13 Ways To Look At A Ramen (라면)

Excluding Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss, I’ve never really been an avid fan of poetry. A few days ago in English class, we read a poem about blackbirds. It was called “Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens (click the link to read).

Honestly, I thought it was another one of the 13572318746 boring poems out there.

Then, our teacher, Mrs. Porter, told us to look at a poem written in a format similar to that of the “Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird.” It was called “Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Tortilla” by Aaron Abeyta.

What Mr. Abeyta did was that he found something that he loved, a tortilla, and made a poem of a similar form of “Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird.” Here’s the first stanzas for each poem:

YEARBOOKs Today: Purposeful??

Why do we need yearbooks?

This is the cover of this year’s yearbook.

I”m not saying that yearbooks are bad – they preserve memories and all.

They probably would’ve been pretty nice for people in the ’70s and ’80s, where many people leave your school, and contact with your friends is limited.

But in an age of text messaging, Facebook, and e-mail, what’s the real purpose of yearbooks?

In a school where return rate, especially for juniors (which I am), is literally 100%, it seems as if,  for me, yearbooks are now obsolete.

As seniors, they would be nice to have, with senior pages and all.

But as I look around in my classes, in lunch, those yearbooks aren’t just worth paying 50,000 won ($39) for.

Not anymore.

Hiatus Over… WHY? Well, APs, of course!

I’ve been taking a hiatus of blogging. The last blog post I wrote was on April 26, 2009. That’s in a different time period. According to the Time Calculator, that is:

• 4 weeks
• 28 days
• 672 hours
• 40,320 minutes
• 2,419,200 seconds

Why?

Two Words, not including the “the.”

The APs.

After taking 3 of these tests this year (Calculus AB, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics), taking 1 last year (Biology), and deciding to take 4 more for next year (Calculus BC, Physics, Spanish, Psychology), I decided to explore the historical origin of these tests.

According to the Wikipedia article, APs were created after World War II by the Ford Foundation to further education for students who desired so.

As a result, the APs were initially created as a way for high school students to take college courses in high school to save them money and time in college.

While this is certainly a commendable cause, these days, is it achieving its goal?

It seems as if people only take APs to put something else into their applications.

Knowing that many parents, including my own, can’t and probably won’t be able to afford full college tuition for me, I’ve been taking AP courses to not only put something on my resumé, but also to possibly take college in 3 years or 3.5 years. Whatever works, right?

Although I signed up for these courses optionally, it seems as if it’s impossible to get into any respectable university these days without these courses filling up a big portion of your resume.

And I feel them slowly draining the liveliness and youth from me…

Here’s a good article that agrees with me, mainly about the college applicatino process.

Photo Citations
AP Logo by nicevillehighschool