New Year's Resolutions

It’s getting to the end of the year and it’s time for everyone to make a new year’s resolution. Every year we tell ourselves we are going to be better, we’re going to eat better, and be better people, we tell ourselves “New Year, New me”. These resolutions usually last a while, but we’re so used to our old ways, we just go back to them. Every year we tell ourselves we are going to work out more, so January 1^st and 2^nd, the gyms are packed, and slowly as the month goes on, there as less and less people going to them gym. Come February, the gyms are back to their usual amount of members. I know it’s hard to work out all of the time, my resolution was to work out more too, but that didn’t really go as I had planned.

New Year’s resolutions are very hard to follow. I feel like people, myself included, give ourselves these hopes that we will change and be better people and be healthier and happier, but it’s more complicated than that. Unless you make a plan of how you are going to execute your resolution and stick to it, then you most likely won’t see the change you wanted in yourself. Props to those people who can stick with their New Year’s resolutions because a lot of people can’t. Most people will give up because it’s “too hard” or it takes too much time, but if you really wanted to change something about yourself, you could. You are the only one that can change you, whether that means changing your body or your attitude, only you can do that. Excuses are the biggest reason for not making something happen. We use excuses to make it seem ok that we didn’t do something we wanted to do. It takes dedication to change and you have to really want it otherwise you will just give up.

My New Year’s resolution for 2016 is going to be no more excuses. I always find myself making excuses for myself and it’s not ok. You have to really want to do something/change something and be strong enough to carry out that action and not do it half way and give yourself the excuse that you tried, but that’s not good enough. For example, if your resolution was to lose weight and you’re at the gym and you only do half the workout, that’s not going to help you, just do the whole workout now, yes it sucks but you will be so much happier in with your results in the end if you just do everything now. Don’t give yourself the excuse of “at least I did half of it, instead of not doing it at all”, yes that’s true at least you did something rather than nothing, but just do it all right now. Your result will come faster if you do everything.

Reading

Reading is by far my weakest quality. I am not a very fast reader, because I have to read every word in order to understand what I am reading. I am the type of reader that has to go back and reread part of the passage or story if they do not understand what they are reading. I am also the type of person that will be reading and will start thinking about something else but continues to read and then realizes that they weren’t actually reading they were think about something completely different. At that point I try and figure out what I last read and then have to continue from there.

I do not like reading because I am not very good at it. I usually understand what I am reading but I still don’t like to read. My mom always tells me that it just takes practice and that in order to get better I need to read more. I don’t really mind reading books that I chose myself because I get the freedom to pick which ever book I choose. If I like a good and can get really into it, I’ll read for hours!

However when it is a book I have to read for school, they are usually not very good, in my opinion, so I have a harder time reading them. It’s the fact that I have to read that makes me not want to read the book. In middle school we had to read but we go to pick our books and we just had to record the pages that we read each day, I liked that because we had the freedom to pick whatever book we wanted. In AP Lang we get to choose our books, but they are from a specific list of AP approved books, those books do not exactly interest me so I have a very hard time finding one that I want to actually read and it usually takes me longer to read that book. I am a very busy high school student with two sports and a job on top of that. I have to go to practices, work, and still have time to work. I have a hard time finding time to read in general, but when it comes to books I don’t particularly enjoy, I usually put them off longer than I should.

Can anyone else relate to this??? I know I'm not the only one who doesn't like to read!

Christmas

Christmas is the happiest time of the year, everyone gets excited about getting together and celebrating the holidays. Children love Christmas because they get tons of presents every year, mom and dad put a bunch of presents under the tree and Santa bring even more presents on Christmas Eve when everyone is asleep. Seeing children at the mall sitting on Santa’s lap is the most heart-warming thing. I remember when I was young and thought Santa was real and he actually brought me presents, I even wrote him a letter and he signed it for me, granted he had the same handwriting as my mom, but I didn’t think anything of it. It was awesome waking up on Christmas morning and going out to see all the presents that Santa brought. Still to this day, I can never sleep on Christmas Eve. I get so excited to open all my presents and see what I got. I always wake up way earlier than normal that day just because I’m so excited and hardly slept that night.

As we get older we seem to have less and less presents on Christmas morning, but the presents actually get better, they’re more expensive so there are less of them. A lot of the time, year round kids want every cool new thing that comes out and we want them right at that time, but when Christmas comes around, we can’t think of anything that we want. Growing up we realize that we don’t need as many presents as we did when we were younger, but we realize that we want to buy a gift and give it to someone else. I’d rather see someone’s reaction of me giving them a gift and seeing how happy they are, rather than receiving a gift myself. Yes, getting gifts is always great and we should really appreciate them, but the gift of giving is better. Being a teenager myself, I wanted to get so many of my friends presents for Christmas because I love every one of them and I want them to know that, but I don’t have enough money to buy everyone something, but we understand that others our age don’t have that kind of money either, so we all just get together and have our own little Christmas party and have a $10 gift exchange so everyone ends up with a new gift.

I love the holidays because everyone is so cheerful and in a giving mood, it makes things so much easier if everyone around you is happy.

Christmas Kick

The varsity dance team at Kennedy High school preforms at football and basketball game, we compete at four competitions a year, and we also perform at our school pep assemblies. A popular tradition we do occurs every December at a basketball game, our Christmas kick!

The dance team learns this routine the week after we compete at our state competition. Our Coach, Mrs. Arends, choreographs this dance will some help from a few girls who were in a kick routine at camp. We choose a different Christmas song every year, but we wear the same “Santa” costumes. For those of you who don’t know what a kick routine is, it’s basically a dance where the girls are in a line with their hands on each other’s shoulders and everyone kicks the same leg in the air at the same time. There are low, medium, and high kicks, they vary throughout the dance.

The kick routine is very popular because there is a prize involved. The infamous competition is to guess how many kicks are in our routine! The person who guesses correctly wins a prize of $50. It is $1 for one guess or $5 for ten guesses. We dancers do not actually know the correct amount of kicks for the whole routine, believe it or not. Everyone always says just count the kicks and tell me and ill split the $50 with you, but it would take so much time to figure it out. Coach is the only one who knows how many kicks there are and she doesn’t count them until the day before or the day of our performance.

We sell the tickets to guess the amount of kicks at lunch during the school day and before the game before we perform. The money we raise goes to the dance team (except the $50the winner receives). The dance team is self-funded and we really appreciate everyone who participates in our Christmas Kick.

The best part is during our performance when they student section starts counting all of our kicks thinking they can count every kick. They usually get to 15 or 20 kicks and then we start to break off into groups and have girls kicking at different times and it throws of the students that are trying to count. It’s funny to listen to everyone counting while you are kicking and then you start to hear them get messed up and eventually stop trying to count.

Realtionships: Then & Now

Now a days, we wonder how people communicated before there were smart phones and texting. Think about current relationships today and now think about what they would have been like 50 years ago. I would love to have lived back then, things seemed so much more peaceful without all this social media. Everyone seems to know everything and everyone as soon as it happens these days, that’s how advanced we are. If you think about it, it’s kind of sad that we don’t really have a personal life, everything is posted on twitter or Instagram.

Relationships seemed so simple and genuine in the 50’s. Before cell phones you could just call up your girlfriends and ask what she was doing, you would have to walk to her house and actually go talk to her. Not having phones would really improve peoples’ social skills because they had no other option.

Everyone dressed up and always looked nice back then. They didn’t necessarily wear the most fancy clothes all of the time but they looked classy. There were no such things as crop tops back then and “sagging your pants” was a thing either. Men asked women on dates and took them out to dinner as well. He would pick you up at your house, perhaps with a flower, he would visit with your parents, the walk you to the car and open the door for you. Men usually paid for the dinner too.

I feel as though relationships lasted longer in the 50’s than they do now. Today boys will just “slide” into a girls DM instead of talking to her in person and asking her out on a date. Couples today will fight about each other “liking” a certain some’s picture on Instagram or “favoriting” someone’s tweet. Couples will even break up over that kind of stuff. Back then, those things weren’t even around so they didn’t have little things like that to fight about. Yes I’m sure they still had things to fight about in the 50’s, but not something as dumb as liking a picture! Another thing that goes along with this is that you didn’t always know where each other was. You had to true trust the person you’re with, believe it or not.

There are so many things that have changed just in the last 50 years that it’s kind of scary to see what will come in the next 50.

Music/Drama Department

Many extracurricular activities in high school are overlooked. We get huge crowds at football games because everyone goes. Football games have become more of a social event for some people rather than actually watching the game. This is the same for basketball and volleyball games as well.

Activities such as dance team, golf, and cross country are far less popular meets/competitions to go to. These events usually get a few students to come to them, but it is usually parents and siblings that are there to watch.

Other than sports, the music department here at Kennedy is far underappreciated! We have amazing instrument players and singers and actors that few students here realize. The students that are involved in these coral or musical activities and groups work so hard at what they do so they can continue to improve. Most of them have a band/orchestra class every day, the choir and show choir kids all have a choir class every day. There are also after school practices for these students as well, they spend hours a day rehearsing and preparing for their next show.

Our band doesn’t just play at football games, they also go to competitions throughout the fall. We have a spectacular band, who received place at two competitions this year I believe, and we have an amazing drum line. Most of these kids have been playing these instruments since probably at least middle school. They practice daily and learn new music all the time.

Our show choir starts learning their show the summer before the next school year starts, they work for a good six months before their show is complete and ready to compete. Competitions start in January and go for about two months, with a competition about every two or three weeks. Happiness is the top show choir here at Kennedy and they go to Nationals in Tennessee every year and usually do very well. We also host our own competition right here at Kennedy every February, called Raise the Roof.

The drama department also puts on their own shows a few times a year. Students try out for roles of the plays and they work very hard after school to rehearse their lines and create the sets and make it perfect before they have their show. Each student has to memorize all of their lines and remember what they are supposed to be doing when they say something. Our plays are great, we have very talented actors at our school!

Skipping Classes

I know not everyone loves coming to school. It’s not that we hate school, we just don’t always like the learning part. I know it’s very inconvenient to wake up early every day and go sit in a classroom for the next seven hours while a teacher talks at you and then gives you a ton of homework that you have to do when you get home as well. For these exact reasons, kids skip class. We’d much rather stay home all day ten go to class and get more work. We think “oh it’s just one day, I won’t even miss anything,” but in reality, the net day you just have twice as much work and you probably didn’t do anything while you were at home the day before, so you might as well have gone to school.

Skipping class is a very bad habit to get into. The more you start to skip classes, the less you actually like that class, and the more likely you will be to skip that class even more. Missing school really sucks because you don’t know wat you did in any of your classes while you were gone and now you have work to make up and you don’t know what you’re doing. Then, a test rolls around and you have no idea what is going on and you bomb it!

Trends

People, especially teens, always want to know what the latest and greatest is. We watch TV shows and read magazines and follow famous people on social media to see what they have and what they’re wearing. We would all love to have a million clothes and shoes like a bunch of famous people do, but we don’t. Stores know which young celebrities to advertise, in order to get certain people to buy their product. Marketing knows that we want to dress and look like these “perfect” celebrities, so they’ll put them in their commercials and persuade us to think that ‘because this person uses this product, if I use it I’ll look like them’ kind of thing.

Trends change all the time, everyone’s wearing new clothes and new jewelry and has a new phone constantly. These changing trends are what keeps many stores and businesses alive. They always try and get the new stuff in their stores before anyone else, so we go and buy it from them.

The media is constantly following and reporting what celebrities are doing and wearing. These reports keep us entertained, we love to see what new and what’s “hot”. The media will report everything these stars do, even the not so good things. These celebrities have a lot of influence on today’s society, so the things they do can influence what kids are doing these day because they want to be like the famous people they see everywhere.

Qualities of "Leaders" and "Followers"

Are you a leader or are you a follower?

A leader is someone who generally speaks their mind. They aren’t afraid to say what they are thinking. They aren’t afraid that people will judge them for speaking out against what was said.

A leader is someone who does what they feel is right and they are confident in their decision. They might feel as though the “right” thing to do is not the “cool” thing to do, but they know they should do it anyway. They aren’t bothered by what people might say about them.

A leader is someone who is trustworthy. They are will talk to anyone and are always willing to make new friends. If someone is lost, they will help them. If someone asks for their help, they will show them the ropes and stay with them until they are comfortable and can do the task on their own.

A leader is someone who is not worried about their image or how they look compared to others. They don’t care about looking good or impressing people, they are their selves no matter what.

A leader is not necessarily the most popular person or someone with the most friends, but they are generally the most humble ad have the closest friends.

A leader is a positive role model that people want to be like or be friends with.

A leader is someone who little kids look up to and want to be like when they are older.

A follower is someone who is generally more quite, they are not usually known to speak their mind especially in a group of many people. They tend to stick to themselves and kind of sit back and watch.

A follower is someone who copies what others do.

A follower is someone who doesn’t come up with their own ideas, but might tag along to what someone else said and agree with them.

A follower is not usually the most outgoing person, they don’t tend to do spontaneous things.

A follower is generally someone who doesn’t like to speak or present in front of large crowds, they’d rather watch someone else present.

These are obviously not all the qualities of “leaders” and “followers” and these are not always true for every leader or follower that you see. Every leader is different in their own way, they are all unique, it’s what makes them a leader!

Friends

There is much controversy on the topic of friends. Some may argue that it’s not about how many friends you have but that it’s better to have fewer, better friends.

I would say that you should have a lot of friends, but also have some closer friends. The more friends you have, the more people you have the chance to get to know and hang out with. It’s good to make friends with a lot of people because it will really improve your social skills and teach you about all the different personalities that people have. High school is the prime time to make new friends. You’e been in middle school the last three years with the same people and there are a ton more people you will meet going into and though out your high school career. All you have to do is be willing to meet new people.

Some people are okay with only having one or two super good friends, but for me, I’d rather have a lot of friends. Personally, I believe that you can have more than one “best fried”, I have many “best friends”. Everyone has a best friend for certain activities, one for every class, one on your sports team, etc… We all have more than one friend! All you have to do is be willing to open up to someone and talk to them, you might have more in common with them than you think. It might be awkward at first if you’re the one who says “hi” first or introduces them self first, but after that you could become best friends. You can’t judge a book by its cover!
 

You and your group of friends are probably al very similar because you probably all like the same things and most likely all have the same attitudes towards things as well. A new friend could introduce you to new things and change your perspective on certain things. It’s good for you to be around new people every once in a while, change is good.
 

Your friends will last you a life time, they are the ones who will always be there for you. You could get in a fight with your best friend for months and then talk one day and everything just goes back to normal. I know, because that exact thing happened to me not too long ago. Don’t shut out your friends, even if you are mad at them at the moment. I promise you will get over it and you will realize that you need that friend sooner or later!