Secondary forest

Social Justice Reflection #2 As I think more deeply about the student populations I serve as part of my fellowship, one of the things I have started to wonder more about is how student affinity groups may share different characteristics from the general student body. While I have been quick to assume that the general student body at Merrimack tends to come from more affluent backgrounds, I am starting to find that the same idea cannot be applied to commuter students and graduate students in…

In the three articles: Santa Sander, Students Falling for Sanders, and College Doesn’t Need to be Free. it discusses Senator Sanders and his plan towards free tuition. He feels that it is a good idea to offer this to in-state students for college. Some of the authors of the articles agree with the idea of free tuition. In two of the articles, it states that Senator Sanders had an idea to help the poor and middle-class college students to get free college tuition. The cost of college today is…

Introduction In Johnathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, one student named Jezebel recounted the time when she knew that her school was not equally funded as other schools, “they have that money goin’ to their schools. They have a nice clean school to go to. They have carpets on the floors and air-conditioned rooms and brand-new books. Their old books, when they’re done with them, they ship them here to us.” (Kozol, 2012, p. 210). Students like Jezebel are aware that their schools do not get as…

Pg.1-50: The main character, Ruth Anne McCabe, better known as Roo is a senior in high school and is ready to go to her dream college, Yale University. Roo has a younger sister named Tilly, she is a freshman in highschool and one day when she was at a museum doing research for a school project texted Roo to pick her up from the museum minutes before they were about to close. Roo was running a little late and Tilly was really impatient so she kept sending her lots of text messages telling her to…

Imagine, as an impressionable high school student, that your teachers do not care about your education or your well-being because of a label: “at-risk” or “unteachable”. This is an issue that many students have faced, and a few outstanding individual teachers have attempted to erase this label for the progression of these students’ lives. Freedom Writers, a movie that heavily involves this problem in education, is a 2007 movie directed by Richard LaGravenese and stars Hilary Swank, Scott Glenn,…

How Embarrassing! Because I am African, people have expected me to be less intelligent in school or in a professional environment. One day in college, I had anatomy class on a Monday morning by 9:30am. I will not forget that day in my life, because I had never been humiliated in class before until that day. My colleagues and I were to engage in a discussion about Cells, and our professor divided us into groups of six, where one person from each group had to present for 5 minutes, the part of…

School is an extraordinary journey that prepares us for life’s challenges in the future. I knew middle school wasn’t going to be filled with coloring activities and jigsaw puzzles like what I had experienced in elementary school. My junior high years were unexpectedly difficult. In order to reach my goals and be successful, I had to mentally prepare to be determined, focused and responsible. 6th grade began on August 10th; I felt nervous but confident. I expected my new classes to be a breeze…

Few people know that I was bullied. In my freshman year of high school, I joined the tennis team. As a newcomer, I found myself towered over by much older teammates. Bullying doesn’t always mean being beat up or teased. Instead, I was humiliated by their persistent taunts. They masked their verbal abuse towards me with “tough love” meant to enhance team performance. However, they accomplished the opposite. The dread of being ganged up on haunted me in the hours of the school day before practice.…

After making the mistake of hanging with the wrong crowd and spending close to two years at a community school I returned to regular school and decided I’d never let anyone in like that again nor would I ever be bullied again. I came into high school five feet nine inches two hundred pounds and ready to fight anyone who tried to bully me and I did. I got into a few scuffles during my freshman year of high school but still made the varsity football team due to how aggressive I was as well as the…

“One of the most damaging messages of educational romanticism has been that everyone should go to college.” – Charles Murray. Growing up neither of my parents graduated college, while it was a struggle to make their way into the job market due to the recession, they were able to do it. While my mother eventually went back to college, my father was able to find a job that didn’t require a college degree but was able to support a family of five. Nearly everyone knows someone who didn’t graduate…