Homecoming Week

    There's a sort of magic that comes with Texas High School Football. And it's difficult to describe if you don't experience it for yourself. It's a total subculture that fascinates me, and I can only imagine it fascinated those involved in Friday Night Lights and the likes of Texas Football epics.

Homecoming Week, until the Playoffs, is the epitome of High School Football in Texas. An entire week devoted to this team and this game and this Friday Night. Then there's a dance.

It's a nice ritual, lighthearted even, because even if the team loses, the dance always cheers everyone up.

Homecoming dance is Prom's crazy cousin. Shows up early, dances crazier, dresses more casual, and makes every one laugh.

Here's to Homecoming Week!

The Race for College Admissions

Well not so much a race, as much as a colosseum of cats, clawing and hissing at each other.

Let's admit it. It's September! The cool kids are talking and thinking about Homecoming or football, THEY are the lions, and WE, are the kittens.

The kids who are taking and retaking both the ACT and SAT so that we can apply Early Decision to Ivy Leagues.

The kids who are pestering counselors about school forms while they're trying to fix first semester schedules.

The lions are getting high and getting drunk, and the kittens are staying up until 1am on eprep dot com. For real. I have done it.

And meanwhile, us kitten are few in litter at our own school, but reading College Confidential, we find the cougars. The kittens who started way earlier then us. We scored 30's on the ACT and they scored 36.

The lions could beat up the cougars, but the cougars could outwit the lions. And us kittens can't do anything to anyone.

And now, the lot of us are placed in a mad dash to submit everything before November 1st, when College Admissions will seal our fates as we quiver in fear of December 15th's notification date.

The lions will hang back and apply regular decision in January, the Cougars will cross the finish line, and the kittens will jump in and hope to scrape by.

Here's to all the kittens, racing toward Early Admission.

This was a bad metaphor and I apologize.......

The Influence of Teachers

    Teaching seems like a difficult line of work to pursue if only for the loss of momentum. I've been Chief Student Aid for the English Department at my High School for more than 2 years now, and I have seem some terrible classes treat teachers in ways that make me sick.
 
    But I've also seen teachers respect their students and seen the students return that respect. It's in those instances that I see the faculty smile and glow in what I'm sure is always their end goal.

    Teachers have a ton of influence on students. So today, was a bit disheartening.

    "I have news for you, folks. Boeing does not build engines that fall off."
     Sitting in my Economics class on September 11th, the board reads "3 major economic questions..." But the topic never comes up. Mr Hainer, our professor, asks the class where we were on that tragic American day when New York, and all of America, trembled. The stories overflow lachrymose or jovial, but honestly, it's mostly accounts of what we saw in our parents and family that day.
    We were all too young, 6 or 7, and none of us were in New York, so we're afforded a sort of safety blanket to what resounds as a horror story for Americans world wide or a lead-in into jingoism. Suffice to say that when its Mr. Hainer's turn, his story bears much more gravitas. He's lecturing to impressionable teenagers now, but back then, when the towers still stood, he was working in DC. He recounts 1977, his first visit to the World Trade Center, watching the two river flow through New York as a clear sky rolled over the Twin Towers. He recalls taking his daughters there. He also recalls September 11th, 2001, when he stood outside the pentagon, smoking a cigarette on his break, and seeing two fighter jets shoot past him.
    "The story of United 93," he tells us, "is a fairy tale." The plane went down but, by Mr Hainer's account, it "had help going down. Engines don't just fall off. They get shot off." Usually in this class I appreciate his conservative ideals as a breath of fresh air from all the "liberals" and self-proclaimed "hipsters," but today it bothers me, that what he's saying is snaking its way into my classmates' minds and nestling in there as fact.
    Before, he's told us things like: "Capitalism is a synonym for freedom," and "Wall Street brokers work as hard as anyone else!" But today it feels like more than Right Wing Thought. To debase our journalistic institutions, which I admit, are far from perfect, and imply that not one person out there knows the truth.
    Because in moments like this one, I really wonder if teachers are aware of their impact on students. Does Mr. Hainer know that all the kids in my class left certain that United 93 was shot down by our own military? Not to mention that he specifically told us this was a media cover up perpetuated by our "incompetent" journalists. I don't know much about missiles or aircrafts, but I don't think two fighter jets could shoot down a 757 and know that it wouldn't hit somewhere crucial or drop dangerous debris all over DC.

But anyway.

Teachers matter. And I think sometimes they need to be reminded.