try to say.

 This of course coming from a student’s perspective.

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But HEY I sure do love my school.

Photo thanks:

#1: from Regan Chamberlain: Communication Arts Teacher

#2: from Kate Anthony on Flickr

#3: from Sean Nash

So senior year is full of…. well senior stuff right. Yes and No. Senior stuff is really the same as junior year, and sophomore year, you go to class, you get homework, you have tests that colleges look at, or at least they say they look at, and you go about your day as normal. It used to be that your senior year you only had to be at school for the classes you needed to graduate, but now they keep you busy and make you keep a full schedule. As if you already didn’t have time to fill out scholarships and write hundreds of essays. They keep you busy with school work, so now you have to worry even more about keeping your GPA up and your grades high so you keep your high spot on the class ranking list, or try to move your ranking up.

Senior year is not as laid back and fun as it once used to be. Not saying, that I was expecting it to be easy and the best time of my life, but senior year has become a giant competition between classmates. Competing for the top spot in the class and even the school, some students hardly give themselves fun time or free time so that all their time goes to school work. But why have students gotten so competitive? What good is it?

Being that competitive is almost essential nowadays if you care at all about getting some sort of post-secondary education. Getting into colleges is getting harder and harder. And even if you get accepted to a college, you have to worry then about how you’re going to pay for it. Getting scholarships are highly competitive when you’re competing against possibly every student in the United States. A lot of scholarships go by your GPA, ACT score, and financial need. Everything is about a test score these days. They want to make sure that they’re not wasting their money. If they give someone money, and lots of it, for school, they want to know that their money is going to create something good.

Why would donors give someone money if they think that that student is going to fail with their goals or dropout, especially when they could give it someone who is extremely motivated with what they want to do with their life. It helps a lot if you are self-motivated, you can get things done a lot faster and sometimes easier, and it helps with those pesky scholarships. If you just take the time to get them done you never know what money you can accumulate for school.

My family is one of those families that on paper, it says that we have money and don’t need financial aid, but we really need the help to pay for my college fees, even more so since I’m going away for school. Getting as many scholarships as I can is essential so I am not leaving college with debt. My mom doesn’t want me to have to take out loans, so we’re depending on financial aid (which we may not even qualify for), and scholarships. So most of this year I’ve been filling out scholarships. My senior year has been filled with scholarships, both searching for and filling out, and essay writing, homework, projects for classes, my dual credit class, studying, ACT practicing, and work. So it hasn’t really been fun filled quite yet. You just have to make the time for fun and all the competition of senior year and getting to college.

Four in ten girls in the United States get pregnant as a teenager. That’s almost half of the teenagers in the U.S. I find that statistic to be extremely high, way higher than it should be. Some of the same teens end up getting pregnant for a second time before they hit the age 20. All across the nation, near one million girls under the age of 20 get pregnant each year. That’s close to 2800 teen girls having sex and getting pregnant each day. And how does society look at this?

Well a lot better than they did say 20 years ago when the percentage of teen pregnancies was only 9.3% compared to today’s 40%. Since the numbers have sky rocketed over the years the world has learned to accept it, since there was so few years ago, when someone found out they looked down on you greatly because it wasn’t common at all.

A lot of people are complaining about the economy nowadays, teen childbearing is not helping that at all, if anything it’s making matters worse. People are also wanting lower taxes, well then crack down on abstinence because teen childbearing alone costs U.S. tax payers nearly $7 billion annually.

Don’t forget though, it takes two to tango. Who is getting these girls to sacrifice everything for a little “fun” or sex? About 77% of all births to high school-aged girls (16-18) are fathered by men older than the high school age, and 51% of all births to junior high school-aged girl (15 and younger) are fathered by men over the high school age. These men should be locked up for rape!

Men over the age of 25 have fathered twice as many teenage births than boys under the age of 18, and men over the age of 20 have fathered five times as many children of junior high school-aged girls as did junior high school-aged boys.  There is something definetly wrong there. These parents need to be making it a priority to know where their kids are and who they’re with. My parents always know that about me. In my 8th grade year alone, there were two girls in my health class that were pregnant.

This is how I see it, because society could really care less about more and more teens getting pregnant, girls aren’t as afraid of what others might think if it happened to them. They’re not  afraid of being shut out by friends and family or anyone because it has got to be so common among girls. What’s ridiculous is that the age keeps dropping in mothers. This past year I’ve heard about numerous 14 and one or two 13 year olds getting pregnant. There’s even a t.v. show about a 14 year old having a baby. When you are seeing girls at that age popping out babies, you know something has got to be done to stop it.

Let me just clarify in case of any confusion, I am not one of those people that shuts out pregnant teens. I don’t hate all teens that get pregnant and I don’t look down on them. I was just simply stating that the numbers are getting crazy high.

artwork thanks:

aki.kyozoku, “Teen pregnancy ad.” Flickr. 14 May 2007. 12 Jan 2009 http://www.flickr.com/photos/aki-kyozoku/498722478/.

the Frankfurt School, “”Where were you when I needed you the most?”.” Flickr. 10 09 2006. 12 Jan 2009 http://www.flickr.com/photos/thefrankfurtschool/239961162/.

 mira mira on the wall, “White Trash.” Flickr. 20 Feb 2005. 18 Jan 2009 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mirabw/5137481/.

Why do bad things happen to good people? That’s a pretty common question, with a not-so-common answer. Have you ever heard anyone answer it with reason?

A lot of people use that unanswerable question as an excuse not to believe in God. “If God is real, then why are so many bad things happening if he’s all powerful and good?” I’ve heard it a few times myself.

I got the idea to do a post on this from, you guessed it, going to church. My youth pastor was out of town and so the pastor stepped in to conduct our lesson for the morning. This is mainly what we focused on.

Some people think that karma works in life, like you do good things, good things will happen to you, and you believe that if someone is always bad, then naturally bad things will happen to them, or at least we say that they deserve bad things. But what happens when the good person has bad things happen? Suddenly, there’s no God or this wouldn’t have happened. But it’s not God who always makes things happen, sometimes he just allows them to happen. Big difference? Not really.

You may not realize it at the moment, but it happened for a reason. Take this for example: say you’re a senior in high school about to start your last year of high school, but you’re family starts having money problems and you’re forced to move out of state because of your dad’s business; you would probably see that as a bad thing happening, moving away from all of your friends to a place where you’ve never been and you don’t know anyone.

But say if you didn’t move then you wouldn’t have met your future husband and you wouldn’t have landed a major scholarship to an ivy league college. You didn’t know those things were gonna happen at first, but one bad thing led to many wonderful things.

My point with this is not to stop being a good person because it doesn’t matter if bad things will still happen, because it still matters if you’re a good person or not. Just don’t think that just because bad things are happening to someone that you don’t think they should be happening to that it’s because there’s no God.

Artwork Thanks,

funkandjazz, “Karma.” Flickr. 22 10 2006. 8 Jan 2009 http://www.flickr.com/photos/phunk/276863888/.

weiglen, “Karma: What you give is what you receive.” Flickr. 30 11 2008. 8 Jan 2009 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/weiglen/3071538221/>. 

A lot of people will just agree with the government in saying that you’re not alive until your mother gives birth to you. But once again if that’s the case then why are there laws saying that after a certain time in your pregnancy you can’t get an abortion if you don’t want the child? They make you wait to have a partial-birth abortion. It’s because the child has grown, developed and began moving, not just the cells but the child is kicking and moving around. The baby has a heartbeat and a pulse and is breathing inside the mother’s womb. Basically I think that the government chose to say alive at birth because it’s the only date they would know for sure. Lots of women don’t know the day they conceived, or at least the government doesn’t know, and the government can’t really track when the baby’s heart beat for the first time.

  thanks for the pictures:

http://www.sydneyivf.com/Portals/0/skins/sydneyivf/images/pronucleii.jpg , Euthman, “9-Week Human Embryo from Ectopic Pregnancy.” Flickr. 14 June 2007. 6 Dec 2008 http://www.flickr.com/photos/euthman/548063929/. ,Hive, “9 Month Old Fetus.” Flickr. 19 Dec 2006. 6 Dec 2008 http://flickr.com/photos/hive/327506828/. ,http://www.solarnavigator.net/animal_kingdom/animal_images/Human_infant_newborn_baby.jpg,