COMING DECEMBER 2013

SOON...

City Life by Yareidy G.

City Life

Give me crowds of people,

Give me tall buildings

Keep your boring quiet place,

Give me lots of homes

Give me busy streets

Keep your woods and nature,

Give me rain drops and shining sun,

Give me lights

Keep your quiet homes,

Give me technology,

Give me happiness!

Give Me Everything by Shadia N.

The Grand Mosque of
Mogadishu, Somalia's Capital

Give me Everything

Give me everything I have always wanted,

Give my country, Somalia, peace,

Give me a strong belief in my religion--here and in the afterlife,

Give me good grades in school,

Give me independence,

Give me everything I have always wanted.

 

My City by Mynique S.

My  City

Give me parks for kids to play in,

Give me amusement parks for kids and grownups to have fun,

Give me beautiful gorgeous gardens and flowers

With lots of ripe fruits and berries,

Give me beaming lights,

Keep your polluted waters,

Keep your contaminated oils,

Give me fresh air,

Give me pine trees,

Give me magical creatures,

Give me fairies,

Give me a land,

Where I’m me,

And you’re you,

When no one’s judged by whether they’re black or white

I want you to say to yourself,

This is my land.

Keep Cameras Out! by Keegan M.

Attention School Officials:

Imagine; kids walking in the halls silently, sweat dripping from their brow, glancing around nervously, hoping that for some reason they won’t get in trouble. One kid “pops” out his phone to check the time, a few seconds later school security comes in hauling the boy off to an administrator’s office, all thanks to a shiny black lens out of sight. This is what will happen if you continue to go along with the plan of putting security cameras in schools, you will have stressed out kids, kids that can’t work, and kids getting in trouble all the time.

         

One of the first bad things to happen would be that kids would start getting stressed out; you know that felling when you feel like someone’s behind you, that kind of stress. Kids would nervously look up hoping the cameras wouldn’t notice and then “bam!” he/she gets in trouble because he/she should have been focused on his/her classwork!  You can see school rules do need to be followed, but not word for word, strictly, with no exceptions, whatsoever.

The next bad thing that would happen would be that kids would start failing their tests and their grades would gradually decline into a horrible mixing pot: stress, anger, guilt, sadness, and despair. All because he/she will be yelled at by his/her teachers and family members with put downs and “You need to get this done”, and “There’s a thirteen paragraph essay due tomorrow about how waffles played a major role in the civil war”. The kid would be showered by due dates and report cards; without cameras, that would be challenging, with cameras, impossible.

So after all that; the reports, the essay about the waffles, and under the stress of the mysterious man behind the black lens he/she still had six more periods to go through! And there was no way he/she could keep this up. The kid by the end of the day ends up getting several warnings by the teachers her phone and iPod taken from the teachers, and a phone call home, all in just one six hour school day! This kid wasn’t even a bad kid either because before the cameras he/she had B+’s and A-‘s across the board. But after the camera “experiment” he/she had C-‘s if he/she was lucky but mostly D’s and even an F-! Whoa, talk about a dramatic result, right?

A small minority of people may argue that security cameras “keep kids in line” although all they really do is scare them into submission and force them to act like robots; following every rule down to the letter having no emotion, and no reaction to anything, or else they will be punished.

In conclusion I think that even considering the option of putting security cameras inside school classrooms is a rather inane concept, with kids not focusing, dropping grades and constant trouble. Schools in the United States wouldn’t be as effective or efficient as the method we are using right now. So I must insist that security cameras in classrooms law may not go in effect under any circumstances.

Keegan Metcalf