journey through junior year

During this week, one of the pieces we read were letters sent back and forth between Abigail and John Adams. Although it is an important piece of history, I couldn’t help but feel like we were intruding on their privacy by reading and analyzing and discussing what were just two letters they had meant to be written to each other. I guarantee that when they were writing these letters, they never would’ve imagined high school students all over picking it apart nearly three hundred years later. But, it still happened. They both left their mark on history in ways they probably didn’t imagine to do so. Relating this to life today, I started wondering what high school students will be studying three hundred years from now. Are they going to find President Trump’s tweets and start analyzing those (good luck with that) like we did with the letters? What if all they find from the 2000s are meaningless memes? I tend to overthink and often focus on hypotheticals but honestly, this is something ...

Throughout this week, my favorite piece we read was definitely “Just Walk On By” by Brent Staples. It describes Staples’s experiences with racism and how it has affected him in all sorts of different scenarios. He tells terrible stories of being mistaken as the “bad guy” solely based on the color of his skin and what he looks like. At the end of the story, he explains different tactics he has come up with to make the people around him feel safer and more comfortable. Although considerate, this to me, is just outrageous. Why has it become HIS job to change the way he acts in order for the strangers around him to not jump to conclusions? Staples says he often keeps his distance from others and even hums happy tunes for the comfort of others. This reminds me of the school system regarding dress code. In middle school, at Boulan Park, the dress code was so strict to the point where girls couldn’t even wear leggings to school because boys would be “distracted”. To most girls, leggings ar...