Fresh Thoughts 2017

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Essays from Writing I Fall 2016

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Introduction

Lasell students are required to take Writing I, usually during their first semester of college. All students in Writing I classes were invited to submit an essay for publication in Fresh Thoughts. We received a large number of submissions and had to make challenging decisions about which essays to publish.

Faculty teaching Writing I this year included Carroll Beauvais, Vincent Bisson, Kevin Farrell, Nicholas Frangipane, Ted Hoffman, Gavin Hurley, Sara Bartlett Large, Erika Lessien, Christine Meade, Michelle Niestepski, Annie Ou, Susan Torbay, and Cathleen Twomey.

Instructors worked closely with student writers throughout the semester to help them develop their thoughts and ideas into essays and to polish their writing.

Many thanks goes to Aiko Harashina, Olivia O’Connell and Katelynn Staples for the art direction and production of this publication, Emma Witbeck for the cover design, and to the students of Professor Stephen Fischer’s Typography I course for their typographic illustrations.

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Dedication This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Diane M. Donatio who passed away unexpectedly during the summer of 2005. Professor Donatio, Diane to all who knew her, taught Writing and Communication courses at Lasell College for eleven years. She was an exceptionally talented teacher who dedicated herself to student success. Students loved her classes and were constantly trying to get into them even when they were full.

Although Diane loved teaching all of her courses, she particularly enjoyed Writing I and Writing II. She relished working with first year students and constantly pushed her students to do their best. Because of Diane’s belief and support, her students worked hard and felt proud of the essays they wrote and how their writing improved over the course of a semester.

Because of the generosity of Diane’s family and friends, we are able to give awards to outstanding essays from Writing I. Selecting the award winners is always a difficult task. As one faculty member said, “If Diane were here, she would have wanted to give every student an award because she would have found something great in every essay.” We certainly know that Diane would have loved to read every essay in this book, and we hope that you enjoy it as much as she would have.

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Contributors Editor Nicholas Frangipane Creative Director Katelynn Staples Art Directors Aiko Harashina Olivia O’Connell Cover Design Emma Witbeck Illustrations Beautiful Struggle Paul Clohisy Blood Doesn’t Make a Family Jake Kent Is Autism a Disease?

Miranda Quinn Weathered Emma Witbeck Faculty Advisors Stephen Fischer Michelle Niestepski

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Table of Contents Diane Donatio Writing Awards First Prize: Weathered by Candace Rosado............................................................. 6 Second Prize: Beautiful Struggle by Ashley Owembabazi...................................... 8 Third Prize: Blood Doesn’t Make Family by Cody Martorilli.............................. 10 Honorable Mention: Is Autism a Disease? by Christina Tomasik....................... 12 Distant Memories by Jennifer Manning.................................................................. 14 Try Everything by James Macrokanis...................................................................... 15 3, 2, 1, Call 911 by Alex Manseau............................................................................ 16 Block Out, Pass On by Skye Bouffard...................................................................... 18 Lost in Translation by Hannah Bowerman............................................................. 20 Christmas Morning by Karissa Coher..................................................................... 22 Three Little Eggs by Sophia DeLuca........................................................................ 24 Zootopia Review by Beverly Ortiz........................................................................... 25 Second Grade Terrors by Alexis Desjardins............................................................ 26 Setting Myself Up for Judgement by Sarah Rudker............................................... 28 Movie Review: The Goonies by Shelise Dutcher.................................................... 30 Remission & Regression by Mindy Esposito........................................................... 32 No Nose Perfection by Julia Feeney........................................................................ 34 Grades Don’t Define You by Katlyn Fenuccio......................................................... 37 The Fundamentals of Free Throw Shooting by Chris Forte.................................. 38 Charter Schools, not Cheaper Schools by Kaitlin Johnson.................................... 40 Should Students Learn a Foreign Language? by Leah Sheltry............................... 42 Reflect and Learn, Never Regret: My story, My Mistakes by Marc Verity........... 44 Sitting Facing the Wall by Grace Duguay............................................................... 46

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Weathered Candace Rosado

Family vacations are a joke. There is no way everyone can be pleased with what’s going on, and everyone eventually becomes frustrated towards one thing or another throughout the trip, and quite frankly, why the hell would people choose to do it annually? Seeing as how much affection I have towards the idea of a family venture, you could only imagine how I felt when my family felt the need to accompany me on my trip to the Speech and Debate National Championship Tournament in Salt Lake City, Utah this past summer.

Speech and Debate tournaments are essentially giant competitions where students dress in business attire and act in a professional manner. These kids are intelligent, well-rounded, strongly spoken students that represent the best orators in the country, and they haven’t even graduated high school yet; so needless to say, I felt pressured to put my best foot forward, especially being that I was the only one from my district to qualify. But this is hard to do when you’re a large, boisterous Hispanic family in a place with a concentrated conservative white population like Salt Lake City. It was not my first rodeo; I knew how these kids were, and how judgmental they and their coaches could be. I saw Nationals as business; my family, on the other hand, was just excited to leave California and stop at every McDonald’s they saw on the way there.

My mom has this idea that everything is a Kodak moment; like, she was the mom to cry for three hours straight when my brother first learned how to shit in a toilet. I was in speech and debate in high school, and I was fortunate enough to make it to the National Championships all four years. Being that it was my senior year, my mom felt that it was only mandatory that the entire family tag along to experience Nationals with me. And I get it, she wanted the family to be involved, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but my mother has hardly ever left California; she is the tourist to walk into a Waffle House in Birmingham, Alabama, walk to the dusty jukebox, and play “Sweet Home Alabama” for every patron to hear. So not only did she make poor use of $1.50 on being cliché with a jukebox, but she got very amped up whenever I spoke about speech and debate. I won trophies, and I did fairly well, but doing well in speech and debate is entirely different from doing well in football; this is a concept that my mother, along with the rest of the family, could not grasp.

The head of the clan, my wonderful grandmother, may seem like just your ordinary, adorable, made-from-scratch meal-making Hispanic grandmother. But no, this 4 foot 9 mother of four comes in guns blazing.

The family took a separate car from the one my mom, my coach and I took to get to Utah, so fortunately we didn’t have to witness this first hand, but each and every time my mother would get a call from my grandma, the first thing to come out of her mouth would be “Oh my God, mija, I hope that the people here are nice, because your brother is gay, and if the Mormons find out, that’s gonna be bad.” As if my uncle was going to actually go up to the local church goers at the Mormon Temple and greet them with a pleasant “Hi I’m gay, please be nice to me.” Not

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to mention, the fact that my grandma was falsely accusing all Mormons of feeling a certain way towards homosexuals was wrong in more ways than one. My aunts and uncles are okay, for the most part, but as for my cousins, simple everyday tasks become week-long projects. My eldest cousin is probably the most interesting of cases there is to date, seeing as he is 21 years old, pushing 400 pounds, and has never left the comfort of his mother’s home. It took him five years to graduate high school, he has no job and continues to spend his mother’s money on his hat collection, and he has no desire to change anything. I admit, I would probably feel the same way if my mother was handing over everything I wanted with just a slight mention; but being that he is living in these lavish conditions, he still does not know how to act in public. And his younger sister is essentially the same person as him, go figure. I often dread going places with them, as we become the main focal point of everywhere we go.

And to think that these people were going to come with me to an event that I held so near and dear to my heart, and wanted to go as smooth as possible, was terrifying.

I am just like many other 18-year-old girls suffering from an outrageously embarrassing family. When we got to Utah, everything that I expected to happen, happened. My grandmother ran out of the car crying and thanking the Lord that she got there safe, my cousins were complaining about how they were hungry and asking when we were going to get food, my uncle described how excruciatingly painful it was to have to listen to my grandma complain about his sexuality during the entire drive, and then of course there was my mother capturing all of this on camera. We ended up staying in an Air B&B, and of course that was a mission and a half.

It took us almost two hours just to figure out who was sleeping in what room, where the thermostat was so my grandma could crank the heat up to 106 in the middle of the night, if the bathrooms had any plungers, and to check every single channel on the TVs to make sure they had the channels that were up to the standards of my cousins. Within minutes, everything just kind of went to shit. Everyone began nitpicking every single thing they could, and of course they all had something to say. The first night, the main problem of the evening was what we were going to get for dinner. My uncle and I are probably the most sane in the family, so we seek refuge with each other whenever we are forced to deal with the family. He asked me what I wanted for dinner, and before I could even respond, the 21-year-old so boldly interjects with a loud “Don’t get none of that Asian bullshit.” This then started the spiraling thread of my grandma stating that “Chinito food gives her gases” and then the youngest cousin saying “How come we can’t just get like American food?” Great—not only was I not going to get the chance to try out the Pho place down the street, but my family was a bunch of racists. Of course, every night after that, there had to be some element of cheap processed fast food as to keep the masses tamed. Oh, and the fact that my speech and debate coach (who just so happened to be Vietnamese) was there listening to all of this ridiculous banter was just the icing on the cake.

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And just as I had expected, we stuck out like a sore thumb everywhere we went. I tried to dress as normally as possible, a simple summer dress because it was so hot outside. But apparently someone told each and every member of the Diaz family that they were going to different places than each other, because this crew was a mess. My grandma had on these church slacks in a warm, putrid brown, and a sheer chiffon blouse with a vertical pinstripe that pointed right towards her all-white New Balance sneakers. My older cousin’s choice of attire is always a pair of basketball shorts, some oddly designed graphic print t-shirt, and a San Diego Chargers hat; one that the 21-year-old bought with his mother’s money, mind you. His younger sister was wearing what most Lisa Frank loving chubby 13-year-olds wear, so in other words, she looked like a Limited Too store had given her a free shopping spree. Now my aunt’s clothing choice has always been pretty questionable. She had on this very tight, ruffled, leopard print, deep-v blouse paired with some Sketchers Shape Ups, and blue boot cut jeans. But these jeans were not worn in a regular manner, no. My aunt apparently likes to do this thing where she rolls her boot cut jeans up one time to her knees, and then continues about her day. As for my mother, her lifelong goal is to be a skinny 16-year-old white girl named Stacy, which usually means her outfit has some type of fringed denim shorts and gladiator sandals. So here we were; my grandma in her “gotta run to church fast” clothes, the 21-year-old in his “can you tell I don’t try” outfit, his sister in her “I hate you mom” phase, my aunt, the swashbuckler, and my mom, a cast reject for the movie 300.

I didn’t want to make the trip about me, because I genuinely did want to enjoy this “vacation” with my family, but I mean, not for nothing, I was the only reason they came in the first place. I think what they failed to realize was that they didn’t actually have to come, but that they chose to.

I was in Utah for one thing—to do the best I could at the tournament.

And it was beginning to get hard to focus with everyone doing their

own thing. I was upset because they seemed like they didn’t even care about something that I had been so passionate about.

But then I realized one major thing that changed my entire perspective around.

Yes, my family was annoying, and they weren’t always the best to take somewhere in public, but they also did something else—they put in effort. They had no interest in what speech and debate was; hell, I’m sure they had no interest in taking a 10 hour drive up to Salt Lake City either, but they did. Not only that, but I have been travelling the country since I was 5 years old, so getting out of California was nothing new to me. But to them, it was an opportunity of a lifetime. I failed to realize that I had to be more understanding, just as I had wanted them to be more understanding. My grandma has always stressed the importance of being present whenever one of us accomplishes something. This usually then turns into the “I’m going to die soon so you better include me in things” speeches, which I hate. But in a sense, she was right; I have spent a majority of my childhood trying to be something completely different from my family. I dressed differently, I spoke differently, and I even went so far as to think differently (this did not always go well with the Diaz tribe, trust me). But what I didn’t realize was that I needed to just embrace who I had for a family. I had to embrace their strange outfits, their loud cackling in grocery stores, their inability to acknowledge that they are in a public place, everything. I see now, that I probably could learn a thing or two from them. I don’t have to always be proper and reserved, but I should always be comfortable with the person I am. I mean, my family had been, so why couldn’t I?

Candace Rosado is a Creative Writing major. She is from Riverside, CA and is a stand-up comedian.

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Beautiful Struggle Ashley Owembabazi

You wanna know what white privilege is? It is having the freedom to be exactly who you are.

You can say I have been blessed with the struggle of two burdens, but I assure you I have never let my head fall due to them. Not only am I a woman but a black woman at that. And just by that very combination my struggle is one many will never and can never understand. As women we have our universal struggles that we have found a way to support and uplift one another in those times, but the black woman has been lost in all of it. This is what media tells me about black women: we are loud, argumentative, ghetto, rude, manipulative, gold diggers, baby mamas, hoes, tricks, and bitches with big booties. My sisters and brothers, black or white, my fathers and mothers, husbands and friends and tragically enough, myself, have all helped in promoting, cultivating, and protecting that image. Growing up that is all I was ever shown, and before I could even speak I was deemed an angry black woman, created to tear down my black brothers and hate the white woman. I am not sure if it’s by the grace of God or my strong black parents, but I have never let those images become my blueprint, but no matter how high I hold my head and stand up for the sanctuary that is the black woman, I cannot escape the damaging internal and external effects it has.

You wanna know what white privilege is? It is being able to not smile without having the world think you are an angry bitch.

I can remember always having to be extra nice. Smiling a little harder, laughing a little longer, speaking a little less and always, always, having an extra pencil handy to give away. Because if for any reason, at any given time, I was unable to deliver any of these things, I would check off every preconceived, negative, stereotypical notion others would have of me. And my pride could never give them that satisfaction. I prayed for my silence to never be misinterpreted for anything else than just that: silence. You could say I was damned either way. Feared and misunderstood by the white community because of my distinct facial expressions or powerful voice, while hated and shunned by the black community for yearning for white approval and, in a way, abandoning the stereotype as if to say I was better than them. It was a constant tug-of-war. Having to put on a show the white world had created for me and doing my race justice.

Shedding a light and giving glory to the black women that lived longer than our stereotype. The real black women that, at the end of the day, were just regular women.

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he is transfixed on someone who won’t give him the time of day, and he turns to you, as though you have insulted him and say, without a blink of an eye, “ah that’s what black girls do, it’s nothing special, ya’ll were made for that. But getting head from a white girl now that’s some magical shit cause you just sit back and watch her innocence fade. It’s forbidden, that’s what makes it hot.” And there it was. Maybe that is what made black women so angry. We were not only victimized in the media but made out to be expired sexual objects. The black woman is desired, but never for her brains or her purity, but desired like an exotic animal caged up in your elaborate zoo. The black woman for years had always been the mistress, the dirty little secret only brought to light when conditions got hard. She had always been the woman you fuck but never marry, and that is our tragedy.

It took me a while to shake the stereotypes that surround my race. It took even longer for me understand that I did not need to conform to them strictly out of self-pity. Some believe there can never be a silver lining when dealing with racial stereotypes but I found mine. It is a privilege to be exactly who God intended you to be, but it is just that: a privilege, and like any other person of color I work hard every day for that reality to be a thing of the past. I have been blessed to be a black woman in this America, but I am not going to be shamed into being anything other than I am.

Ashley Owembabazi is a Fashion and Retail Merchandising major from Cambridge, MA who has a deep love for Beyoncé and red velvet cupcakes.

You wanna know what white privilege is? It is being able to be both Mother Mary and Amber Rose, while still getting the ring.

It was one of those summer days that you cannot quite remember but somewhere in your body it lingers and all you can really remember is sitting next to your best friend go on about how badly he wants to get head from some white girl and you ask him why out of all his potions

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Blood Doesn’t Make Family Cody Martorilli

The feeling of my blood beginning to boil within my veins, closely followed by the rush of adrenaline causing me to feel as though I am about to pop out of my own skin. My mom would look at my older brother Brian and I with her motherly gaze and say “look away now, close your eyes, and wait for all the bad things to stop. And when you open your eyes just know none of the bad things can ever hurt you, I will never let them.” The sudden thought of my own home being the most unsafe place to be overtook my infant mind, leaving me with feelings of hatred and fear that would remain in the depths of my subconscious until the day I die. Never has a child wanted for another person to disappear more than me in those crucial moments. These are the feelings that I encountered when I would see the way my father David would treat me and my family.

We are all simply a product of our environment, so David is not entirely to blame. He grew up within a family that was fundamentally faulted.

David and his brothers were allowed to roam the streets of Albuquerque, New Mexico freely. This poverty stricken lifestyle soon lead to the abuse of hard drugs and serious violence, eventually tearing their family apart.

Naturally, this carried over into David’s home life. Brian, my mother, and I all knew we had to leave.

In early September, about four months after my mother gathered enough courage to leave, we all went to a wedding in Vegas. It was there where my mother met the man of her dreams, Jack. My first image of him will resonate within me for the rest of my life. He was a tall well dressed Italian man. His hair was slicked back with a tailored suit on, accompanied by glasses that sat at the tip of his nose. My initial thoughts were that this man was terrifying as I had a predisposition that all men were the things of nightmares, only existing to feed off of the souls of others.

He stood up as the bride and groom introduced the two. He reached out his hand and I felt myself begin to turn away out of fear. He shook my mother’s hand, then my brother’s, and then got down on one knee to address me. I felt my hand clench onto my mother’s leg looking for some sort of comfort. He looked me in the eyes, took my hand, and said “The one I’m most interested to meet, what is your name?” His voice was strong, but protective.

Clenching onto my mother’s leg as if it was the only thing keeping me grounded to the Earth I quickly said “Corey,” the word shooting out of my mouth like a bullet.

“Those are some nice shoes you have on,” pointing to my sketchers that lit up with every step I took, “do you know if I could get some like that in my size?”

Being quickly distracted from my fear of this stranger by his interest in my shoes, I began to stomp around in a glorious display of what they could do. Jack laughed and said “Now I am definitely going to need a pair of those!”

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I chuckled at the thought of him in my shoes. He was a good man.

A month later Brian and I were told to pack our possessions in preparation for our new lives to come. Jack picked all three of us up in his black Lexus that came straight out of a mobster movie. Jack opened the door for my mother, who was quickly followed by Brian. I remained standing on the side of the road, stuck. I tried with all my might to move my feet but it was as if I had stared into the eyes of Medusa herself. My mother went to get out of the car but Jack motioned her to stay. Jack took me by the hand and led me to the curb. He sat down and I stood near him. “What is your favorite thing to do Corey?”

I paused for a moment and stared at him, waiting for him to drop this charade. All he offered me was his dark eyes and silence. It was as though he was anticipating what I was going to say. After a long awkward silence I told him “I like to play outside with Brian.”

“So you like to be outside? Well I have a secret to tell you. There is this meadow far away from here that is the most beautiful place on this entire planet. It may not have the same warm sunset against the horizon that you have here in the desert, but it does have a breathtaking beauty all of its own. There is a path in the woods near my house that leads to this meadow that peaks out of the thick forest. There is a majestic stream that flows down the center with an old stone bridge in the center. There is more than enough room for your whole family to run around and play all day long.” The way the words left his lips enchanted my mind and left me in awe. I wanted nothing more than to go to this place. He then motioned for me to stand closer as he looked me in the eye and told me “I promise you I will take you and your family there whenever you like.”

I looked at him and asked “what about dad? Will he get mad that we went away?”

He grabbed my hand and said “As long as you stick by me and your mom, you don’t have to worry about anything bad happening.”

Jack stood up and I followed him to the car. I looked out the window and began to wonder why David never treated me that way before. Never had someone asked me about what I wanted other than my mother and brother. I spent the remainder of my trip studying Jack as if I had discovered a new species. He was a good man.

A few hours later the four of us began to board a plane. This was the first time I had ever gotten into one, so I began to shake with fear. My mind wondered into the realm of the worst-case scenario. What if the plane crashed? What if it blew up in the middle of the air? What if the pilot fell asleep and we wound up getting lost forever? I was snapped back into

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reality by the loud click of my mother fastening my seat belt. The pilot began to speak on the intercom, but I was too nervous to pay attention. I heard the mighty rumble of the engine being fired up and within a matter of minutes the plane began to tilt. I could feel my skin begin to melt onto my seat as if I was on a carnival ride. My throat began to expand and I quickly bowed my head and vomited all over Jack. I was expecting all seven levels of hell to open up and unleash their unholy wrath upon me but the only thing I felt was Jack’s gentle hand unbuckling my seat belt.

Without a moment wasted he barraged me with questions about how I was feeling. Before I even had time to process what was happening I was being picked up and carried to the bathroom. There I was, sitting in the airplane bathroom being cleaned up by the man I just puked on. I just entered the Twilight Zone. Jack brought me back to my seat, grabbed a pair of clothes from his bag, and went to change. I turned to my mother confused and asked “why didn’t he get mad at me?”

“Well why don’t you ask him yourself?” my mother replied with a smile.

Once Jack returned I asked him my question.

Without hesitation he answered “There’s nothing you can do that would make me mad at you.”

This man continued to shock me with his alien behavior. I began to think of the time when I spilt hot coffee on David and he threw a tantrum. I remember that my only hope was to run behind my mother who had a way with calming down David’s insanity. This seemed to be unnecessary around Jack, I was sure that he was a good man.

A few months later I had gotten quite accustomed to my new life. My mom had married the man who truly loved her, and Jack also held true to his promise of taking me to the meadow. One night we four were having dinner with Jack’s family. Some of his sisters ridiculed his choice in a woman as, according to Italian tradition, they felt the divorce left her unclean. Jack’s father began to ask questions about us, his biased opinion against us clear. He also kept referring to Brian and I as his “step-kids.”

This is when my father quickly snapped and stared everyone down, displaying his dominance with his dark eyes glaring over the edges of his glasses. It was as though his gaze pierced your very soul. With a voice that could shake the very foundation of the house he said “Brian and Corey are my children, and I will love and treat them that way until the day I die. If any of you have a problem with that than you are welcome to leave.” The room went silent. I stared at Jack in shock. Never has anyone stood up for me like that. He was willing to yell at his own blood for my brother, mother, and I, whereas David to this day has not reached out to me, his own son, once. I was rescued from a life of suffering and violence.

I may have lost a father, but I gained a dad. I know, Jack is a good man.

Cody Martorilli is a freshman who is majoring in finance. He is from Albuquerque, NM and his hobbies include Muay Thai kickboxing, playing the guitar, and spending time with friends and family.

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Is Autism a Disease?

Christina Tomasik

Autism is defined by Google’s online dictionary as “a mental condition, present from early childhood, characterized by difficulty in communicating and forming relationships with other people and in using language and abstract concepts.” As pointed out in the article, “Autism: An Overview,” in the last several decades since its discovery in 1943, the definition of autism has been changed and redefined many times, often taking on labels like “public health crisis” or even “disease” (Ballaro). While it’s understandable that most people are simply trying to grasp the concept of autism and its related disorders, it seems they are utterly unaware of the emotional and psychological effects and implications of labeling an autistic individual as “sick.” Despite the ever-growing mental health stigma, deceiving research regarding vaccines’ link to the disorder and the inaccurate vernacular pervasive in certain organizations, it is clear that autism is not a disease. Autism is, rather, a disorder that doesn’t stop people from living happy, healthy lives and is something that should be seen as no more than a difference among individuals.

The mental health stigma is a well-known terror in today’s society, and despite efforts by those affected and those that can only sympathize, this stigma is something we internalize whether we realize it or not. For those unfamiliar with the mental health stigma, there is a general consensus in society that those with mental disorders or mental health issues are individuals who are sick, disturbed, and unworthy of sympathy. Furthermore, they should be treated inferior to those who do not possess these problems, or at least don’t admit it. This is undoubtedly the most influential cause of the misnomer of autism as a disease. While many people in the autism community do struggle with their mental health or other mental disorders related and unrelated to their diagnosis, it in no way means they’re “sick in the head,” nor do their autistic symptoms render them useless by disease. The first issue with the label “disease” is that it leads people to think that there’s a need for a cure, which is not at all the case, because that’s just simply not how autism works. A disease is something contracted, usually because of outside influences, and something that can eventually be “cured.” In comparison, as an article on the Autism Speaks website states, autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that occurs in the brain, sometimes caused by mutations in certain genes, other times they develop independent of an individual’s DNA. The article makes it clear that it will most likely develop before birth, and even then if it is not diagnosed until later in life, odds are it’s been present the whole time (Autism Speaks). While autism certainly can’t be cured, nor should that be the end goal, there are numerous ways to improve the lives of the individuals affected and to help them overcome some of the challenges that come with their diagnosis. Dozens of organizations work toward the goal of improving the lives of these people by providing therapy, counseling, advocacy, and other programs to improve the symptoms of autism to increase their overall quality of life.

In addition, “Autism: An Overview” explains that while it’s usually just referred to as “autism”, a singular diagnosis, this disorder is more fully named Autism Spectrum Disorder, ASD (and other related disorders: the milder form, Asperger Syndrome, and a broader category, Pervasive Developmental Disorders), which is just that, a spectrum. Many autistic individuals could be completely high-functioning, and you might not

even know they’re on the spectrum, while others’ symptoms are more apparent (Ballaro). Furthermore, this proves autism is not a disease because to receive a diagnosis, an individual doesn’t have to have every symptom related to the disorder, or they might have even more than what’s required for a diagnosis, and in all cases the individual would then be placed appropriately on the spectrum. Regardless of the scientific and medical differences between a disease and a disorder such as autism, the most important takeaway is that, yes, autism should be more accurately referred to as a disorder. Besides all that it should be seen as nothing more than a unique trait in certain people.

The second part of the “disease” implications is that the individual in question is suffering, which is hardly the case with autism and its related disorders. There is no doubt that life is harder for those in the autism community, as they often face challenges in social relations, developmental milestones and other behavioral obstacles, and many times they face other challenges related to their success and natural progression. But this isn’t to say that those on the spectrum can’t absolutely live happy and healthy lives. In fact, many autistic individuals have even made a name for themselves in pop culture. The Huffington Post sites many celebrities and actors that have been diagnosed with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, including people like Dan Ackroyd, the mastermind behind the Ghostbusters series, Heather Kuzmich, a finalist on America’s Next Top Model, Dan Harmon, the creator of the popular show Community, and Alexis Wineman, a highly regarded Miss America contestant (Schocker). It is clear that for many, their ASD diagnosis doesn’t hold them back from achieving their dreams, and sometimes being in the spotlight even allows them a platform to educate and speak out about the mental health stigma and bring awareness to others about the autism community. Besides those in the media, the majority of autistic individuals are ordinary people, like you and me, and many organizations work towards creating programs and services to cater to those people to help them understand and cope with the challenges that come with ASD. As mentioned, this is where many times people and organizations can go a bit off track in their discussion of autism. As Emily Shire explains in her online article “Autism Speaks— but Should Everyone Listen?” the Autism Speaks organization received an astounding backlash in the last few years regarding how they handle providing services and support for those in the autism community, along with speculation about the beneficiaries of their funding. Many times on their website they cite wanting to find a “cure” for autism, and fundraising to support research in trying to “fix the issue”(Shire). In addition, on the actual Autism Speaks website, there is an article link to information about the organization’s merge with another similar program, Cure Autism Now, which blatantly sends the wrong message to those affected by ASD; that there’s something wrong with them, and that they need to be rid of their “disease” (Autism Speaks).

“Autism Speaks—but Should Everyone Listen?” goes on to explain that the organization has also been deeply criticized for not putting all of its funding towards providing programs and raising awareness, and too much of it goes to paying the six-figure salaries of the board of directors

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(Shire). Something else to note is that there are only 2 autistic individuals on the Autism Speaks board of directors, and they were only inducted after years and years of criticism (Statement). While these facts are undeniable and are based on definite research, it’s also to be noted that Autism Speaks, along with other organizations like the Autism Society, do a great deal for the individuals affected by autism as well as their friends and family. The Autism Speaks website provides many resources for those with autism, such as employment and educational opportunities, and options for shared homes (Autism Speaks). The Autism Society is a wonderful organization catering to the needs of those on the spectrum and their loved ones, as well as providing accurate information to those simply curious about ASD. Among the resources included on their website are sensory friendly events, different therapy options to make life easier for those on the spectrum, legal resources and options for future planning (Home). These are just some of the opportunities available on some of the websites out there that advocate for individuals and families affected by autism, so to say that these people are “suffering” is highly disproved.

The controversy over Autism Speaks is and was a huge deal, but undoubtedly the most prevalent and emotionally charged debate regarding autism is its possible link to vaccinations given to pregnant mothers and young children. Part of this controversy has already been discussed, as vaccines causing autism would be preposterous considering ASD is widely developed on a genetic level before the child is even born. Furthermore, the Center for Disease Control, CDC, issued an article in 2015 addressing this issue, an article explicitly titled “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism.” The piece explains that through the extensive research they have conducted over the years, the conclusion has been drawn that there is no known link between the chemicals in vaccines and autism diagnoses (Vaccines).

Many would go on to speculate that the CDC is controlled by vaccination agencies, which seems more like conspiracy theories at work. However, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it’s surrounding the idea that if your child is autistic then there’s something wrong with them, the exact thing that this research is trying to disprove. Others might allude to the correlation in the rise of vaccinations and the rise in autism diagnoses. Vaccinations have risen over the years as more studies have come out proving the immense benefits to infants and children. The rise in diagnoses have undeniably risen in the years, as well. “Autism: An Overview,” notes that in the 1960s, one in every 2,500 children were diagnosed with autism, while in 2007 nearly one in every 150 children received a diagnosis (Ballaro).

However, upon further investigation one can surmise that this skyrocket can be attributed to the redefinition and widened criteria of autism, the addition of its related disorders, and the heightened awareness of autism among medical professionals and parents, which again, proves “autism as a disease” unreasonable.

Works Cited “Are Children Born with Autism, or Does It Develop Later?” Autism Speaks.

N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.

“Autism.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016.

“Autism Speaks and Cure Autism Now Complete Merger | Press Release | Autism Speaks.” Autism Speaks. N.p., 5 Feb. 2007. Web. 30 Nov. 2016.

Ballaro, Beverly and Ann Griswold. “Autism: An Overview.” Points of View: Autism. (2016):1. Web. 28 Nov. 2016.

“Home - Autism Society.” Autism Society. N.p., 2016. Web. 17 Nov. 2016.

Schocker, Laura. “These 8 Inspiring People Will Change the Way You Think About Autism And Asperger’s.”

The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2016.

Shire, Emily. “Autism Speaks- But Should Everyone Listen?” The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast Company, 13 June 2014. Web. 30 Nov. 2016.

“Statement on Autism Speaks Board Appointments.” Autistic Self Advocacy Network. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2016.

“Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015. Web. 28 Nov. 2016.

Whether or not these skeptics are correct, the entire argument of whether or not autism is a disease caused by outside influences is morally wrong and needs to be changed. Part of this change is definitely has to do with the astounding low presence of those with autism on executive boards of organizations related to the disorder, something that could be compared to a large group of men making decisions in government about women’s rights. Another large part is simply changing the vernacular and general feelings towards those who do have developmental and mental disorders, both in society and professional environments. One thing is for sure though, autism is not a disease, nor should it be treated like one.

Christina Tomasik is a first year education student from Brewster, MA and has been ziplining!

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Distant memories Jennifer Manning

I was never able to fully love my grandfather. I was too young. Instead I’m in love with my memory and the stories I heard from my relatives that were lucky enough to have encountered him. He lived in our house.

He slept in the front room in what I thought looked like a hospital bed. I never thought about him when I was watching cartoons with my siblings or when he sat across the table during dinner. I always managed to complain about his smell though, I guess I was too young or naive to understand he was sick. I never understood that he was too old to live on his own or that my mother was taking care of more people than my siblings and I. Sure my mother had my father for support but at the end of the day she was left standing in her own shoes and dealing with the problems that erupted in her life. I was just a child whose biggest concern was my cookie intake.

It was the month of September, where the days were still hot but where the nights started through my unsettling thoughts about the unfairness of my bed time. It was close to midnight, I believe, when I mustered the courage to go downstairs. I had heard my mother’s soft voice saying “It will be ok.” I had heard somebody’s heavy breathing, now I know it was my grandfather’s last breaths. Other than that, it was silent. Weirdly silent. The stairs seemed endless as I placed my foot on each wooden step. It was the last thing I wanted, to be scolded by mother for being out of bed. Although that seemed like the end of the world at the time, the craving I had for cookies was far more important. I was determined. As I hit the bottom of the stairs, I waited for my mother to acknowledge me.

Then I began to make a little noise, with my foot or hands, I can’t quite remember. Still nothing. Finally, I began my walk over to her while her back was turned from me. Then I saw my grandfather lying in the bed while my mom held his hand. I was confused for a second but did not put too much thought into it because my mind went right back to the cookies I so badly wanted. As my mother began to notice me, I gave her a big nervous smile. She didn’t seem too phased by my presence.

Now that I look back, I start to realize it must have taken all my mother’s courage to put up a fake front for me. Maybe that is why it took a little longer than normal for her to acknowledge me. None the less, she did.

I waited for her to ask me why I was downstairs so late. She didn’t. All she could do was give me a smile. I could sense there was something wrong. It still gave off warmth of course but I could see that something was off. Yet again I was too young to think more into it or investigate.

As she began to fully turn to me, she asked me as politely as possible to go back upstairs. She didn’t even ask me to go back to bed or threaten to call my dad home for being up past my bedtime. So I pushed my luck and told her I was only willing to go back upstairs if she gave me some cookies. I swear on my life that negotiation made both my grandfather and mother chuckle. She got up and went into the kitchen to grab the cookies I so desperately wanted, which left me for a few minutes with my grandfather. He didn’t look at me. Not that he didn’t want to, but he was too sick to move. Somehow though, he managed to smile. I was scared because I didn’t understand why my grandfather was the way he was. I didn’t understand why he had a walker or why he had to eat soft foods. I

didn’t want to get involved because I was scared. Luckily my mother came back with a bag of Mini Oreos. I was so proud of myself for gaining the courage to ask for cookies and actually receiving them. I marched back up the stairs and sat myself on my bed.

My grandfather never phased me or made me think twice. I just always figured he was meant to be there with no cause of doubt. So I ate those Oreos slowly with pure bliss. I laid them out on my hand and ate one by one. I didn’t even think of my sister or brother who were both sleeping.

Most importantly I didn’t think about my mother. My mother who was saying her final goodbyes. She had to tell my grandpa that it was okay to pass peacefully in the dimmed room. All by herself, she had to let go of the one person who understood her during her youth. My mother has always been strong in a different way from anyone I know. She had to stay strong for both her young family and her dad. My mother had to literally tell my grandfather that it was okay to leave her in this world. Sure, I bet that it was a hard task to take care of both of her children and father, but this man was her world. He showed her the truth behind life and taught her that she was always loved even though she had an alcoholic mother and four older brothers. My grandfather was a very special man in the way that he loved deeply and made everyone in his life feel like they belonged alongside him. So in all, my mother had to do one of the hardest things in life while I was upstairs eating my cookies. I was oblivious. I was young. I was way too ignorant to realize that would be the last time I saw my grandfather.

I guess it’s true when people say ignorance is bliss. I have always been scared my whole life and sometimes I consider myself weak. I will never come to understand the weight my mother had to carry during this time period. It still gives me stress and a tremendous amount of sadness. I can still hear my Grandfather’s southern accent when he called my mother for assistance in whatever it was he needed. The emotional battle while raising three kids and her sick dad, while my father had to work night shifts to cover the bills must of broke my mother. It definitely did make her stronger and tougher. Then again it gives me pain thinking about how strong my mother still is. Sometimes even disappointment. Not because my mother had to go through this, but the fact I will never be able to become as strong as she did. Seeing my grandfather so close to his death while I was just beginning to understand life makes me understand “strong” doesn’t mean being physically able to hold your own, but fighting through everyday life.

Jennifer Manning is a Law and Public Affairs major.

She is from Rockland, MA and rode the highest roller coaster in America.

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Try Everything James Macrokanis

In the movie Zootopia the song “Try Everything,” written by Sia and performed by Shakira, is an extremely upbeat and motivational tune. Shakira is the voice of a character in the movie that goes by the name of Gazelle.

She addresses the struggle that comes with trying new things through inspirational lyrics. Throughout the song there is a notable amount of repetition, very straightforward syntax, ethos, pathos, and logos in order to convey a positive overall message that anyone can do anything as long as they put their mind to it by never giving up.

“Try Everything” is filled with many rhetorical strategies, one being repetition. Throughout the song she constantly sings, “I’ll start again.”

In the first stanza the lyrics say, “I still mess up,” followed by, “I’ll start again.” Shakira wants the viewers of Zootopia to know that her character will start again even if she makes mistakes. It does not matter to her to mess up because she will keep going at it and never give up. Later in the song when Shakira repeats, “I’ll start again,” this time she begins with saying “I won’t give up, no I won’t give in till I reach the end.” By stating she’s not going to give up and she won’t finish till she reaches the end, she emphasizes the fact that Shakira’s character in the movie is a fighter who can do anything and will do it again and again. Another phrase Shakira repeats is “I could fail.” Before she states this phrase Shakira says, “I wanna try even though…I could fail.” In this quote, Shakira wants to address the matter of having a desire to try new things even though she may not succeed. Shakira’s character is aware of the possibility of not being successful but that does not stop her from wanting to try, which demonstrates the struggle of trying new things. The last phrase of repetition Sia creates is the words “Try Everything.” “Try everything” is the most important phrase of the song as it is the title for a reason. One of the main overall points of the song is to literally try everything. Sia creates all these repetitive phrases throughout the song in order to demonstrate the positive message that anyone can do anything as long as they put their mind to it by never giving up.

Another rhetorical strategy throughout the song is very straightforward syntax. Sia presents all of the lyrics in a very simple and straightforward manner. One stanza that is portrayed pretty simply is, “I messed up tonight, I lost another fight… I still mess up but I’ll just start again.”

This quote is very straightforward, Shakira’s character in the movie tries to illustrate the message to keep trying and putting your mind into everything you do by never giving up. The majority of the viewers for the movie Zootopia are younger kids therefore Sia does her best to create as uncomplicated lyrics as possible. Sia wants the viewers of Zootopia to follow the song as best as possible through creating pretty simplistic lyrics for the audience. Another pretty simple quote is, “I keep falling down, I keep on hitting the ground… I always get up now to see what’s next.”

Even though Shakira’s character may fall down at times and end up coming short of things, it is irrelevant to her because she always continues to fight and try everything by putting her mind into it and never giving up.

Sia wants the audience to understand the overall message of the song as best as possible, so in order to do that she conceives pretty straightforward and simple lyrics.

All in all, the most notable rhetorical strategy in the song are the appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos. The first appeal to ethos in the song targets the children’s and other viewers of Zootpia’s credibility. The third verse of the song that pertains to ethos starts with, “I won’t give up, no I won’t give in” and finishes with, “I wanna try even though I could fail.” These lines target the audience’s ethics by painting the picture of not quitting and trying even though it could result in failure. This goes back to the struggle of trying new things, when it comes to doing new things Shakira’s character promotes the fact she is not afraid to try everything even though it could come with defeat. By promoting her quality of not being afraid to try new things, Shakira hopes to encourage the audience and inspire them to pursue their dreams.

Another significant appeal in the song is pathos. “Try everything,” adds an upbeat, uplifting, inspirational, and motivational feel to the song. The lyrics appealing to pathos are in the second paragraph “I always get up to see what’s next”, and the sixth verse “Sometimes we come last, but we did our best”. The verse, “I always get up to see what’s next,” means that Shakira’s character is motivated to see what the future holds although she might have come across struggles in the past. The other verse, “Sometimes we come last, but we did our best,” is very uplifting because she wants the audience to know that it doesn’t matter what the outcome of anything is, all that matters is if you did your best. These quotes connect to the emotion of the song by being positive and motivational in order to attack the struggle of trying new things and never giving up.

The last appeal in the song is logos. The logic of the message in “Try Everything” is to always try. The stanza that appeals to logos is, “Birds don’t just fly they fall down and get up… Nobody learns without getting it wrong.” If birds didn’t try to fly then they would never learn. They may not be perfect when they start but they end up eventually learning because they keep trying. This relates to people trying things, odds are you aren’t going to be good at everything when you first start, you will need to try and practice because practice makes perfect. The overall meaning of this quote is that we all should try because nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes. We can do anything as long as we put our mind to it and never give up.

“Try everything” is a very motivational and upbeat song. In the song Shakira brings up the struggle that comes with trying unfamiliar things by means of very inspirational lyrics. Throughout, there is a good amount of repetition aiming towards the straightforward syntax, ethos, pathos, and logos aspect of the song. This demonstrates a positive message that anyone can pursue their dreams as long as they put their mind to it and never give up.

James Macrokanis is in the honors program and is majoring in Entrepreneurship. He is from Somerville, MA and over this past summer he was fortunate enough to travel to six different countries.

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3,2,1, call 911 Alex Manseau

Just a few years ago there was a moment in my life when I thought that I had lost everything. I believed that my life had changed in the flash of an eye, and I was right. Granted that little me sitting on the kitchen floor that morning did not want to believe what she had just witnessed, but I still knew nothing was going to be okay anymore. It all began one beautiful morning; the sun had just begun to kiss the water with a slight orange glow. The birds were chirping as they slowly arose to go in search of their breakfast. I heard the soft click of my grandmother’s bedroom door open, and the low long squeak of the door as she pulled it open as quietly as she could. I laid in my warm comfortable bed just down the hall from her, the covers lightly encasing the warmth of my body between them. I forced myself to jump out of bed like any other morning.

I tiptoed down the hall to greet my grandmother in the kitchen. She was sitting in her normal morning chair with her breakfast coffee in hand, and the toast just finishing in the oven. She knew that every morning I would wake up and join her. “Good morning my little sunshine, how did you sleep?” She would always greet me this way. I sat in her lap and watched the birds with her as she would give me a little quiz each morning to figure out how many birds I had remembered from the previous morning. Then we began to gather all of the things to make a French toast breakfast. This is when everything went wrong. As she leaned over to get the mixing bowl from the cabinet, I could see her body out of the corner of my eye bend the wrong way. She went down backwards to the floor. I heard the crack of her head as it hit the corner of the stove on her way down. My stomach dropped as a high pitched scream came from my lungs. I had just witnessed my whole world collapse in front of me.

Any medical part of my brain that I had left in the split of a second, all I could do was drop to the floor and hold her head in my lap. What I mean by medical part of me is my training. Ever since I was about 8 years old my parents have been putting me through CPR, first aid, life guarding, and medical classes. Every generation of my family is filled with some sort of medical background or job. So I’ve been trained in many different sections of the medical fields.

I was still screaming and crying but had no idea that I was. I heard the door of my parents’ room fly open faster than any time before, and the pounding of their feet as they ran through the halls to the kitchen. My parents hearing my screams had thought that I had broken something, until they entered the kitchen and went into full medical action. My father sat on the floor next to me, and slowly took my grandmother’s head from my lap into his, bracing her neck as he moved. My mother ran around the house trying to find a towel to help the bleeding. My father instructed me to call 911. I remember him saying “Now I know you know how to call 911, and what type of injuries to report, you know what to say.” At this point I was only 10 years old, I nodded my head and slowly reached for the phone, I could feel my body shaking. My grandmother

came out of her concussion and her eyes opened, as she went to say something the dispatcher on the other end of the phone started her spiel of 911 information. I reported what happened, told them what vehicles we needed, and they were on their way. I hung up the phone with them and my father instructed me to go wait outside and help the ambulance when they got here.

My mother had reappeared into the room with my father’s medical bag, and they were doing as much in home treatment as they could to keep my grandmother stable. Now you may be wondering if my father is a doctor. He’s actually not. Since my father was in high school he has been working for our town fire department. He went through years of medical school, and is one of the most important people in the department, working in every single piece of the department because his training is so wide. My mother, on the other hand, was an ER nurse so she’s really seen it all. The ambulance seemed to take five hundred hours to reach the house, yet in reality it had taken them three minutes.

They pulled up, and two EMTs hopped out of the vehicle, they asked if I had been the one to call the incident in and I just nodded my head. I grabbed the equipment that I knew I could touch and rushed them into the house. You may wonder why I did this, but the ironic part of this was I had slept in my fire t-shirt the night before so they trusted me to touch the equipment. Soon enough they had the back board and neck collar on the floor next to my grandmother. The last thing I remember was them wheeling her out of the house and my father following right behind them.

My grandmother paused them halfway down the cobble stone walk way and asked for me. She grabbed my hand and with a shaky voice said “I love you, you are strong, and I will be okay my little sun shine.” The ambulance lights turned on and they whisked her away to the hospital.

My mother instructed me to run back into the house and wake my sister and tell her the situation. She had somehow slept through the whole thing. As I began to throw clothing on my body, I heard the phone ring and my father’s voice on the line as my mother frantically ran around the house trying to find my grandmother’s medical records to bring to the hospital. I ran to my mother wanting to help her; she directed me to gather what my sister and I would need for a day or two at the hospital.

The phone call was my father telling us to move very quickly, because the doctors were unsure if my grandmother was going to make it. I remember my stomach dropping, trying to comprehend a life without her. We jumped into the car and my mother didn’t even care about speed limits, I had never seen her run a red light before but she did.

When we reached the ER, I jumped out of the car and ran into my father’s arms as he was standing right at the entrance to bring us to her. Little did we know that he had tried to call my mother but she had forgotten her phone on the kitchen table. My grandmother’s vitals had become stable

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and she was looking much better than before. The doctors had jumped to a conclusion because of how weak her heart had become during transportation. That night I slept in the hospital bed with my grandmother, I was curled up in a ball at her feet and the hospital staff told my parents that I was allowed to stay.

I write about this experience because it began the process of slowly losing my mother to the care of my grandmother. For 8 years of my life I didn’t technically have a mother anymore. She moved out of our house and moved in with my grandmother to care for her. This made an impact on my life because I had to learn how to grow up very quickly and take care of both my sister and I. This became the new norm for my life, school became a chore, I got a job to support my sister and myself, my dad took extra shifts at the department because we lost my mom’s income. Since this happened my life took a big change and I took it as the biggest learning opportunity I could.

Alexandra Manseau is from Wilbraham, MA. Her major is Psychology.

An interesting fact about her is that her twin sister also attends Lasell College.

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Block Out, Pass On Skye Bouffard

Warm tears ran down my face, streaming like a waterfall along my nose.

I could feel my face was beet red. I was a mess and didn’t know what to do. Through my blurred vision, I saw a pencil and a piece of paper on my bureau. The pencil and paper seemed sad and miserable, just like me. I unsteadily walked to the bureau. I didn’t know it at the time but I would find something in that pencil and paper that was meaningful to me. It would change my life and allow me to open up new creative doors to worlds I didn’t think I could imagine.

With the tears still running down my face, I held the pencil in my shaky hand. It felt nice and the pencil didn’t seem as sad anymore. It just wanted one thing, the paper. The paper had something interesting about it. It seemed to open a new imaginary door to new creations. Little did I know that once I started it would take up the rest of the day and night.

The once-sad pencil and paper weren’t sad anymore. Before I knew it, I was drawing lines and shading. The lines and shades all came together at once. The drawing was beautifully finished, and told a story, the story of my life and how I felt. I suddenly didn’t feel sad anymore. I felt as though I could accomplish anything with a simple paper and pencil. I didn’t feel alone anymore, didn’t feel so isolated from the world around me. I knew now I could create my own characters, my own world; heck, I could create anything I wanted to. Anything my mind could create I could draw.

It felt amazing!

Growing up, I wasn’t like the other kids. My parents were strict and overprotective. They cared, loved me, and wanted the best for me. But at the same time, they often made me feel disconnected from the world. For example, my teacher had asked me to go to Skills USA and I would have to stay for three nights at a hotel. It was a competition that would help me learn speaking skills. I would be representing my school as well as my trade in marketing. It looked good on a resume for a job, and it would help me get into a good college. They didn’t let me go, even though I told them my teacher wanted me to. Not to mention they wouldn’t have to pay a dime. It was a competition that the school paid for fully. I was never allowed to go out and do anything. I wasn’t a normal teen who could go to a friend’s house and have fun or do something that could help my future.

I always felt sad, alone, and isolated. My isolation made me realize that I loved drawing. Drawing helped me feel better and took me on different roads and adventures so I didn’t feel so miserable, locked up, and alone.

Since I was not allowed to do anything, I had all the time in the world to draw. Even though drawing helped, it didn’t solve everything. I was always getting in trouble with my parents. For not doing chores right when I thought I had done a good job. My sister didn’t help either. When she didn’t get her way I got in trouble. With things going on at home, I always looked forward to learning at school. School got me away from all the bad emotions for a bit. However, I felt miserable all the time. I knew

right after school it would start up again. My father would find something to pick on me about, whether it was chores or something completely stupid I didn’t do. I couldn’t even look to my own parents for support, so I felt more alone than I would have if my parents were less strict and less overprotective.

When drawing, however, I felt free. I loved the way the pencil glided over the paper with each line, shape and shade. Everything came together like a story. Drawing helped me work through my emotions. Drawing helped me feel happier and peaceful at mind. The mind itself is complicated, but with it I could create anything with just a pencil and paper. Over the years I created better pictures and put my best work into it. Every picture is important. Every picture tells a story. Every picture determined how I felt in the end. I could have started out with a dark picture in the beginning and then I saw that in the end it all came together to create a beautiful picture that wasn’t so dark anymore. However, after every picture, even if I felt happy and at peace, I would say “Drawing is all I have.” Drawing really was all I had. I couldn’t go out and do anything so drawing was my friend. We fit together like two puzzle pieces. The drawing would get drawn and drawing would help my emotions.

Over the years I have gotten better at drawing. I have made it my mission to make each drawing better than the last. I drew every day no matter what my mood was. I drew every day so I could get through life day by day, whether it was to de-stress from a stressful day or to just calm myself from an emotional day.

As I got older I realized that my parents didn’t just pick on me but they picked on my younger sister Diamond. I saw how sad she was and how angry she got. I knew how she felt day by day; the only difference is that she had it worse than me. Everything I felt she felt double because of her autism. Her autism made it harder for her to control her emotions, like if she got upset she would cry for hours. If she got angry she would hit things—even me—even if I was trying to help her. I noticed she wasn’t like me; when I cried I could stop crying after drawing for about 10 minutes. I asked myself, what could I do to help her? Maybe help her feel happy and more peaceful? I always sat down with her and showed her my drawings or she would come in to see what I was drawing. I decided that maybe she wanted to learn. I knew it would help her in many ways. She came in my room one day to see what I was drawing and I asked her “Do you want to learn how to draw?

She said “Yes.” “What would you like to draw?”

She said “I don’t know.”

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“How about anime?” Knowing that I wasn’t too bad at it and it was something easy and difficult to draw at the same time.

She said “Okay.”

So in that same day I went to her room and I taught her how to draw anime step by step. She had a unique way of drawing and I can even say she has grown to love drawing just like I did growing up. To this day I still teach her a few tricks and I know she uses them. It shows. Her drawing skills have become amazing and there is one particular piece of artwork that I love of hers. It was a dragon she had drawn. My sister Shawna, out of jealousy and anger, ended up ripping the picture after I had laminated it for Diamond. I asked Diamond if I could keep the picture so it wouldn’t get ruined further. She said I could and so I took the laminated picture she had drawn and I patched it up. It now hangs on my dorm wall for people to see. I am so proud of what she has accomplished in drawing because it is something I passed down. I hope one day she passes it down to someone that needs something to help lift them up in life, so they can get away from the bad and see the good in things.

Her favorite saying now is “Drawing is all I have.” That is the same phrase I said every day after I drew a picture. I feel good knowing that I helped my sister. I know now that she will do great things in life, just like I will.

Drawing will help her just like how it helped me.

I hope she understands the true beauty of art because I do. Drawing is something that will always be within me. Although I have slowly waned away from it, I still enjoy it. Drawing is very special to me. It has taught me to be independent, to accomplish things in life, and to do something amazing that no one will ever even think about doing.

I am now 18 and my art skills still continue to grow. I know that I will accomplish so much in life thanks to drawing. I am not who I was back then. I am much happier and I know what I can do in life. I set a goal I accomplish it and no one can tell me I can’t do something because I know I can. I know I will succeed. Drawing has its touching moments and it has its saddest moments, but at the end of the day, drawing has helped me and I can’t say that I never had anything in life. All I needed was a pencil and piece of paper. Drawing was a huge part of my life and I will never give that up.

Skye Bouffard is a Creative Advertising major at Lasell College. She is from Haverhill, MA. She is a freshman who enjoys drawing, being creative, and loves to make crafts.

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Lost in Translation Hannah Bowerman

Having the chance to live in China for six months seemed like a dream come true to me. I packed up my bags and watched some YouTube videos to quickly try and learn a few phrases in Mandarin like “ni hao,” hello, and “xie xie,” thank you, to prepare for my trip. I purchased a travel book of China and read it cover to cover and dreamed of neon street signs and calm Buddhist temples. Before I knew it I was standing in line with my airplane ticket in hand about to board the plane. Little did I know that as soon as I stepped onto the plane, I left everything that I had known before behind me and arrived in a totally different world when I stepped off.

The excitement of being in a new country and all the China-ness of everything there quickly wore off after the first couple of days. No amount of research and book reading could have prepared me for the endeavor of being a foreigner in China. Right away, I was swept in a tidal wave of confusion and stress as I struggled to be able to buy some coffee and bread on my own. Not being able to express myself through language was something that I had never experienced before. The smell of fish and stinky tofu filled my lungs and suffocated me along with the highly polluted air. I couldn’t see the stars at night and during the day the sun was buried under a great grey cloud at all times. The difference in environment created a difference in myself that I was unfamiliar and uncomfortable with. Not being able to communicate with everyday people and not being able to just speak small talk bothered me the most. I had to speak the same few phrases that I knew in Mandarin to be able to barely get by. Pointing at an object and saying “zhe ge,” “this” in English, was my only way of trying to get what I needed to say across to somebody. When people would try talking to me all I could respond with was “bu zhi dao,” meaning “I don’t know,” and shake my head along with a shrug of my shoulders. Soon enough it became overwhelming to never know anything that was happening at all. The language disconnect was slowly driving me insane and made it difficult for me to keep going.

Luckily, I met a girl from Italy that was from the same agency as me and she introduced me to a lot of foreigners. We all got together and ate at the one “Mexican” food restaurant in our city. I put Mexican in quotations because Chinese people end up grouping together all Western things so it was really a restaurant where you could buy very badly cooked pizza, burritos, or burgers. I met lots of other foreigners there and it was my first time in months actually being able to make conversation with people in real life which led to me not being able to stop smiling the entire time I ate my mozzarella cheese burrito. I was able to relate so much with these people, but it turned out that none of them were from America and all had English as their second language. I ran into this problem a lot where if I could finally find someone to speak English with, but it wasn’t their mother tongue, then I would constantly have to think about whether they could understand me, if I was speaking too fast, or if I was using too complicated of words. It was always looming over me to make sure I

used simple dialogue and change the way I talked, which basically left me feeling empty since how you speak is a part of who you are. It’s incredibly exhausting to have to always limit yourself and think before you say something every single time. I longed for the days when I could just be myself and speak whatever I wanted to and not have to stop and wonder if they could follow along to what I was saying.

I wanted to be happy and joyful all the time because I mean, come on, I’m in China. China. I should enjoy being here and not be so down all of the time. I knew also that if a Chinese person came to America then we would just expect them to learn English and we wouldn’t even bother trying to understand them in their native language so I should at least feel grateful that some people are trying to talk with me. But it ultimately just left me feeling more worn out and tired from having to change so much of who I was for other people to try and understand what I was saying. It tore me up like a tornado that was constantly going back and forth between feeling confused and lonely, while also trying to stay happy and upbeat. I tried learning more Mandarin by taking two hour lessons twice a week, but I realized pretty early on that it is almost impossible for a foreigner to learn the language. There are four different tones so if you say the same word four slightly different ways then you end up saying four completely different words. My instructor was Chinese and he would have me repeat a word after him and literally every time I would say the same word back to him he would always tell me that I wasn’t saying it right and have me try repeating it over and over. I would often listen onto a conversation and try to understand what a group of people were talking about, but when I would think that their conversation was along the lines of going to the park it would turn out that they were actually talking about something in their kitchen the whole time because of the slight differences in the words. It was incredibly depressing to try so hard at learning something new and be so incredibly bad at it. Also having to learn the characters of the words is basically like trying to learn a whole other language in addition. I didn’t want to give up, and I surely couldn’t because I needed to learn as much as I possibly could to be able to get by, but it was not an easy task and left me feeling like I didn’t know anything.

My friend from back home suggested that we should become email pen-pals and it was the one chance that I got to be able to write down everything that I was feeling in English and also feel some normality in hearing about her life back in America. It was a relief to not have to limit myself to simple vocabulary and short sentences. Sitting in my small room with the lingering smell of rice and fish still permanently attached to my clothes and sitting on my hard-as-a-rock bed, I would just let everything go and have my fingers do the typing as I told her about everything. Then, after four months in China, I was finally able to find another American in my city named Charlotte. Charlotte made being in China bearable and we actually ended up laughing so hard from having

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to deal with all of China’s struggles as a foreigner together such as getting stared at like an alien or having random people take pictures with you just because you’re white and tall. Ultimately, being able to go places with her brought me back to feeling like myself again. I could just talk and talk and talk without having to worry about anything. We would travel to get to this one pizza restaurant that served decent western food and pretend like we were back home just having a night out with a friend to gain some feeling of normality in a world of unfamiliarity around every corner. We were able to be sarcastic together and also just joke about the weird habits of the Chinese like how they refuse to wash their underwear with the rest of their laundry because they think it’s dirty, or how they wear plastic gloves when eating finger foods like pizza, and sharing in disgust of having to eat duck tongues, pig intestines, and chicken heart.

Most people in America take it for granted that everybody speaks our language and shares our culture, but after my journey in China I will never again take these things for granted. It was most definitely the hardest six months of my life but I don’t regret it one bit because I learned so much about myself and the power of being able to speak freely. Before going to China I always got so nervous and tongue-tied when trying to talk, but now I don’t even think about it because I’m just so grateful that they are able to speak the same language as me.

Hannah Bowerman is a Fashion Design major from Raleigh, NC who is studying to become a Costume Designer. She took a gap year before coming to Lasell and worked at Monocacy National Battlefield in Maryland and as an English teacher in China.

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Christmas Morning Karissa Coher

It’s cozy. The TV flashes replays of the Patriots game, reflecting off the mirrored glass case holding an entire collection of pocket dragons. The background noise of adult laughter from the room over holds a card game of hand and foot. I hang over the back of the wooden chair and pretend I know what’s going on while different faces and numbers continue to flick against the kitchen table. I dance back and forth between the happy people, snacking on small sandwiches of pepperoni, cheese and Ritz crackers. The repetition of ring around the rosy leads to more falling down than anything else. I laugh so hard my cheeks are flushed and glow bright red. My face as hot as the color. I’m so happy. I’m mesmerized by my Mimi’s shiny jewelry on her olive skin. She smells of Calvin Klein’s “Obsession” and so do I because she gave me a small spray before everyone arrived. My Papa squeezes me in his soft dressy sweater, it feels like I’m getting a bear hug from my favorite blanket. He smiles.

They are so happy.

The laughter starts to die down. I say my goodbyes while my legs dangle, hovering above the kitchen floor. I’m so tired, I have to rest my head against the back of the chair. My eyelids fall to the soothing sound of the dryer and shortly after, I feel my dogs sniffing around under my feet.

Searching for any crumb they could find. The phone rings, Mimi picks it up. I always imitate the way she says hello because I’ve heard it so many times. The best times are every Friday when I call her and say “TGIF! Can you pick me up after school today?”. The answer is always yes; it’s a routine. Mimi was serious this time. She didn’t speak much to the person on the phone before she stepped out of the kitchen. Her voice echoed through the doorway while I sat in curiosity, hands pressed under my thighs against the chair. “Pete,” she said, “Yeah,” he responded as he also stepped into the living room. They whispered back and forth. My eyes went out of focus against the tile floor trying to make out the soft words.

Everything was silent from then on. When I asked who it was Mimi just looked at me, with eyes that had almost no expression but you could see the concern. Her hand held her chin and covered some of her face. She was questioning something. Was she going to tell me? I started to get nervous. Did someone die? My heart was so loud and quick it was the only thing I could hear.

“Your mom got arrested when she was on her way home. She was drinking.” This had not been the first time so I wasn’t so worried but little did I know this would have the worst outcome of them all. I sat there in a room that was filled with laughter nearly 20 minutes beforehand but was now filled with aching hearts and racing minds.

Christmas approached and I was still happy, living with Mimi and Papa now. Mimi told me I had to go away for a little while so they could figure out some things with my mom. I didn’t understand but I knew I didn’t want to go. This nice lady came to pick me up. She was familiar to

me. She always would check on me and make sure I was happy. Before leaving, Mimi packed my stuff for me, putting my petite clothes into a backpack. She tried to hide the sadness she felt. She paced around her bedroom trying to think of every little thing I might need. She always did that, she always made sure I never went without. She made sure I had everything, even the things I might not need. But while pacing back and forth she was also trying to figure out what she was going to do after I left. Mimi hugged me and told me I’d be back before I knew it. She kissed my head as I took in the sweet smell of her perfume one last time.

The familiar lady took me to this place that I had never heard of. She explained that there were plenty of other kids I could play with. It was dark when we got there and there were small hills with paved roads that were slightly lit by the skinny poles. There were a couple of buildings there.

We walked into the first building and it was very loud, filled with young voices. I met some older kids while the lady talked to the other adults.

I asked about one kid’s trophies and some posters he had on his wall.

I felt welcomed there and it was almost nice for a second. They knew I was scared from the unsteadiness of my voice. They said they had been scared before too and that it would get easier, but how long was I staying?

Days? Weeks? Years? When the familiar lady came back we had to leave and she explained that those kids were a little too old for me so I was brought to the younger building. I started to miss the older kids because it was the first comfort I had since leaving Mimi and Papa and the kids were so nice to me. How was it that they were too old for me? The kids at the other building were so young, I felt like I was at daycare. This building had dim gloomy hospital lighting.

I was introduced to a big woman. This woman wrote my name on all of the tags of my clothes. She wrote my name on all of my toys. Everything of mine had smudged ink on it and you could barely make out my name.

I asked the big woman if I could call my Mimi many times, but the answer was almost always no. I was not able to call to say TGIF, because Mimi couldn’t pick me up. Not on Friday, not ever. I just wanted to hear her voice because that was the closest I could be to her. I wanted to hear that hello that I knew so well or the joyful “Yello!” that Papa always answered the phone with. When I did talk to her I only cried. Tears slid down my face, creating streams down to the corners of my nose and to the bottom of my chin. “I just want to go home,” I would plead this sentence over and over to whoever would listen. The big woman sat at her computer and told me not to cry but she didn’t know what it was like.

She was like the mean nurse at school that didn’t let you go home when you felt sick. I felt like I was drowning and nobody was there to save me.

The big woman just watched me suffer. The young kids just sat scattered around the room on the stingy old carpet. They were loud, oblivious to where they were. They just cared about the toys that surrounded them. I didn’t want to talk to those kids, they were happy.

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The life had been taken out of me. I would sit in the big woman’s office every day with my face in my hands, crying until I started to gag. It actually felt like someone died, but it was me. I died, and my mom was the one that caused this.

The big woman and all the young kids and I went to the movies for Christmas Eve. The next morning was not Christmas even though the calendar said it was. The kids were excited for the one present each of us got. I didn’t want a toy. I just lay in my temporary bed like a dead body.

Was it possible for a 10-year-old to feel like this? My heart felt like a bag of sand that dangled inside of me and it poured out of me when I cried.

I imagined what it’d be like to be with Mimi and Papa. That was the only thing I could do.

The familiar woman came to pick me up later that day. We stood on the icy cement steps in front of the door of my cousin Carrie’s house. It was dark out but the street lights gave a silent glimmer off of the house. I stood there anticipating the greetings from my family. The familiar lady was like a gift from god that day. As I was welcomed in, I walked up the split level stairs to a warm living room full of my family and a beautiful Christmas tree. I was rejoiced with Mimi’s perfume and her shiny jewelry.

It felt like Christmas until I had to leave again. This time goodbye was even harder because I knew where I was headed. I didn’t want to go back to the building with the young kids and the big woman. Being there was like being stuck in a bad dream that I couldn’t wake up from. There was no one to talk to. I was surrounded by bodies but no actual people.

Karissa Coher is an Event Management major.

She is from Preston, CT and lives on a farm.

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Three Little Eggs Sophia DeLuca

The sound of glass shattering into a million minuscule pieces began the biggest change of my life, and I often associate this sound with the first time I ever heard it. The crash was followed by the screaming and crying of my little sister, Emily. She, my older sister, Olivia, and I were all huddled together on the couch, scared to know what was going on behind the wall separating the living room and the kitchen. We knew not what was happening, we knew only what we heard. All that I can remember hearing was a crash.

We can take a few steps back, right before the horrid sound. It was an average night in the DeLuca household. We’d just finished eating dinner, taking our showers, and we were now in our pajamas. My sister Olivia was eight, Emily was about four, and I was six years old. The three of us were always close as children, and spent a lot of time together. As we were relaxing in the living room of our home, I looked out the window and saw nothing but darkness. Usually at this point, my sisters and I would read a story or watch a show before bed. Tonight we decided not to watch television. Instead, there was a book on the agenda. After all was said and done, I remember two things—the sound of a crash, and a picture of three blue robin’s eggs in a nest.

The book that we decided to read was a non-fiction book about a mother bird and her three eggs. I let my little sister Emily pick out the book, and I read it to her. I was not an amazing reader at the age of six, but I liked to pretend that I was teaching Emily how to read. Naturally, the fouryear-old was more interested in the pictures than the words on the page.

She said to me, “Look, Sophie! The momma bird is mommy and the three eggs are you, me, and Livie!” This was a moment of happiness, as my little sister made a real-life connection to the book we were reading. However, neither of us knew at the time, but that happiness was only going to last a few seconds.

Shortly after my ears were pierced with the dreaded crash that I can still vividly hear in my head. Emily was no longer happy, she was now in tears. Olivia was consoling her, as an older sister would, but I, on the other hand, did not move. I was stopped in my tracks, staring at a picture of three blue robin’s eggs in a nest. Ever since I was a little girl, I have never been the type of person to openly show my emotions. Sure, I felt like crying out as Emily did, but I held it all in because I wanted to pretend as if nothing wrong was going on. So, I ignored the fighting of my parents, and decided to keep reading my book.

She was choked up, but was able to muster together the words, “Let’s go girls, we are going to visit Grammie and Pop.” I contested, “But mommy, Emily and I were reading a story!” “It can wait ‘till later, sweetie,” she replied. My mom slipped my little sister’s church shoes onto her feet—and that is when I knew this was urgent. Emily was wearing her pajamas and dress shoes, and to this day, I still remember it clearly. The two-minute drive to my Grandmother’s house suddenly seemed like an eternity. So many thoughts were racing through my head. In fact, this was the first time I had seen my parents fight. It was a new feeling, a feeling of helplessness and broken heartedness. I felt terrible for my mother. I could not bear to see her cry. I also felt bad for my dad. My mother, sisters and I were all together, but he was stuck at home alone. I was torn. Three little girls and their mother headed into the car, escaping the violent scene, while a lonely man remained inside.

My Grandfather never likes to see his girls cry. So when we all arrived to his house, he too, was very upset. My Grandma remained conservative as usual, pretending like everything was fine, and I thought to myself that maybe that is where I get it from. Nonetheless, she told my sisters and I to go play in the game room while they had “an adult conversation.” I did not want to go into the game room, but I knew that my mom and grandparents needed some privacy. At this point, my sisters were starting to calm down, and things were a little better. I do not know what their conversation entailed, and I probably will never know. Just as I will never know a lot of things that happened on that dreadful night.

It is needless to say that I never got the chance to finish that story. There are a lot of things that were unresolved from this horrible night. I also never found out what exactly that terrible crash was. It sounded like a plate smashing, but it could have been anything. Although I do not recall some of the specific details of this night, the ones I do remember are very clear. I remember a sound and a sight. I may not have finished the story, but I still remember the picture of the blue robin’s eggs as it is etched in my mind forever.

Sophia DeLuca is an Elementary Education major.

She is from Warwick, RI and her favorite place to be is Newport, RI.

I knew in my mind that by this point, I was no longer reading. Instead, I was just staring at the image of three blue robin’s eggs. The crash was followed by yelling and screaming, but still, I could not see what was going on. The wall between the living room and the kitchen was withholding my ability to see what was happening. As it got worse, Olivia joined in and started crying with Emily. However, I did not budge; I continued to stare at the image in my lap, pretending like nothing was wrong.

After a few more minutes of arguing, my mother raced out of the kitchen.

The first thing I saw from behind that wall was the view of tears streaming down my mother’s face. By now, I knew something was really wrong.

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Zootopia Review Beverly Ortiz

Disney’s 2016 film Zootopia is an animated fantasy film geared towards young children. The film demonstrates a consistent message of how discrimination is wrong through a world where predators and prey live in harmony yet still face stereotypes because of the type of species they are. When Judy Hops, who is the first bunny to graduate from the police academy, leaves her hometown for the city of Zootopia in pursuit of her dreams of joining the police force, she faces many obstacles of discrimination because she isn’t a predator or a large herbivore. Determined to prove herself, she takes on a huge, mysterious case that terrorizes the city of Zootopia. Unfortunately, the only source in helping her solve this case happens to be a small-time hustler fox, which is one of the rabbit’s mortal enemies. Officer Hops breaks all odds and stereotypes against her, sending their young viewers a message to never judge a book by its cover and to not judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree.

In the words of Peter Travers, writer for Rolling Stone, the movie “comes ready to party hard.” Travers writes so highly of the movie’s ability to turn an adorably fun and endearing film fit for children to an eye opening and meaningful motion picture that any adult could relate and personally understand. Zootopia highlights feminism, racism and discrimination all in a family movie which kids, “paying zero attention to such things, will love [it, and] the grownups will have even more fun digging in” (Travers).

Other critics such as Nico Lang from Consequence of Sound, argue that Zootopia fails to address racism properly. He writes, “In Zootopia, no one really benefits from racism, and everyone is thus harmed by it equally—which is actually a pretty dangerous idea” (Lang). Zach Blumenfeld of Paste Magazine completely disagrees with Lang. He claims Lang is criticizing the movie from the wrong point of view, that Zootopia’s “main focus is not racism. It’s about prejudice… and how prejudice leads to racism. In this light, Zootopia is a stunning success” (Blumenfeld). I believe that Zootopia sheds some light on the touchy topic of racism but it’s not its main focus. Its focus is on prejudice and the discrimination made about animals who fall under the category of prey. Prey are belittled and assumed to be incapable of doing great things like predators. In Zootopia, Hops defies all odds against her to prove the stereotypes wrong.

The movie’s setting of a predator and prey living in segregated but not peaceful harmony sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Hops having to continuously have her guard up while trying to desperately prove herself to Chief Bogo, a massive and hard headed buffalo, that she is more than just a bunny. She constantly is denigrated and discriminated against because of the fact that she is the first female bunny to not only graduate, but graduate at the top of her class at the police academy. Blumenfeld sees this as the same characteristics “to a human character from a different film: Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods. Both Judy and Woods are highly enthusiastic, surprisingly intelligent females with major chips on their shoulders, trying to make it in a profession to which society has told them they do not belong” (Blumenfeld). The two are both strong women, letting nothing stand in their way of getting what they want. Zootopia accurately portrays feminism in a way that encourages young women to pursue their dreams no matter the social norm. It tells Hops’s story as a way to urge women that no matter where or how you start, to continue proving society wrong that women are more than capable of doing great things within their profession.

After having to accept a job as a meter maid that underestimates her ability, Judy Hops finds herself being scammed by a sneaky and tricky fox, Nick Wilde, who later becomes her crucial aide in solving a mysterious case. No one knew for quite some time why predators all around Zootopia were going “savage,” meaning predators were reverting back to nature and going on snarling, violent attacks. Assistant mayor Bellwether sees her struggles to reach her full potential of solving tough cases as a real cop, and assigns Hops the case. Unfortunately, Chief Bogo, unhappy with Hops, puts a time limit on her investigation.

In the midst of trying to crack a hard tough case, there is one of the most hysterical scenes I have ever seen. In a DMV exclusively staffed by sloths, Wilde and Hops seek help from a friend of Nick’s that goes by the name of Speed (keep in mind that he is a sloth). I would have never predicted for that scene to occur at that point in time in the movie. It was during a time where Hops still had limited time to solve her case and by adding this scene which included the sloth almost interacting in slo-mo, was brilliantly done. This scene serves as comic relief just as the movie reaches its climax. Travers jokes in his article, “Is it too soon to talk about next year’s Oscars?” In my own opinion, I think this might be my favorite part of the whole movie because it was so unpredictable and hilarious.

After Hops solves the case, she makes assumptions that the predators might be a threat and going “savage” because of their DNA, and what we see here is “the process of prejudice activated by fear and becoming racism” (Blumenfeld). Driven by fear of the unknown cause of predators going savage, Judy Hops resorts to Social Darwinism as a way to describe what is happening to the predators. Zootopia touches on how those who were discriminated against can also discriminate. The movie highlights how any type of person can experience prejudice, privileged or not. The audience can relate scenes of the movie to what is happening in the news today. This is powerful because the audience can draw on their own experiences of racism and prejudice when watching Zootopia.

The juxtaposition of making a children’s movie around touchy and sensitive topics was a very bold move on Disney’s part. It teaches young viewers life lessons that will help to guide them through their journey, and comforts adults by helping to explain complex issues in terms that children can comprehend. Luckily for us, their bravery produced one of their best films yet and set the bar high for all the remaining movies still to come.

Works Cited Blumenfeld, Zach. “How Zootopia Nails the Relationship Between Prejudice and Racism.” Paste Magazine. Web. 03 Nov. 2016.

Lang, Nico. “How Zootopia Gets Racism Wrong.” Consequences of Sound. 10 March 2016. Web. 03 November 2016.

Travers, Peter. “Zootopia.” Rolling Stone. 03 March 2016. Web. 03 Nov. 2016.

Beverly Ortiz is double majoring in Accounting and Finance. She is from Waltham, MA and has rescued four cats.

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Second Grade Terrors Alexis Desjardins

“Mommy read me this book!”

“Honey we read this last night!”

My first destination after learning how to crawl was my mom’s lap, and I went there every night until I was about 10 years old. I had a routine, I would climb into my mom’s lap with a book and ask her to read to me until I fell asleep. I loved reading! I would read all the Berenstain Bear books, Goosebumps books, and Babysitter Club books. Oh, but of course, with some help from my mom. My first grade teacher even recognized me for reading and I would always be the one to read out-loud from our stories in first grade. Going into second grade, I knew I had high expectations because my new teachers knew about “the reader” of the class. Books always amazed me because of the meaning deeper than the text on the page. Second grade meant chapter books. I was ecstatic—until I started getting bruises every time I read something wrong.

I always looked up to older kids—the “big” kids. Second grade meant we were getting book buddies, which were 4th graders who came to our class and listened to us read and guided us. We met our book buddies the first week of school and I was so excited that mine happened to be a “cool” big kid! The first time we had book pals we had to introduce ourselves and get to know each other.

She was a fourth grader. Her dark brown hair, big brown eyes and her deep voice intimidated me a little, to say the least. Chelsea was so cool— she had a boyfriend and a locker! She seemed nice but she was kind of “too cool” for me though. She was a big kid. Her lunchbox always represented the popular cartoon at the time, and her nails were always painted ten different colors. Jelly bracelets were the coolest thing in elementary school, and Chelsea’s left wrist sported at least one of these bracelets in every single color. Locker 101 was Chelsea’s and everyone knew it. How could you miss it? It was decorated in zebra print duct tape and every single Webkinz in her collection lived in her locker. All the other fourth graders would slip notes in her locker through the three slits on the outside. Every time she unlocked her pink shiny lock, two or three notes would fall out. Oh but don’t worry, she would not have to bend down to get it because someone was always there to pick them up for her.

Book pals was held in my classroom. It was a big classroom, one of the biggest in the school. The class was right next to where trees flourished and bird feeders were assembled in the courtyard for observation of the bird’s daily gatherings. I considered the classroom my second home; I was comfortable there. I was safe. My best friends were in my class and my two teachers who split the job were personal with us and very warm and very friendly. The atmosphere was always warm and secure.

We met three times a week for an hour each for book pals. It started off nicely, I read to her and she told me I needed a harder book because I mastered the level I was on! The next level was not a baby step up, it was a jump and naturally I struggled with it. Challenges didn’t scare me though.

I liked challenges. Finally, it was Wednesday, the next class, and it was time to start my new book! I was a few pages into the book when I mispronounced a word and Chelsea punched my leg. I looked up in surprise, and she just looked at me.

What? Am I missing something? Did I really just get punched by my book pal!? What did I even do? I was just reading my new, challenging chapter book. We sat in silence and I continued reading, thinking she was trying to be funny. I read another few pages and I accidently skipped over a period and she squeezed my arm. Again? Really? This time I didn’t let it slide.

“What was that for?”

“My teacher told us to punish you guys if you messed up so you learn how to read.”

I had no clue what to think. I was only in second grade. Could it be true that they were told to hit us? I mean I guess… but wait no that definitely was not okay. She was a fourth grader and I was an innocent second grader who did not know any better. Book buddies was over that day, thank goodness.

This kept happening over and over again. I began to dread these three hours of the week, which was reasonable. I kind of kept it a secret from my friends because she told me that I couldn’t say anything about it. Being an innocent second grader, I didn’t know any better. Why did everyone else love book buddy hour? This could not be happening to anyone else because I dreaded going to school those days and tried to find every excuse to not go to school Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The abuse happened for about a month until my parents noticed a bruise on me.

At first, my parents didn’t believe me that they were coming from a fourth grader. I didn’t even know what to tell them. Chelsea told me not to tell anyone and that included my parents. I was scared of her and what she could do to me. Eventually, they pieced it all together and realized I had been acting distant, avoiding school, and the bruises. My mom cried— which confused me because I knew it was a big deal, but not that big of a deal because I thought it was protocol.

After my parents brought it up with my school and teachers, she had to write me an apology letter. I switched book pals to be with my best friend and her sweet book pal. I hated reading after this. I had trouble focusing.

I didn’t want to make any mistakes, so I avoided reading. I avoided it for a while, so I did not develop the skills in third grade and all the grades above until I finally decided to look past it. To this day, I struggle with reading. I am the reader I am today because of a negative experience that I had when I was younger with my book buddy.

Unfortunately, my writing was affected by this because I had trouble reading, so I never learned new words or how to put things together.

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Writing became a challenge for me too and I began to dislike writing, naturally, because I became a weaker writer. Oddly, at the same time, I found myself turning to writing despite my weaknesses. I would write stories, diary entries and anything I could think of. I decided to not let this experience ruin writing for me too. Something I loved doing was stripped away from me, and I wasn’t letting writing go too. I am the writer I am today because of a negative experience that I turned into a positive experience to uncover what I loved, which was writing.

When it came time for high school, anxiety filled my body. I couldn’t go back and blame my second grade book buddy for my poor performance in English classes. I decided I needed to really focus on putting it in the past and focus on the future in reading and writing. I always dreaded reading out loud in class because I didn’t want to mess up. I dreaded reading for homework. I dreaded reading in small groups. When it came time for the ACT and the SAT, I wasn’t so nervous about the writing part, but I was very nervous about the reading part. I worried about the reading sections and on both tests I scored the lowest on the reading sections.

It’s not that I was scared of being hit or abused when I read something wrong or answered incorrectly, it was just that I was conditioned to not enjoy reading. I certainly was not a strong reader, which also made the reading sections unpleasant during the standardized tests. I was also very insecure about my reading abilities. I didn’t want to be judged based on my reading level. After I struggled through the testing, a college essay was next. I was genuinely terrified for my college essay. I did enjoy writing, but I was still so scared of being judged, like my book pal judged me and abused me. This piece of writing could make or break my future. I always thought that it was normal to be insecure about writing a college essay, but none of my friends were as nervous as I was. I drafted it many times, and gave it to many teachers to read and edit. I opened up and let myself be vulnerable to the teachers, in hopes of producing a college essay that would allow me into my top choice colleges. All the preparation ended up paying off and I got into all five of my colleges. Still to this day, I do not enjoy reading. I cannot focus on reading, and I get anxious when I have to read, all because of one girl in second grade.

Before second grade I loved reading. I’d climb into my mom’s lap every night and she would read to me until I fell asleep. It took one fourth grader and one experience to ruin reading for me. Luckily, I saw the positivity in the situation and I turned to writing and even though I struggled, I taught myself how to write and to this day I love writing and still struggle with reading.

Alexis Desjardins is a Psychology major.

She is from Hope Valley, RI and has also gone skydiving in Las Vegas!

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Setting Myself Up for Judgement Sarah Rudker

I was uncomfortable and sticky from four hours of being crammed into the back seat. Pulling into the driveway, our vacation was officially over.

However, I didn’t mind being home. My favorite part of that moment was getting to check the pile of mail stuffed and bulging out of our mailbox.

I plopped out of the car, all of my stiff bones and muscles cracking. I inhaled deep until my lungs were full and about to burst. Then I ran to grab the stacks of envelopes and pointless magazines, embracing the large bundle so that nothing would collapse. I waddled my way up the stairs and threw everything on the table. Immediately I start scavenging through, paper by paper, as if I were a kid in a candy store. I came across a strange brochure. It said “Miss Teen CT USA.” I was not really intrigued; however, I took the pamphlet to look through anyway. Once its turn arrived within my stack, I noticed it was not just any pageant, unlike previous ads I have gotten over the years. It was a preliminary for the pageants you see on TV, specifically “Miss USA,” but for girls my age.

I immediately showed my mom and after she read through it she wanted me to apply. No matter what she said to convince me, I still was not interested because I was not the pageantry type. I have never been a size two and I most definitely would never be tall enough to model anything since I am a measly five feet. Not to mention, I was not the most outgoing of people at the time, recalling the fact I was terribly shy my sophomore year in high school. On a whim, and not really knowing why, I ended up applying online that afternoon. To my surprise, the very next day I received an email from the pageant coordinator that said I was eligible for participation; and so it began. Why I accepted the challenge is still a mystery to me. I was at a point in my life where it was my second year in my new body. I had lost a lot of weight, but in my eyes, I looked the same as I always had. Being insecure, maybe I wanted the validation. Maybe I wanted the attention. Maybe I just wanted to feel beautiful, because what girl does not want that? I never discovered the exact reason and still continue to ponder what got me started in this.

When the weekend for competition finally arrived, I took that Friday off from school to travel to the other side of the state. I was either car sick or had butterflies in my stomach the whole way; I could not tell the difference. Arriving impeccably dressed in a Michael Kors trench coat and high heels, I strutted my way across the hotel lobby as humbly as I could in what I was wearing. I specifically remember all of the eyes watching me, judging me; but that is what I signed up for, right?

After a long day of rehearsal, running on five hours of sleep and nothing but the salad and fruit they served, it was show time. The first competition was swimsuit. My heart was beating out of my chest. It was like thunder continuously banging inside of me, screaming to find a way out.

Same with the little amounts of food that were expected to keep me full.

I thought at any minute they would be spilling out onto my shoes, or worse, the audience. I took a glance around the room at all of my fellow competitors, then turned to look back at me. I did not belong here. These ladies starved themselves and ate only salad for weeks. I ate whatever I wanted, including an entire pizza the night before. Despite the fact I am an athlete and I worked out every day, I still did not compare by far.

Feeling ashamed, the heat from the lights burned my face and eyes more than usual as my face simultaneously flushed red with embarrassment. I just wanted to get my walk over with. My legs jiggled with every shaking step. I nearly fell down the stairs running off the stage when my moment was over. The next couple of shows were not as bad. Being the underdog, I was naive to all the little details. At least my mom did think to sneak me some snacks. But rather unfortunately, all of the other forgotten pieces that could be noticed by anyone in the audience, added up to something huge that made me stick out like a sore thumb. My hair was different. My makeup was different. My shoes were different. All in a bad way because I did not follow the precedent they had set on how to look. I was ashamed I presented myself the way I did, and that I did not know the correct way to look. At the same time, somehow I was still forgettable. How is it possible to stick out and be forgettable? Basically, I looked like a girl playing dress up. As you can imagine, I did not make the top ten. Hearing those words, or the lack thereof, it was one of the hardest moments to keep a smile on my face, and because of that I was beginning to look like the other girls: fake. The second I turned away from the audience, I could not hold it in. The back of my throat felt like that moment after you eat sour candy, tight and numbing. Tears silently streamed down my face despite the fact I came into this competition not even wanting to win. I am a realistic person; hope for the best but prepare for the worst and do not expect anything. I did not expect to win but for a reason unknown, I physically could not stop the tears from falling. Maybe it was because I did have hope. Or maybe it was because I had just been judged, and rejected. I was not good enough for what they were looking for. That made me judge myself. I promised I would never put myself in that kind of a situation again. I had built up my nonexistent confidence just to have them tear me down to a step below even that.

A year went by and I could not believe where I found myself. I broke the promise I had made. I was going through the same steps as the year before, setting myself up to be judged. I broke that promise because I wanted to go back. I wanted to take a stand and prove the world (or at least all of the girls and their monstrous audiences) against stereotypical pageantry girls. The last thing I wanted to do was quit when I knew I could have done better, said more, or maybe even done something to inspire someone else, because that’s the true purpose behind this competition, isn’t it? Wakeup call; from where I stood, the competition was not what they had advertised.

The dreaded swimsuit competition was yet again the first to face. Shoes and robes flew across the ballroom we used to change. Girls who weren’t afraid of showing their bodies walked around without getting dressed.

Thick fumes of butt glue and hairspray saturated the air. The stench reeked in a way indescribable, but one every pageant girl knew. Butt glue was something I would have enjoyed the pleasure of never using. This was a growing up experience for me, and this time I took the stage with pure found joy and confidence. I was pleased with the way I presented myself because I remained natural. I decided if I was not going to follow their precedent, then at least this time I knew what I was doing. I refused

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to use hairspray or layers of makeup that would take hours to paint on. My hair I left from when I got out of the shower. My face I applied enough goo only to be able to see my features because of the bright lights drowning you out. I stood out in my own way simply by getting across the point I wanted to make. I was a symbol for all of the “real girls” who were too shy to grasp an experience like this one.

Next quick change was into my evening gown. I raised it slowly up my curves, savoring every moment of the silky lining finally dragging up my body. As I grab the zipper and begin to pull and tug, I get this random burst of joy that I was able to accomplish what I set forth to do. This celebration did not last for long as I was shoved out of the room. Now hyperventilating, waiting patiently behind stage, I desperately sat on a small ramp close to the floor, anything to relieve my bloody feet covered with inferno, oozing, blisters from walking in six inch heels for three days straight. Getting up was even more of a struggle. As the line filed through and I was finally up, I made sure to take my sweet time walking down that runway. They said to “take your moment;” well I took advantage of that statement.

farm town. You don’t have to be perfect and know how to do everything correctly. You don’t have to wear layer upon layer of makeup and use extensions to look beautiful. And most of all, you don’t have to be a model.

Even if I did not make a change in the standard, I still got to show people my personal opinion of how pageants should be and how I wanted to be perceived. This may not seem like much, but this accomplishment is a huge victory for me. I have never been a confident person, but now, my confidence was finally on my own terms, not determined by others.

Sarah Rudker is a Fashion Design major and on the Lasell field hockey team. She is from Salem, CT and has received various CT State Scholastic Art Awards.

Shaking with anticipation, thoughts of winning wrapped around my brain. Those thoughts squeezed until my head pounded and eyes bulged.

I shook out my limbs and realized I forgot to breathe. It was time for the announcement of the top ten finalists. Shoved on stage and scanning the audience, I stood proud, waiting for what I thought was to come. I would keep waiting, because what I imagined was exactly that, not real but a figment of my overactive imagination. I was rejected yet a second time.

Giving my whole self, natural and raw, this struck me hard. I walked the same route as the year before: back to the ballroom to grab my belongings and leave. Knowing that for two years you aren’t good enough was the hardest part of this entire process, especially since I was stepping forward as the best version of myself. That feeling is a type of heartbreak that stabs you over multiple times, and something each and every one of us non-finalists’ could not forget even if we tried.

Despite everything, I will never regret this experience. I learned how to be a leader and I was able to get on the road to finally loving myself.

These are colossal stepping stones in my life that I always knew I needed to achieve. No matter the emotional handicap and burden the competition had put on me, it was worth every moment being able to go back for the second time. I finally felt like I could do something to make a difference and that was the true reason I was there. I doubt I would ever put myself through this again because pageantry is not me. I did not fit in nor did I want to because of the type of people I was surrounded by.

Why would I put myself through such a horrendous experience yet a third time when I feel like a was already able to put forth the message I intended to?

I paid for people to judge me. Most would call me insane to do such a thing, but it was not to me. I set forth to make a new standard for pageant girls. You can come from a non-wealthy family and grow up in a small

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Movie Review: The Goonies Shelise Dutcher

The Goonies is a classic 1980s movie that is enjoyable for the whole family.

The Goonies themselves are a group of young teen boys named Mikey (Sean Astin), Mouth (Corey Feldman), Chunk (Jeff Cohen), and Data (Jonathan Ke Quan), who then adopt Mikey’s older brother Brand (Josh Brolin) and two girls Andy (Kerri Green) and Stef (Martha Plimpton) to come along on their adventures. Each character has unique characteristics that makes the movie more enjoyable to watch. The leader, the foolhardy one, the fat one, the inventor, and the mature one. Then, you have Andy—who is only there for Brand’s good looks—and Stef, who could not want to be there any less. When the Goonie boys find a treasure map in Mikey’s attic, they follow it in hopes to find treasure to save their neighborhood which is being torn down to build a golf course.

The map brings them more friends (Andy and Stef), and many dangerous and lively adventures including the Fratellis—a mother and two sons that make up a criminal family and become a major inconvenience throughout the film.

The director, Richard Donner (who also directed X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Superman in 1978), is known for his fantasy-themed movies.

The writer of the film, Steven Spielberg, is actually the true founder of the film for he is the one who wrote the story. Although Donner does a great job interpreting Spielberg’s story on camera. It is obvious that Donner and Spielberg make a perfect duo for a funny and adventurous family movie. Spielberg absorbs us in the ultimate childhood adventure where the bad guys are real and so are the monsters (Sloth). Spielberg and Donner do a great job in showing a “keen understanding of how such characters might interact, and a good feeling for their horseplay; it even employs such kid-oriented devices as subtitles in a scene that has one boy talking with his mouth full” (Maslin). Maslin explains the mood of the movie perfectly. This childlike mood can remind most of us of the fun adventures that everyone envied at one point in their lives, and also brings us back to the days when we used to play treasure hunt and ride our bikes as children. Also, the ancient tale about one-eyed Willy is enough to remind us of some of the urban legends in our own hometowns.

It is argued by many that the film does not have any important message within it. Movie reviewer Roger Ebert, who gave The Goonies three out of five stars said that the movie “uses what it knows about kids to churn them up, while E.T. gave them things to think about, the values to enjoy.”

The comparison to E.T. doesn’t really do this film justice, for the movies have two completely different plots and themes. I have to disagree with Ebert, because this movie is not just about making us laugh, but also about the transition from childhood to adulthood. We see this when the fun game of treasure hunt becomes a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

By this, I mean how while looking for the treasure they are also trying to outrun the Fratellis, who also want the treasure and will do anything to get it, even going as far as possibly killing the boys. We also see this transition when they are trying to find the money in order to save their neighborhood and not just for fun; we see that desperation for one to hold on to their childhood no matter what the cost.

Also, this movie does have touching moments—much like E.T. An example of this is the wishing well scene: when Mikey talks about how they should not give up, he states “the next time you take another test it will be in some other school… down here it’s our time it’s our time down here, that’s all over once we [leave here].” Mikey shows how they might actually have a chance to save the neighborhood if they keep going and not give up. The movie has many heartwarming moments like this, and even a touch of teen romance too. This is between Andy and Brand, and even a small amount between Mouth and Stef.

One can admit the movie is mostly fueled on perfectly timed comments and hilarious moments. This makes the movie enjoyable to watch, while also having just the right amount of young love and sentimental moments. An example of one of these moments is at the beginning of the movie when Mikey is upset about their house being torn down, and Brand comes up and hugs him without having to even ask what is wrong. This shows the brotherly love the two share, even though they are tough on each other a lot. The film also has a brilliant mixture of intense moments, such as when they are trying to find the right keys of the piano, and the fierce ship scene.

The fierce ship scene, when the Goonies discover One-eyed Willy’s ship, shows us once again the mixture of childhood and adulthood, and we can see exactly when the scene turns from childish to adult-like.

There’s the moment when Mikey is talking to the skeleton of One-eyed Willy: he says how he outsmarted him, and that Willy was the first Goonie. That moment quickly changes when they all take the treasure, we are reminded that they are there to help and save their neighborhood.

However, Mikey tells the rest of the Goonies not to take the treasure in front of One-eyed Willy because it is Willy’s. Also, when the Fratellis arrive, the childhood dream is completely gone when the scene turns into a scene of survival. However, the scene portrays a more Peter Pan “walk the plank” type of pirate feel. We are grateful for when an unexpected hero—Sloth—comes in and saves our brave Goonies.

We also see Steven Spielberg’s love of monsters (also seen in E.T. and Jurassic Park) when the hilarious fat character, Chunk, meets a creature that looks like a deformed human. This creature’s name is Sloth, and is apparently the third child of the mother Fratellis. He and Chunk become very close, and he even saves the day at the end of the movie. The weird friendship heightens when Chunk asks Sloth to live with him at the end of the movie, when Sloths only “family” is arrested for their wrongdoings.

In the scene at the end of the movie Data tells the Newscasters that “the octopus was the most scariest,” but what octopus? When making the movie, Donner decided to cut out the giant octopus scene. According to Gwynne Watkins, who writes for Yahoo Movies, the most obvious reason Donner cut out the scene was because “the ‘scary’ octopus looks like an oversized bath toy.” After watching the deleted scene myself, I must admit that the octopus does not look real enough to be placed in a movie that has so many other amazing props. Also, the placement of the scene was

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supposed to be between when they discovered one-eyed Willy’s ship and before they board it. The emotional mood might have been wiped out by the “oversized bath toy” coming into the scene. Also, the scene itself does not make a lot of sense. In the scene, Data saves the day by putting a playing Walkman into the Octopus’s mouth, which causes the octopus to swim, or maybe even dance, away. It’s not clear why the octopus went away and why Data’s Walkman can play underwater. However, it is clear that it was a good choice for Donner to cut out the scene.

It is evident that the classic 1980s movie The Goonies has won the hearts of many people, including myself. At the end of the movie, I had a feeling of sadness that the adventures were over. Films that are that enjoyable and are able to make us feel strong emotion afterwards are the best to watch. To have a movie that has such an aftereffect is a brilliant thing to encounter.

Works Cited Ebert, Roger. “The Goonies Movie Review.” All Content. N.p., 01 Jan. 1985. Web. 02 Nov. 2016.

The Goonies. Dir. Richard Donner. Prod. Richard Donner and Harvey Bernhard.

By Chris Columbus and Steven Spielberg. Perf. Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, and Jeff Cohen. Warner Bros., 1985. DVD. Maslin, Janet. “MOVIE REVIEW SCREEN: ‘THE GOONIES,’ WRITTEN BY SPIELBERG.” NYTimes. N.p., 7 June 1985. Web. 2 Nov. 2016.

Watkins, Gwynne. “’The Goonies’ 30th Anniversary: Watch That Bonkers Deleted Octopus Scene.” Yahoo. N.p., 5 June 2015. Web. 02 Nov. 2016.

Shelise Dutcher is undeclared, but will be majoring in Psychology in the fall of 2017. She is from Rockland, MA and is one of six children.

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Remission & Regression Mindy Esposito

“Melinda, you just got called down to the office.” My first-grade teacher told me one afternoon. I was still known as Melinda when I was seven.

I didn’t understand why I was being called down to the office. I had never been called down before. During the short walk downstairs, I ran through everything that had happened recently but could not think of anything that would require me to go to the office. I nervously opened the door to the main office, and the first thing I saw was my mom and little sister sitting there waiting for me, and my mom with one of those elementary school homemade icepacks (a yellow sponge in a Ziploc bag) pressed against her face. As it turned out, my mom had tripped on the sidewalk on the way to pick me up from school because her legs were too weak to lift high enough to be able to walk without her foot dragging on the ground. This was the event that led to my mom’s diagnosis of the auto-immune disease known as Multiple Sclerosis, or MS. My mom had been experiencing symptoms of her disease for a while, but no doctors had any answers for her. They kept turning her away time after time. Finally, after that disturbing day in first grade, the doctors listened. They did MRIs and other tests and realized she had lesions on her brain and spinal cord. They diagnosed her with the type of MS called remission and regression. That means she goes through periods of time when her symptoms are at their peak (regression) and then a period of usually longer time when her symptoms are subsided (remission). They gave her medicine for that and started to treat this incurable disease to the best of their ability.

At first, my mom was very sick. She always had trouble walking, had to use a cane, and couldn’t work anymore. She was always tired and had difficulty taking care of my sister and me. My dad was working all the time to help take care of our family financially, so I helped my mom around the house at the young age of seven. Memories of that age come in bits and pieces, but one memory is very clear in my mind.

My sister and I were dancers. We would go to dance every Tuesday and Thursday night. For a while, it was difficult for my mom to be able to take us to our classes, so my dad would have to rush home from work to take us to class. I don’t think he minded. He liked the opportunity to spend time with his kids, but it was hard on him. I remember every Tuesday after dance class, my dad, sister, and I all helped clean around the house.

My job was vacuuming. My dad did most of the work, but I helped in the little ways I could. My sister, who was only four, did little things, like pick up her toys, or use the Swiffer duster to dust around the house. That time always stands out to me because it’s one of the times my mom really needed help. She doesn’t like asking for help, but she was so physically and mentally exhausted from the remission and regression MS that she couldn’t do the typical chores she would around the house.

The meds slowly started to kick in and started to make her feel a little bit better. She was able to start cleaning and cooking again for my sister and me, and my dad could ease back into a normal work day for a while.

But then, a couple years later, another bad bout hindered her again.

“Melinda, Gabby is coming to stay with us for a little while,” my mom told me one day. (I was still known as Melinda at nine.) Gabby is my grandmother on my mom’s side.

“Why is Gabby coming?” I asked her.

“I have to have some treatments done and I won’t be able to take care of you guys for a while and since dad is traveling for work, Gabby will have to help me out.”

For the month of October, when I was in fourth grade, I remember getting driven to school every day by my grandma. I remember coming home and seeing my mom lying in bed, sometimes walking around, but just to use the bathroom, with an IV sticking out of her arm and her holding one of those metal poles that the IV bag hangs off of that you see in hospitals. I was a little confused as to why she was at home with the IV and not at the hospital, but I guess it made sense that she got to be as comfortable as she possibly could in her own bed and not in a hospital bed for a whole month. The doctors were hoping this treatment would help with her remission and regression MS. Gabby stuck around for a while and it was nice getting to see her for so long, but eventually my mom’s IV treatment was done and she was able to go back to Pop-Pop (my grandpa) in Connecticut. My dad had also come back from the work trip that he was on, but he traveled a lot so he would probably end up having to leave again.

Mom was doing all right for a while. She could drive my sister and me home from school. We had switched to a new school a few towns over from where we lived when I went into fourth and my sister into first, so we couldn’t take a bus. She was able to cook and clean and take care of us the best way she could. But there were always things that would bother her. By the time I was in fifth grade I started playing sports, basketball in the winter and softball in the spring. I was also still dancing so my mom had to drive me a lot of different places and always had my sister to take along with her. My dance classes were in the town that we lived in, but my softball practices were all in the town where my school was. My mom and sister always had to find stuff to do while I was practicing.

One day during the spring, I had a game for softball. It was disgustingly hot that day; my mom’s van showed 101 degrees. The heat and the humidity always had a huge impact on my mom’s health so she couldn’t sit outside in that weather and watch my game. The air conditioning in her van was also not working that day, so she was already bothered by the heat and humidity that was in the air that day.

“Mindy, I don’t think you can go to your game today.” (I started going by Mindy when I changed schools).

“What! Why mom?” I asked her in a very disappointed tone.

“Because it’s too hot and I need to go home to the AC.” At the time I gave her a little bit of a hard time, but quickly got over myself. She had already sacrificed so much of her health to let me play sports

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and dance and missing one game was not the end of the world. I knew how hard it was for my mom to sit through my games and I also knew how hard it was to tell me I couldn’t do something I loved, so I didn’t need to make it any harder by complaining.

By the end of my senior year of high school, I knew where I was going to college and my mom and I just started to organize a list of what I needed to take to school with me, when one day my mom gave me some news about her regression and remission MS.

her if she needs help either driving my sister around when she’s having a rough day or helping her if she’s too tired to get out of bed, and she won’t be there for me if I need my mom. But after all we’ve been through together, we’re both ready to be apart and for this new part of our lives.

Mindy Esposito is an Early Childhood Education major. She is from Sunderland, MA and has been to Holland.

“I have to go to a new neurologist in New Hampshire. It’s about an hour and a half away. If Gabby can’t drive me, I might have to have you bring me if you’re available.” Gabby had moved closer to us and now lived in a town 15 minutes away.

“Why do you have to go to a new one?” I asked, very confused.

“Well there are two different kinds of MS. One is progressive and it just continues to get worse and one is called remission and regression. I was being treated for remission and regression, but these new doctors think that it was the wrong diagnosis. I actually have the progressive.”

I was dumbstruck. How could doctors for 12 years have treated my mom incorrectly? We had noticed around Christmas time of my senior year that she was having trouble again. She had to use her cane in the house and she had never had to do that before. She noticed that her meds seemed not to be helping anymore and that is what sparked some questions and what led to the discovery of her being treated for the wrong MS. She is now on new meds that seem to help her. She doesn’t need her cane in the house anymore and she doesn’t get as tired as quickly. Hopefully these meds are the ones she really needs.

Even though my mom is on these new meds, it wouldn’t be easy for her to help move me into college. I wanted so badly for my mom to be there and help me take one of the biggest steps in my life, but I knew it might just be too much for her. I had to move in earlier than the other college students because of preseason field hockey into a dorm that wasn’t the one I would stay in for the rest of the year.

I told her, “Mom, I think when I move in for preseason you shouldn’t come. I won’t be able to move my stuff in until after the first session and it will be a lot of standing around in the hot sun for you. It will be better if you come when I move into my actual dorm. Even that won’t be easy for you.”

“Yeah, I think that will be the best idea, because I really want to be there when you move into college,” she agreed.

It was so nice that she was able to come the week after my preseason move-in to help me move in to my actual dorm. After all these years of her learning to deal with her disease and us coming together as a family to help take care of her when she needed it, her being able to move me in and take this huge step with me was indescribable. We’ve all grown together and now for the first time in my life, I won’t be right there for

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No Nose Perfection Julia Feeney

I was born into a body that was given to me blindly. I had no choice on which body would be mine or what features I would inherit from my parents. The vessel of my being was assigned to me by pure lottery, a roll of the genetic dice. What would I look like? Who would I become? I have been bound to this body for life. It is all mine to take care of and protect.

It is my body which I am stuck in. I did not have a choice.

My mother would say I won that lottery. As a child, around age 6 or 7, I remember laying on my bed as she tucked me in. Admiring the thin long legs that she passed onto me, while taking credit for their beauty. She told me how strong and stoic my shoulders were; they were “tennis shoulders” that I got from my grandfather. She would push her fingers through my hair saying how lucky I am for not getting stuck with my aunt Ellen’s thin hair. Instead, my hair was long and thick like hers. “It’s gorgeous,” she would say, tucking some behind my ear, which she also admired. Was it really possible to have pretty ears? And was I really lucky enough to be blessed with such perfect ones? A kiss on the forehead extinguished these questions stirring in my mind; my thoughts faded into the night as my lamp was switched off. Sleep came easy.

This peaceful picture came to a screeching halt in 6th grade when middle school began. It is hard to pinpoint one thing as the cause of my downfall but an undeniable contributor was surely puberty and hormones. My body was changing and suddenly my appearance really mattered. I felt under a microscope. I couldn’t believe I now shared a homeroom with not just 6th, but also 7th and 8th graders. They seemed so much older and more adult-like than me. In retrospect, I know they were no older than 14 but back then they seemed like seniors. They were royalty in my mind; a meaningless head nod from an older boy was enough to send me into giddy hysterics with my girlfriends in the bathroom.

Middle school social life was a whole new ball game. Romantic relationships kept the gossip mill moving and there was always enough drama that the days were never dull. Eighth grade boys would check out the younger girls and burst into laughter as a group would walk by. It always seemed like they were making fun of us until one would expose himself and admit intentions of “dating” one of us. I saw the way that the boys looked at certain girls. I also overheard the things they would say about the girls. They talked about them like they were pieces of meat. Their conversations revolved around the physical appearance of the girls and seemed more like a critique. Their faces, bodies, behaviors, and even clothing were all topics to be discussed and ridiculed.

I learned quickly that I was being watched and judged for the way I looked and the way I acted. This caused me to behave much more nervously and awkwardly and caused a lot of anxiety. I was under a microscope and desperately did not want to be there. My body was going through things I wasn’t prepared for; my skin was oily and prone to breaking out, I could never get my hair to look the way I wanted it to, and my body still felt a bit prepubescent. But I was expected to be a beautiful young woman. I knew these boys were picking me apart. I felt inadequate and ugly and had no idea what to do to change that. I couldn’t change

anything. I was stuck in this body and suffered day by day, wishing I looked like someone else. *** Inadequacy and unhappiness were all very normal for me to be feeling at that time, as it turns out. A study by Dove found that out of ten girls, a staggering seven believe that they are not good enough or do not measure up in some way, including their looks, performance in school and relationships with friends and family members. The way we look seems to top the list of stressors for American teens, as 71% of girls with low self-esteem feel their appearance does not measure up, including not feeling pretty enough, thin enough or stylish enough (Real Girls). *** By the time I reached the ninth grade, I had a better sense of who I was and felt confident in my personality and somewhat confident in my looks. I was far from perfect but definitely had developed at least some level of comfort in my appearance. After all, I couldn’t change it. My only option was to be happy with it, which I was. I got my braces off in 8th grade and that was life changing. I got a great hair straightener that I could finally tame my hair with, which I had recently dyed blonde. I was slender and in shape, I could fit into anything I wanted to wear. I had a lot to be grateful for.

I was self conscious about one thing, though. Every time I looked in a mirror I felt dragged down. It was so frustrating to be so unhappy with something I could not change. There was nothing I could do about it. I could not avoid it. No matter what angle I turned my head, it was never the way I wanted it to look. Right in the middle of my face. My nose. I had been cursed with the “Feeney nose.” My dad’s nose. My brother has it too, but he’s a boy, it’s okay for him to have a big nose. But I am a girl.

I am supposed to be delicate and dainty. And have cute little features. I should have a nose like Tinker Bell’s but instead I have Captain Hook’s.

Why did I get cursed with such an awful nose?

I had studied it from every angle. It was so triangular and the bridge of my nose had a big bump. The tip of my nose tilted downwards. When I smiled it was even worse. One side was a little better than the other. I had only one acceptable way to hold my head in photos. There was only one angle that allowed my face to look the way I wanted it to, and even then it was far from perfect.

If there was anything I could do to make my nose better, I would do it.

I was willing to try anything. I constantly rubbed the bump, gradually adding pressure, hoping I was wearing away at the bone and making it smoother. One time, I took a little hammer to the bump, tapping away, hoping somehow it would make a difference. But nothing did.

By the 10th grade I was 15 and felt it. I was ready to get my license and begin my young adult life of freedom and bliss. I had a stronger sense

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of self than in my earlier years, and there was this strange disconnect I was dealing with. The appearance of my face did not accurately represent who I felt like inside of my body. In the center of my face was this thing I did not identify with. I looked in the mirror and would have trouble accepting that my reflection was me. It was something I did not want to accept. I wanted better for myself. I hated who my nose made me look like. I would see pictures and be disgusted by my own face as if it wasn’t a part of me my entire life.

I can’t remember when I decided I wanted a nose job, formally known as rhinoplasty, but it wasn’t some big conclusion I had to wrestle with. It was something that I felt so strongly about, there was no hesitation whatsoever. If I had the chance to get surgery to change my nose, would I? The answer was yes. An enthusiastic, yet dead serious, and entirely unapologetic, YES. *** The concept of having elective surgery to change part of one’s body had been becoming increasingly more normal, even in teenagers. Studies show 31% of teens have at least one body part on which they would like to get surgery (Stage of Life). It is rare, but not unheard of, for a teenager to go under the knife. My environment was especially open to the idea—I went to a private school and specifically remember a few Jewish friends that were “in line” to get rhinoplasty like their older siblings had before them. It was very normal and a sort of right of passage in some families, whereas other families would never even consider such a thing. My family wasn’t completely detached from the world of plastic surgery because my grandmother had gotten some surgery done to her nose. We never really talked about it. But it did make the idea sound a little less crazy when pitching to my mom that I wanted a nose job.

It is sadly normal and common to be less than thrilled about your personal experience, especially when you’re a young girl. Which I of course was. Studies conducted by Dove show only 10 percent of young girls found themselves to be “pretty enough” and mention that it’s clear there is an epidemic of low self-esteem among girls. The latest figures from the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery show that the number of cosmetic surgical procedures performed on youths 18 or younger more than tripled over a 10-year period, to 205,119 in 2007 from 59,890 in 1997 (Sweeney). These by-choice major surgeries are increasing rapidly, becoming more and more common amongst young females especially.

Elective surgery in patients under 18 can be a taboo subject and is not often agreed on. Some doctors refuse to do elective plastic surgery on patients below 18 because of two reasons. One reason being that the patient’s face is still growing and changing, and they will likely require follow up surgery. The second reason being that patients under 18 do not have fully developed brains and are not likely to fully comprehend the gravity of the decision they are making and the potential consequences.

Some doctors would recommend therapy instead of surgery in hopes that the patient’s unhappiness with their appearance can be healed internally.

The acceptance of cosmetic surgery in young people continues to grow.

In 2015, 64% of plastic surgeons saw an increase in cosmetic surgery and injectable treatments in patients under 30 (AAFPRS). When surveying girls specifically under 18, trends show that the top 3 procedures are ear surgery, nose surgery and breast reduction. The most common being otoplasty, which is ear reshaping surgery. The second most popular is rhinoplasty, which is surgery on the nose.

These are both major procedures and very rarely does insurance help

out with the cost. Otoplasty costs an average of $3,000, while rhinoplasty costs $4,500, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. *** I begged my mom to let me get surgery on almost a daily basis for months. She would always have a reason not to, but I kept explaining how important it was for me. Conversations varied from tears to anger and frustration until my mom finally understood how life changing it would be for me. She started to entertain the idea but not in a serious way. One morning, after a lot of pecking, I finally broke through to her. I specifically remember her driving me to school and I was looking at myself in the mirror with hatred for how my nose looked. “There’s no way you think that I don’t need a nose job,” I said to her as I turned my head to the side.

“Look at my nose. You know it’s awful.” Then there was silence for a few seconds, she had no response—nothing to say. It was in that moment that my journey began. It seemed impossible and completely out of reach but I hoped with all my heart that I would someday, somehow, get my nose fixed.

We had to make appointments almost a year in advance. The first appointment is a consultation where the surgeon looks at you and evaluates what he would do. My mom and grandmother decided to set up appointments with a few different surgeons so we could compare their plans and chose the one we liked the most. We had four appointments with four different plastic surgeons who were chosen with careful consideration based on ratings and reviews. One of them was even on the cover of a magazine. It was all very exciting; we took a plane from Logan airport to JFK and weaved our way through appointments.

The different consultations all blur together in my mind with images of gorgeous marble floors lined with dark wood and twinkling chandeliers. The offices were beautiful and grand like miniature hotel lobbies.

The waiting rooms were fascinating, not only because of the decor but because of the clientele I was sitting with. “That guy over there is on the news!” my mom whispered to me, referring to a father and daughter across the room, flipping through magazines.

All the doctors seemed smart and proficient but each had their own unique opinion on how to make my nose look better. One doctor insisted on a minimalistic approach- that I really didn’t need much done. He spoke directly to me and looked into my eyes. He said that I was very beautiful just the way I was, and that he didn’t think I necessarily needed my nose fixed, but he understood why I wanted it. This made my eyes fill up with tears. Hearing those words from a stranger, never mind a doctor in the field, was really powerful.

He warmed my heart but didn’t change my decision; I would be getting surgery in June and would take the summer to heal. I chose my doctor based on his plan of action. I liked the changes he said he would be able to make, and the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of former patients were impressive. He also was a talented artist, and his office was lined with oil paintings of children and animals. My mom concluded that in order to paint such pictures he must have a steady hand.

I eagerly awaited the day of my surgery. Confident and collected, I felt one hundred percent ready. In the few weeks prior, I had to begin taking medication that would build in my system to later help with things like swelling, bleeding, and bruising. I traveled to New York City again, but this time by car and with my grandmother. We booked a room because the surgery would require us to stay two nights. I had to take a medication the night before my surgery and the morning before going in. I didn’t need to go to a hospital. Instead, the doctor has an operating room

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as a part of his 5th Avenue office. I sat in the waiting room just as I had for my consultation, except this time was the real deal; everything I was waiting for.

I remember being wheeled into an ice cold operating room and getting knocked out with laughing gas. Next thing I knew, I was waking up from the deepest depths of darkness and had a heavy, sleepy head. A nurse helped me go to the bathroom as I was still waking up. Before I had any idea of what was going on, I was in the back seat of a taxi, pulling up to my hotel. *** Looking back on my decision, I have no regrets. Nothing is perfect, as I previously mentioned, and neither is my new nose. It is an improvement, nonetheless, and is still more than I ever dreamed of calling my own.

The recovery solidified to me what a major surgery it was. The first few nights were a bloody, cotton-stuffed, painful blur. After 2 weeks I could finally take off the splint I had on it, and after that, for weeks, my nose was delicate, achy and swollen. Eventually the surgery faded into the past.

Such a major thing caused such a major change, yet after time seemed insignificant. Even still, catching a glimpse of a photograph of my former self always confirms that I made the right choice.

My family all had positive reactions to the transformation; they noticed it physically and emotionally. I suddenly had a little more confidence that would show up in places I didn’t expect, like at a restaurant, placing my order. I just had a sense of bravery and boldness that I didn’t have before.

I had less trouble going out on a limb and speaking up for myself. All of these are changes I am eternally grateful for.

My mom, who after all will always be my harshest critic but highest praiser, approved of the results. Whenever I point out flaws of the finished product, she disagrees, insisting that it’s beautiful. Her criticism has always meant so much to me and lingered in the back of my mind every time I glanced in a mirror. It is a blessing to have a mother with such loving eyes but also its like a curse. I was raised on the belief that looks are important and they can define you before your voice gets the chance to. In this world today, it is unfortunately true that often times we are judged based on just our appearance. My mother was just trying to warn me; to make sure I always looked at myself with the perspective of onlookers in mind. But to constantly have to worry about what others think or how they feel is a burden that can wear down even the most confident of people. Nothing is ever perfect and no one (or no nose) will ever be. I now know that the only person’s opinion that matters is my own; not my moms, not my classmates. I am in charge of how I feel about myself. It’s not always easy, but I decide to feel beautiful on the inside and the out. waiting for.

My family all had positive reactions to the transformation; they noticed it physically and emotionally. I suddenly had a little more confidence that would show up in places I didn’t expect, like at a restaurant, placing my order. I just had a sense of bravery and boldness that I didn’t have before.

I had less trouble going out on a limb and speaking up for myself. All of these are changes I am eternally grateful for.

My mom, who after all will always be my harshest critic but highest praiser, approved of the results. Whenever I point out flaws of the finished product, she disagrees, insisting that it’s beautiful. Her criticism has always meant so much to me and lingered in the back of my mind every time I glanced in a mirror. It is a blessing to have a mother with such loving eyes but also its like a curse. I was raised on the belief that looks are important and they can define you before your voice gets the chance to. In this world today, it is unfortunately true that often times we are judged based on just our appearance. My mother was just trying to warn me; to make sure I always looked at myself with the perspective of onlookers in mind. But to constantly have to worry about what others think or how they feel is a burden that can wear down even the most confident of people. Nothing is ever perfect and no one (or no nose) will ever be. I now know that the only person’s opinion that matters is my own; not my moms, not my classmates. I am in charge of how I feel about myself. It’s not always easy, but I decide to feel beautiful on the inside and the out.

Works Cited Sweeney, Camille. “Seeking Self-Esteem Through Surgery.” The New York Times, 2009. Web. 29 Sept. 2016.

“Real Girls, Real Pressure: A National Report on the State of Self-Esteem.” Isacs. org. N.p., June 2008. Web. Stage of Life - Changing the World, One Story at a Time. “High School Main Page.”

Statistics on High School Students and Teens. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Sept. 2016 “AAFPRS - Media Resources - Statistics.” Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Alexandria VA. N.p., Jan. 2014. Web. 29 Sept. 2016.

Julia Feeney is a Junior and she majors in Communications. She is from Dedham, MA and likes to attend live music and comedy shows.

I remember being wheeled into an ice cold operating room and getting knocked out with laughing gas. Next thing I knew, I was waking up from the deepest depths of darkness and had a heavy, sleepy head. A nurse helped me go to the bathroom as I was still waking up. Before I had any idea of what was going on, I was in the back seat of a taxi, pulling up to my hotel. *** Looking back on my decision, I have no regrets. Nothing is perfect, as I previously mentioned, and neither is my new nose. It is an improvement, nonetheless, and is still more than I ever dreamed of calling my own.

The recovery solidified to me what a major surgery it was. The first few nights were a bloody, cotton-stuffed, painful blur. After 2 weeks I could finally take off the splint I had on it, and after that, for weeks, my nose was delicate, achy and swollen. Eventually the surgery faded into the past.

Such a major thing caused such a major change, yet after time seemed insignificant. Even still, catching a glimpse of a photograph of my former self always confirms that I made the right choice.

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Grades Don’t Define You Katlyn Fenuccio

Do you ever wish you were evaluated for each class on more than just the number you received on the last test? When it comes down to test taking, it really is serious business. There is no time to joke around, especially when that one grade determines if you pass or fail the entire course. In his essay, “More Testing, More Learning,” Patrick O’Malley proposes that providing students with more frequent testing and assignments will give rise to strong, intellectual individuals. Regarding O’Malley’s frustration he felt in college by what he called “high-stakes exams,” his position towards a solution holds validity to some degree, but does not solve the issue completely. In an attempt to resolve this matter, individuals have to analyze and acknowledge the opposing side of the argument, especially concerning the stress that is now placed on professors to fulfill this demand. Removing tests and large assignments out of the educational curriculum is nearly impossible, but to help individuals learn the material and do well in the course, other measures can be taken to test and evaluate students on their progress and knowledge about the material.

Both students and teachers agree as early as middle school, that the workload in classes is extremely difficult to manage, especially with sports and extracurricular activities. O’Malley argues that, “tests cause unnecessary amounts of stress, placing too much importance on one or two days” rather than the actual progress of the student’s ability throughout the entire term (214). Yes, increasing the frequency of test taking is a strange solution, especially when tests are usually the trigger of stress. If more tests are given that means less material is on each test, allowing for deep study and focus on small portions of material. Studying small amounts of material for more frequent tests allows students to better learn and remember the information and not stress about forgetting small pieces of the detail pulled from larger course sections. Without as much stress, students are more likely to feel empowered and motivated to do their best on future exams and assignments.

O’Malley argues his point that tests fail to motivate students’ best performance, and not taking them as frequently does not encourage frequent studying (214). To some degree, tests fail to encourage a student’s best ability when demonstrating their knowledge on the material, but there is no cause and effect relationship between more frequent exams and studying habits. Although having more frequent tests may cause students to study more, it does not mean they necessarily will or will not actually retain or learn the information. If you ask most students to recite the definitions to their first vocabulary test of their freshman year in high school, they will think you are crazy! Most people do not learn the definition and meaning, they just memorize the phrase that matches with it.

Having large tests or projects does not automatically mean the professor has to ask specific small detail questions, but instead focus on testing the student’s knowledge of the bigger picture and tie all the concepts together as a whole.

O’Malley states that frequent exams also pose a problem for professors.

More frequent exams mean more than just additional reading and grading for professors, but the actual test itself is too time consuming (216). If professors give more frequent tests in hopes to decrease student’s stress, they increase their own by adding to the number of papers to grade. This

also diminishes the already short class time professors have to move on and teach students new material. Instead of removing the number of tests in the course due to short class time, universities should seek approval for administering tests outside of class time. Some colleges, such as the University of Massachusetts Lowell, requires students to complete exams after class hours in order to refrain from wasting class time to take them. This method provides a solution to both sides of the problem because no class time will be affected for more frequent tests the students are demanding.

Students often rely on feedback from their professors about how they are doing in class. This information is valuable advice craved by any student who truly wants to succeed. With challenging courses, students benefit and learn more from the material when they practice it more frequently, helping them find out how much they are learning and what they need to go over again. Ideally, if professors were able to read and grade three hundred papers and exams and provide constructive feedback on each one, then more frequent exams equal more feedback. Now, realistically, we know professors have a life outside of teaching, as do the students, therefore they physically cannot provide the feedback that is constantly demanded by students. Alternative methods to receive feedback can be taken such as scheduled meetings with professors outside of class time at the request of the student, for one on one evaluation of their progress.

Although O’Malley makes valid points in his argumentative essay, “More Testing, More Learning” he does not pose full solutions to the issues he mentions or acknowledge the opposing side. In order to increase the amount of knowledge learned by students, without causing stress on them as well as professors, other testing methods and assignments for grading and ways of doing such should be in place to evaluate their learning comprehension.

Work Cited O’Malley, Patrick. “More Testing, More Learning.” Axelrod & Cooper’s Concise Guide to Writing. Ed. Rise E. Axelrod and Charles R. Cooper. Sixth ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2011. 214. Print.

Katlyn Fenuccio is an Athletic Training major intending to pursue a degree in Physical Therapy.

She lives in Millbury, MA and traveled to Haiti over the summer to build a house for a homeless family.

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The Fundamentals of Free Throw Shooting Chris Forte

Basketball, like any other sport, is just as much of a mental game as it is a physical one. While players must spend hours on the court and in the weight room, there are some things that players cannot prepare for once in game. These factors include time on the clock, referees, and pressure situations in dynamic environments. In some practices, coaches will try to recreate these situations in scrimmages, where they will invite outsiders to attend and distract players during free throws. While players can practice shooting free throws for hours on end, the only way to really practice them is in a game, where many of the uncontrollable factors will take effect. Free throws happen to be some of the most challenging shots in the game of basketball, as they involve the physical and mental aspects of the game. They involve balance, eyes, elbow, and follow through, pressure situations, and an unending battle against factors that the player cannot control.

The player steps up to the free throw line and looks around. Three players line up on the left and two on the right in designated areas under the basket. One of the referees stands underneath the basket with the ball in their hands. They dribble it once, maybe twice, and shout, “Two shots!”

They then pass it with a bounce pass that falls a few feet in front of the free throw line. The player catches it, and now they must start their routine. For their routines, many take a few dribbles, some one, two, three, or more. Some prefer to spin the ball a couple times in their hands, and eventually find a spot for their middle finger on the center of the seam.

All players have their separate routines that work for them, and the reason to have them is to get into some sort of rhythm. After their routine, it is time to look at the basket and take the shot.

Once the free throw shooter finishes their routine, they must implement the rules of BEEF. BEEF is an acronym that stands for the fundamentals of shooting a basketball. It stands for balance, eyes, elbow, and follow through. The first step is to be balanced. This usually means players should keep their feet about shoulder width apart. If they shoot with their right hand, then they should have their right foot pointed at the basket, and the opposite is true if they shoot with their left. Some players point both feet at the hoop and others point their opposite foot at an angle, but in the end it is all about being balanced. The next step is for players to focus their eyes on the basket. Again, personal preference is a factor as some players look at the front of the rim, others look at the back of the rim, and some look a few inches below the rim at the net. It is important to be centered when shooting because if the player is not, there is a smaller chance the shot will go in. An important part with this step is to look at the center of whatever the player is looking at, whether it is the rim or the net. Next, players should focus on how they position their elbows. When shooting a basketball, players must bend their elbows at a ninety-degree angle and they must, of course, aim the ball straight at the basket. Finally, the way players follow through with their hand is important, and should consist of a hard flick of the wrist and the ball coming off

the middle finger last. As long as players follow these four simple steps, they will have the best chance of sinking the shot.

However, when playing in a game, pressure situations will arise and can easily throw off a player’s rhythm when shooting at the line. Pressure can come in many forms, as it can come from outside forces and, more often, from within. At the line, needing to make at least one of two in a late game situation is completely different from shooting one hundred every practice. For some, focus is not nearly enough to make a free throw in a game, as they sometimes need a little bit more of an edge. Many basketball analysts refer to this ability to perform under pressure as a player’s killer instinct. They use this term to describe who wants to take the final shot in a game, saying that you should never want to shy away from it.

Some players do not have this, such as LeBron James, and they are heavily criticized for their inability to finish a game. Yet, in high school and even college basketball, pressure is not nearly as much of a factor as games are not usually nationally televised to thousands of people. Pressure is still a factor, so eventually players must learn to deal with it. The only way to eventually adjust to pressure situations is to be forced into them and grow through experience. So, the best way to experience these pressure situations is to shoot the final two free throws of the game, where you are forced to make at least one to tie the game or both for the win. Once forced into more than just a few of these situations, then a killer instinct will begin to be developed.

The last factor of adversity basketball players must eventually learn to deal with are distractions from fans in certain environments. This is why teams are given home field advantage in sports. A crowd can make all the difference in the outcome of a game. Chants often get into the heads of visiting teams, jeers are thrown at players who make basic mistakes, and fans will relentlessly attempt to divert a player’s attention when taking a free throw. Once in game, especially a rivalry or playoff game, free throws become much more difficult, as a crowd can be so deafening that players sometimes cannot even hear themselves think. Opposing fans can be a free throw shooter’s worst nightmare, as they will act completely inappropriate to possibly give their home team an advantage. Some fans even explore areas that should remain untouched, such as making fun of the family and friends of that shooter. Not only does that player need to have the killer instinct in scenarios like this but they also need to have a thick skin. Otherwise, free throws will not be free at all, and the opposing team will gain a competitive advantage.

To completely master the art of the free throw in games, basketball players all around must learn to adapt to these situations and use BEEF to give themselves the best chance of sinking the shot. This is why coaches make all of their players shoot free throws in tryouts and in practice, to see if they have the fundamentals, the thick skin, and the killer instinct to push through when times become difficult. In basketball, as well as in

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all sports, players must be able to dominate the game physically as well as mentally, because without one or the other, teams will not experience success. Imagine a team that was unbelievably skilled physically. All players are quick, tall, and athletic. Their one flaw is that they cannot make free throws. Due to this, other teams relentlessly foul them to the point where they cannot score because they cannot make free throws. This team exists in the National Basketball Association, and they are known as the Los Angeles Clippers. If some of their best players could make free throws consistently, it is a strong possibility that they could win an NBA Championship. Yet, because they cannot, they continue to lose and they will until they become consistent. So, while scoring baskets consistently is important to win games, free throws can be the ultimate deciding factor between a victory and a loss.

Chris Forte is a Finance and Accounting major.

He is from Wellesley, MA and he loves basketball.

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Charter Schools, not Cheaper Schools Kaitlin Johnson

Massachusetts is known for providing an adequate and exceptional public school education for its children. This includes all forms of public schooling, which includes charter schools. Ballot Question Two would have allowed the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to lift the cap on charter schools by adding 12 new charter schools around the state of Massachusetts and increasing enrollment.

However, Massachusetts voters were largely not for charter school expansion (“Massachusetts” 1). What was at issue was “whether the state should be allowed to approve up to 12 new charter schools or larger enrollments at existing charters each year, not to exceed 1 percent of the statewide public school enrollment” (Seelye 1). However, many Massachusetts residents did not consider that adding more charter schools in Massachusetts would improve the quality of public school education and would potentially reduce education disparities in low-income communities.

On November 8, 2016, the state of Massachusetts voted against Question Two, with 63% opposing and 37% in favor (“Massachusetts” 2). Advocates of Ballot Question Two argued the main reason the cap on charter schools needed to be lifted was due to waitlists at the 78 charter schools in Massachusetts (“Massachusetts” 2). Raising the cap to add more charter schools would allow school choice as well as the opportunity for a better education. If the cap were to be adjusted, it would benefit many low-income families in disadvantaged communities to receive an education like that of traditional public schools in more affluent communities.

Many charter schools in the state have waitlists, which are considered to limit the knowledge of the world’s next generation.

The vote would “add another 42 charters statewide before it bumps up against the cap of 120. But it cannot add them where they are in greatest demand—in urban districts like Boston, where some 32,000 mostly black and Latino students sit on state waiting lists—because of spending caps” (Kenworthy 1). Communities in Massachusetts that would have benefitted from the higher cap include Boston, Chelsea, Everett, Fall River, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lowell, Springfield, and Worcester (Seelye 1). Additional charter schools would have answered the demand of low-income families in these communities who strive for better elementary and high school options (Kenworthy 1). It is evident that these nine communities would have highly benefited from the raise of the cap.

Regarding alternative funding, there are several non-profit organizations that offer support for non-profit charter schools, such as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). This program provides financial assistance for free enrollment in charter schools for educationally underserved communities. However, without a cap adjustment, KIPP cannot offer additional support and many students in Massachusetts will not have the option to seek an alternate, high-quality public school education.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker advocated for Question Two, saying “This is an issue about social justice… This is an opportunity to give every kid in Massachusetts the same opportunity my kids have” (Seelye 2). Other proponents think charter schools are “showing the kind of progress that should win them great support” (Kenworthy 3). “‘After

three years in a Boston charter school, students make up roughly the equivalent to the black-white achievement gap,’ says [researcher] Ms. [Sarah] Cohodes about their findings” (Kenworthy 3). Charters provide an alternative to traditional public school education, as some families cannot afford private schools or to move into a community with higher performing public schools. Therefore, one could argue charters are unbiased and produce a fair educational alternative.

It has been suggested that urban charter schools generate better academics than their traditional public school counterparts (Seelye 2).

Charter school parents have said that Massachusetts charter schools have demonstrated greater achievement levels in students who lagged in traditional public schools. Charter schools have been distinguished for providing better support for struggling students (Kenworthy 1). Howard Fuller, from the Black Alliance for Educational Options says: “You’ve got thousands and thousands of poor black parents whose children are so much better off because these schools exist” (“Charter” 1). It is evident that families see many positive outcomes in charters. They help to give an education to low-income families who want the options that families that are more affluent have. Many families cannot afford the tuition needed for an expensive private-school education; therefore, they go to charters, and that is not to be looked at as the negative option (Kenworthy 1).

Parent education activist Monique Burks says that charters have “been regulated at a much higher level than traditional public schools across much of the country” (Kenworthy 1). Charter school teacher Krista Fincke says that the practices being used in charters should be shared; the models that are working best for students should be given to all educators (Kenworthy 4). Overall, the work of charters has been effective with the many active programs that work for all students.

Regarding the opposing view, many Massachusetts voters expressed fear that charter school expansion would drain funding from traditional public schools and lead to rising taxes, while others did not believe a charter school education was worthwhile or even equal to that of traditional public school education (Kenworthy 2). Lisa Guisbond, the executive director of Citizens for Public Schools, says, “lifting the cap will undermine a fundamental principle of Massachusetts education: its commitment to serving all students” (Kenworthy 2). Many Massachusetts communities were concerned that raising the charter school cap would, in turn, hurt their communities and mainstream or traditional public schools by limiting necessary materials for student edification. Opponents to charter schools also believe Massachusetts should focus on improving traditional, public schools before any alternative charter schools are built or expanded on (Kenworthy 1). Most families saw this as a concern, knowing there are more children in public schools than charters.

One of the biggest issues during this election for Question Two was whether charter schools add to racial inequality. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has called for a moratorium on charters, stating they “lead to increased segregation and inequality in public school systems” and that it’s better to strengthen regular public schools than siphon off resources to charters” (Kenworthy 2). The NAACP called for a standstill until charter schools were more

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like traditional public schools regarding transparency and accountability.

The moratorium also stresses that public funds should not be diverted for charter schools and that charter schools must stop expelling students (Strauss 1). Overall, it is one of the only ways charter schools can continue to grow in an operative manner.

Massachusetts citizens did not have confidence that adding more charter schools in Massachusetts would improve student education and improve the understanding of differences between children. Many residents in Massachusetts did not want the cap for charter schools to increase because of the controversy that traditional public schools should be given more attention before more charters are built.

In conclusion, it’s apparent that Massachusetts residents do not want more charter schools, let alone increased enrollment at current ones.

Notwithstanding, many families believe that charter schools were given the short end of the stick, and believe they tend to prepare students just as well or in some cases better than traditional public schools. Moreover, charter school teachers feel they can offer children a more suitable education than traditional public schools can, overall proving that if question two on the November 8th ballot had been passed, the reimbursements for new charter students leaving traditional Massachusetts public schools would have been worth it.

Works Cited “Charter schools under attack.” Washington Post 27 Aug. 2016. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 18 Nov. 2016.

“How is KIPP Structured.” KIPP Foundation. Web. 12 Dec. 2016 Kenworthy, Josh. “In Massachusetts charter school vote, a debate on how best to serve all children.” Christian Science Monitor 2 Nov. 2016. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 18 Nov. 2016.

“Massachusetts Ballot Measure on Charter School Expansion Fails.” New York Times 9 Nov. 2016: NA(L). Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 18 Nov. 2016.

Seelye, Katharine Q., and Jess Bidgood.

“The Big Race in Massachusetts (No, Not That One): It’s Over Charter Schools.”

New York Times 6 Nov. 2016: A18(L).

Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 18 Nov. 2016.

Strauss, Valerie. “NAACP ratifies controversial resolution for a moratorium on charter schools.” The Washington Post. Web. 15 Oct. 2016

Kaitlin Johnson is a Fashion Design and Production major with a minor in entrepreneurship. She is from Northborough, MA and plays the cello, flute and piano.

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Should Students Learn a Foreign Language?

Leah Sheltry

According to the 2006 General Social Survey, “only 25% of American adults self-report speaking a language other than English” (Devlin 1).

With only a quarter of adults living in the United States speaking a language other than English, studying a foreign language in high school is more important now than ever. Having solid language skills to build on from in high school will help young adults in college and beyond.

Students must take a foreign language in high school to compete in the global economy, increase their knowledge in other school subjects, and to appreciate and learn from different cultures.

Every college graduate wants to secure a career in their chosen field, but might end up working a remedial job. With the current job market, students will need every opportunity to outshine their competition. Between two equal resumes, the one with four or more years of studying a language will impress an employer. Opportunities in fields like “government, business, medicine, law, technology, military, industry, [and] marketing” will open up to those who have studied a foreign language (“Twenty Five” 1). Taking a foreign language in high school through college will prove to the hirer that the student is ready to communicate on a global scale.

Not to mention, an employee’s salary can increase “an additional 10 to 15 percent” (Chau 1) and higher responsibility will be placed on him or her.

So, students who have studied languages in high school and college will likely be making more money immediately than their job-hunting peers.

With many companies headquartered in Asia and Europe, a job seeker that speaks Chinese or German will be more attractive to a corporation.

An entry-level employee who is fluent in these languages and understands the country’s customs is potentially more valuable to a company than a seasoned, English-speaking only worker. If a company has a strong network of foreign language speakers, ties with that company in the U.S. and abroad will be strengthened. Opportunities to travel for work will open much more than a high school student sitting in a Spanish class could ever imagine. Learning a new language can benefit students long before they’re ready to look for internships or jobs. Students who take a language can feel the effects in different classrooms.

When students are in high school, they might not realize what they are studying can improve other skills. It’s easy for a high schooler to focus on what he or she does well and ignore the other subjects, but school subjects build on each other. Learning a foreign language is the exact same way. It’s true that when high school students are studying for a French vocabulary test they are growing their English vocabulary. Looking at a list of words in a different language might serve only one purpose to students—earning a good grade. They will probably throw it away the second they receive their grade and never think about it again. However, their brains are forming complex links to words they never thought of before. They will be able to recognize root words, suffixes, and his English vocabulary will grow because of it. According to the University of Louisville, “math and verbal scores climb higher with each additional year of foreign language study” (“Why Study” 1). While their English skills are expanding, so are their problem-solving skills in math class. Apart from picking up a new skill and sharpening others, taking a language class exposes a student to different cultures.

In the age of the internet, critics of studying a foreign language point to online translators. However, these online translators are not perfect machines and they distract from having a fluid conversation. While it’s easy for a student to become dependent on Google Translate, after taking four or more years of a language, he or she will be comfortable speaking without it. Additionally, an American trying to speak French to a native will impress and show respect. It’s not about flawlessly pronouncing a word or stringing together a complete thought, but it’s about the student’s effort and stepping outside of his comfort zone. After all, technology is oftentimes faulty and students won’t be able to rely on it in their time of need. There are an infinite number of dialects, accents, and slang in each language that online translators won’t pick up on. For example, not all Spanish is created equal. Most U.S. schools teach Latin American Spanish, spoken in countries like Mexico and Colombia. This varies greatly from the Spanish actually spoken in Spain, which has a strong “th” sound in many of their words. In the case of French, which is more unified than Spanish, there are still unique dialects like French-Creole spoken in Louisiana. Similarly, many African countries speak a blend of French and a local language after France’s colonization of Africa. To put it in simpler terms, a computer isn’t going to understand the difference between a Boston, New York, or Wisconsin accent. A translator isn’t smart enough to note different names for the same thing, either. What people in New England call a grinder, people in Philadelphia and New Jersey call a hoagie. Similarly, the word for bus in Puerto Rico and Cuba is guagua, but is simply autobus in Spain. With all of these regional differences, it might be embarrassing if an online translator spits out the wrong word for a student traveling. Even though technology is evolving faster than ever, students need to remember the importance of face-to-face conversations, especially if there’s a language barrier.

When high schoolers study a foreign language, they better understand their own world and the world around thim. They will be able to differentiate their culture in the United States from Mexican culture or Italian customs. They might even try to bring some of what they have learned to their daily lives in America. Blending cultures through food, music, art, or clothing will make them appreciate both cultures more. Today, foreign language studies are less about vocabulary and grammar and more about real world, practical application. After studying a language for four years, students can read literature other than what they’re reading in English class. They will be able to describe the different styles of British, American, and Latin American authors. They might compare Cuban and American art and music, and form an opinion on what they like best. Having knowledge about writers, painters, and singers different than a student’s own will force them to realize that their culture is not the only one.

Developmentally, students graduating from high school who have taken a foreign language will notice the world around them and will be less egocentric. Students will gain real-world experience and have fun while doing it. Sampling Korean food or going on a field trip to a Mexican restaurant will create a lasting memory in a student’s mind. Without even realizing it, students are also breaking down barriers between themselves and different countries. Moving on from high school and college, adults will remember and carry that knowledge with them. They will become more productive members of society and less likely to judge others in

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the workplace. According to Auburn University’s College of Liberal Arts, “foreign languages expand one’s view of the world, liberalize one’s experiences, and make one more flexible and tolerant” (“Twenty-five” 1).

There must be a foreign language requirement across U.S. high schools.

Not only will it help students immensely later on looking for jobs, but it also has short-term benefits like increased knowledge in language arts and math. Students will have fun studying a language and it will be a lifelong learning experience. Students might even be able to travel to a different country with their language teacher while they’re in high school.

Yes, students will have the help of online translators at their fingertips, but actually speaking the language is a learning tool. With younger people speaking a language other than English earlier on, America will be a land of smarter and more diverse adults.

Works Cited Chau, Lisa. “Why You Should Learn Another Language.” US News. U.S.News & World Report, 29 Jan. 2014. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

Devlin, Kat. “Learning a Foreign Language a ‘must’ in Europe, Not so in America.”

Pew Research Center. 13 July 2015. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

“Twenty-five Reasons to Study Foreign Languages.” Auburn University, 02 Feb. 2016. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

“Why Study a Second Language.” Department of Classical and Modern Languages, University of Louisville. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

Leah Sheltry is a Fashion Communication & Promotion major. She is from Gales Ferry, CT and within a week of getting her driver’s license, backed into a street sign.

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Reflect and Learn, Never Regret: My Story, My Mistakes Marc Verity

My life prior to leaving high school was just about as normal as any other kids at the age of fifteen. I had a great upbringing, supportive parents, a solid group of friends, I played sports, and didn’t do anything illegal. I may have consumed alcohol here and there, but at that time I was still nervous my parents would find out or I’d get in trouble with my baseball coach. While playing summer league baseball prior to my junior year, my throwing arm started to give out and I eventually quit the team to focus on resting my arm and training. Although I didn’t tell anyone, I was starting to slowly lose interest in playing sports altogether. I couldn’t take the constant pain, daily icing, or training anymore.

During that fall semester of 2006 just like my interest in sports, my interest in school started to fade as well. It wasn’t so much the act of learning that I lost interest in because I love to learn, but the general idea that I needed to go to school to be successful was not what I believed in at the time. I found myself falling in love with music and becoming more serious about my future aspirations in the music industry. During that fall semester, I had my first heartbreak, my longtime girlfriend at the time had cheated on me. To top this all off, my grades had suffered so much that I was unable to try out for the varsity baseball team which, at the time, I was a shoe-in for. The varsity coach was not happy about this. I ended up thinking, “screw it.” I quit baseball and took up smoking cigarettes.

To this day, I can still recall my best friend telling me I was going to get addicted to smoking. I didn’t know it at the time but I already was.

With everything that defined my preteen years rapidly evaporating around me, I found myself playing music more and taking my craft more seriously. This is when I joined my first real band with a couple of college kids from my surrounding area. Those next 6 months of my life are, to this day, the most important to date. In February of 2007, after months of playing shows on the weekends and practicing almost every night with my new band, things started to pick up. We had decided that we were going to start touring full time starting that summer and into the fall.

At that time, we started talking to a record label, Triple Crown Records, about putting out our next record. The rest of the band wanted to sign the deal and start touring full time but I was the only member still in high school. After a few weeks of discussing with the band, I finally bit the bullet, came home from practice one night and had a long talk with my parents about the future of my life and where I saw myself when I was older. They too could see I wasn’t interested in school anymore. I would come home from school every day, go straight to the practice space, we’d hang out and write music until 10 or 11pm, then I’d come home and go to bed. On the weekends, we would play two, sometimes three, shows all over New England and sometimes even down the east coast. Both my parents and I knew that school wasn’t what I wanted anymore. Being the supportive parents that they had always been, the next day my mom called me and said “There is a GED test in two weeks at Northern Essex Community College. If you take a GED pre-test and pass next week, I’ll let you drop out of school.” That was all I needed to hear. I took my GED pre-test, passed, took the GED, and never looked back.

The next five years were a battle of ups and downs. Some were incredibly rewarding and some were the lowest I had ever been. I found myself at

times wondering, “Did I make the right decision? Am I ever going to amount to anything? What if I don’t make it?” I also found myself touring the country with five of my best friends in a van going from city to city selling our CDs, playing shows and festivals, trying to make ends meet, and eating McDonalds twice a day or Fritos and Nutella because it was all we could afford. I played in front of thousands of people, legendary venues and festivals, I even played shows with some of my idols growing up.

At times, I remember thinking to myself, “Life doesn’t get much better than this.” We partied. Every. Single. Night.

Although I had some of the best times of my life and everything thus far helped form where I am today, it all came to a crash in the middle of the desert during the summer of 2010 in California. Sometimes life throws you a curveball or hands you lemons... In this case, life threw me a curveball that pegged me square in the chest with a sack of lemons, all within the span of thirty minutes. While on the biggest tour of my band’s career to date, we were having some issues with our singer. On that night, we were arguing with her about her vocal performance throughout the tour.

The rest of the band had talked the previous day and we decided to ask her to take vocal lessons to help her build endurance, and learn ways to save her voice while we had a little time off. When we stopped to put gas in our van, everyone was still tense and our singer got up and hastily left.

What we didn’t know at that moment is that she had pressed record on her phone and left it in the van. Three of the other members stayed in the van and continued to discuss the issues at hand while the rest of us got out. Eventually, the three members that stayed in the van started to talk about kicking her out of the band when we got home because everyone was growing tired of the constant tension. After leaving the gas station, about two miles down the road, life officially tossed me that curveball I was talking about. Our singer freaked out, started screaming, crying, and quit instantly. Initially we were all shocked and didn’t know what was going on. We quickly found out she had recorded their conversation when she showed us her phone. She was appalled that the guys would talk behind her back like that and had had enough with how everything was playing out over the last few months. Just a few miles down the road, I got the sack of lemons to the chest. While all of us were sitting in silence contemplating our lives, unexpectedly, one of the tires on our van blew.

Not only are we all incredibly pissed off and in a state of shock, but then two of us had to get out of the van in the middle of the night to change the tire. I’m not sure if you’ve ever been in the desert during the middle of the night in the summer, but I can promise you it is not like the movies depict it during the day. Instead, it’s freezing and windy since there is nothing to retain the heat or block the wind. I then found myself at twenty years old headed back home with no money, no job, no band, and no idea what I was going to do with my life. To top the night off, I broke up with my girlfriend of three years, who happened to be the singer.

Flash forward roughly six uneventful months, still broke and not sure what I’m going to do with my life while working at Guitar Center, Christmas comes around the corner. I could always count on my grandparents and biological father to give me a decent amount of money every year, and this year was no different. With roughly five hundred dollars in hand, I called up my drug dealer on the way home from a Christmas Eve party

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with my family in New Hampshire and told him I wanted to meet up.

He told me to come to his house, his family was having a Christmas Eve dinner. I hung up the phone and thought about what a loser I was for buying drugs when I had no money, no less doing so on Christmas eve during his family party. A couple minutes later, I got a call back though.

On the other end, my dealer tells me his brother’s band just got home from Europe and they were firing their tour manager. He knew I was in limbo and wanted to stay in the music industry but didn’t want to play in another band. Flash forward a few weeks and I’m meeting with one of the other members of the band at Starbucks and on the phone with their manager. Three weeks after that, I’m tour managing my first signed artist on a full US tour. The Wonder Years, Polar Bear Club, Transit, A Loss for Words, and The Story so Far. Thus, starts the beginning of the end to my touring career.

Over the next four years, I worked for many bands. Most notably: Transit, The Story So Far, Handguns, Every Time I Die, Between the Buried and Me, and All Time Low. I toured the country countless times and got to see all of Canada. I met famous musicians, actors, actresses, athletes, played in arenas and stadiums, saw the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, toured NASA, went to award shows, you can name it, and I probably did it! But, I wasn’t happy. You could say the closest thing to a specific moment where I wanted to call it quits may have been summer 2014 Warped Tour working for Every Time I Die. They didn’t do anything in specific, but it was a combination of a lot of things. Most notably, that was my fourth summer in a row on the Vans Warped Tour and I had just met my soon-to-be girlfriend prior to leaving for the tour. Though, those were just the immediate issues that had me eager to quit touring. There were also other issues I had that were lingering, like: the long hours, unfair wages, constant babysitting, and the inconsistency in my life that was starting to take a toll on me. That’s not even including the fact that I didn’t have a retirement plan, health insurance, dental, or guaranteed work. At any point, any of the artists I was working for could take time off and I’m left without income. The very reason I fell in love with music and touring was the exact reason why I didn’t want to tour anymore.

Structure. Initially, I didn’t want to have a boring wash, rinse, and repeat type of life. I loved the nomadic lifestyle touring allowed me to have. As I got older though and saw what everyone else around me was doing, I found myself feeling like I was missing out and falling behind. Every time I came home, it was harder and harder for me to leave.

After four years of touring non-stop, I came home from Warped Tour 2014 for what I thought was going to be my last time. I started to care about my health more. I quit smoking cigarettes, got a trainer, and joined a social sports softball team. At the time, I had been taking online classes at Berklee College of Music for 3 years while on tour for Music Business.

I had the sense that I wanted to work in an office setting going forward. I decided to focus on that, get a job, and see where life takes me. I was able to settle down for about nine months working in the city for an optometrist as her office manager. I was doing everything to try and adjust to living a “normal” life. All the while, I never stopped searching for work in the music industry. Then, out of random luck, I looked at a roadie job board I was a member of one evening, and found what seemed to be at

the time, my dream job. I was going to be the Personal Assistant to the owner of a giant PR firm in Nashville for country music legends.

I packed my car up to the brim and headed South on fourth of July weekend. Once again, missing a family gathering for the industry I’d given my life to. As soon as I got down to Nashville and met my new boss, without much introduction, he whisked me into a car to go to taco night. I’m thinking a family dinner, maybe a welcoming party for me with some of the employees, nothing too big. Boy, was I wrong! Taco night was at Lisa Marie Presley’s house with Kid Rock, TG Sheppard, Tanya Tucker, Dolly Parton’s manager and a few other industry people. At this point, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Shut up Marc, your life doesn’t sound all that bad!” I must admit, it wasn’t. In hindsight, I had it damn good.

But, it wasn’t all roses down South. A couple weeks into this new job, I found myself being pushed to do unethical tasks such as: cook the books, re-gift promotional items to make it look as though they were ours, lie to artists and tell them what they wanted to hear to keep them happy, and worst of all, lie to our own employees. On top of this, I was constantly being belittled and threatened by my new boss. Mind you, I moved 1,100 miles for this. After a short month and a half, I couldn’t take the constant threats to replace me or the ridiculous tasks being asked of me, so I called it quits. About a week later, I found a job at a small printing company working in their warehouse and once again was left wondering what the hell am I doing with my life. The only difference this time being, I was by myself with not much immediate support. With just about two months or so under my belt of taking t-shirts off a bagging station and boxing them up, I received a text from one of the bands I had worked for in the past.

They needed a tour manager for their fall tour and wanted to know if I was interested in filling in for one tour. That was it! This was my calling and my saving grace. This was going to be my closure with touring and my escape back to Boston to finally figure out what I was doing with my life once and for all. One month later I waved goodbye to Nashville and the few new friends I had made during my short stay. I hopped into the U-Haul truck with my dad who had flown down to help me move and we headed back to Boston. I got back to Boston, dropped off all my boxes, hopped right on a plane to Orlando to start my final six weeks on the road in the music industry. The title states that I’d never leave school to work in the music industry again, and I wouldn’t. If I could do the past 10 years all over again, I would go up to that 16-year-old playing summer baseball, and I would tell him to work harder at not just sports, but life and school. Although, I am a realist and I know that I am left to live with the decisions I’ve made and have learned to live without regret.

Marc Verity is a transfer student majoring in Sport Management. He currently resides in Waltham, MA and has hiked the Grand Canyon!

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Sitting Facing the Wall Grace Duguay

“The end, okay Grace, what can you tell us about what Frog and Toad learned?” I started to get really clammy and could feel my face changing colors. I had all eyes on me. I could not remember anything she just read.

After about 30 seconds every other hand in the class shot up. “I do not know.” The next thing I knew, my teacher walked me over to the corner.

I was told to sit there and face the wall, “this is what happens when you do not pay attention” she announced to the class. I could feel everyone’s eyes still on me along with hearing them all whisper back and forth about me. I had never felt more humiliated than I did in that moment. As I sat there, I tried to remember what she had read and tried to answer the question to prove to myself I was listening. I struggled for 20 minutes, and nothing. I could not remember a single word she had read besides the names of the characters. I was so confused by this. I knew it happened all the time to me, but it seemed like it never happened to anyone else in my first grade class and this confused me.

out of the school and saw my grandmother and started crying. I honestly do not remember much of the stuff my mom tells me about this one year of my life. I was so hurt by my teacher that my mind blocked it all out.

Another situation I often also dealt with in first grade was when getting class worksheets. My teacher always assigned us worksheets we had to do in silence: “… Once you finish with the worksheet you have 30 minutes of free time.” I began to work on the worksheet right when it touched my desk. I did not want to miss out on any free time we were given. I attempted to read the question in my head, and then I got distracted because someone had dropped their pencil. I tried again from the start to read the question. The second I went to go write an answer I realized I still had no idea what I was supposed to be writing. The next thing I knew, I was raising my hand and waiting for my teacher to come and explain what I was supposed to be writing. When she came over she looked at my blank paper and was not impressed. She then looked at me with a blank face and I said, “I don’t understand this.” She then told me to read the directions and walked away. I began to tear up. I could feel the pressure building behind my eyes and my face felt hot. I then raised my hand to ask to go to the bathroom and she replied, “not until you finish the worksheet.” All I wanted to do was go to the bathroom and collect myself and try not to cry. Not much of a surprise, I sat there with some tissues crying, trying so hard to not make it obvious. I did not know what else I could do.

Looking back on first grade with my mother and grandmother, I learned a lot I had forgotten about. They talked to me about how I was mistreated and how I have come so far. My mom was a big part of my life growing up and dealing with all the issues I had to overcome. My teachers following first grade were finally able to work better with me. As time went on and I got older and went through the entire school system I had some teachers who did not honor my accommodations. I struggled through some different situations and mistakes from the school systems.

My mother has said many times that she hated seeing the way I acted in first grade. I would leave school crying almost every single day and would sit at the kitchen table for hours without doing any of my homework. I would ask her a million questions to just get through it. I honestly do not know if she realized something was wrong. I had read children’s books at home with my mom and grandmother sometimes. When I did, I do not remember them asking me questions about what I read. First grade was the reason I am the way I am today. I never had any anxiety until I went to first grade. After that year, I was scared to be in school until I realized it was not my fault. My mother can distinctly remember a day I walked

In second grade my teacher had reached out to my mother about getting me tested. I was sent through so much testing to figure out why I was so slow and behind in school. That year I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, executive functioning disorder, nonspecific reading disability believed to be dyslexia, and ADHD inattentive type. Due to this I received accommodations for my learning disabilities. I gained many separate times to work with special educations teachers and reading teachers. I gained extended time on everything, a multiplication table, and my own personal teacher to type for me. When I was getting spelling words I got half the number of words that the class was given so I could focus on those words.

Not much has really changed in my life now. To this day I still hate school, reading, and public speaking. School was never enjoyable for me.

The only thing I ever looked forward to was lunchtime. As I grew up, I began to like certain subjects more than others. For example, I started to enjoy science and math classes more than history and English classes. I really started to do great in school during high school. I amazed myself by the grades I earned and the awards I began to receive for my grades.

I used my accommodations only for certain classes and only when I needed them. I used my resources very often and began to work well in certain classrooms. I got a special class for my IEP called resource; in this class I received one credit for doing homework. In this class I sat down and did as much homework as possible. I did this so that I would not have to get it all done after all my sports practices, and babysitting.

I have tried multiple times to try to read for fun and I have never finished a single one of those books. I am such a slow reader that I lose interest in a book very fast. Once I finally got anywhere in the book I struggled to recall what the characters are referring back to. At this point I would just give up. I have had several tutors growing up and been in special reading classes in school. I went to summer school every single year until high school. To this day I still cannot read more than about 100 words a minute. I have struggled to enjoy reading and school ever since then.

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My mom was devastated to see me like this every day after school. My mother said, “it was everything I always wanted to protect you from, it was abuse that was condoned by the school.� As time went on and I moved throughout public school my mom was on top of everything that had to do with my IEP. Once I turned 18 and was allowed to go to my meetings, I began to advocate for myself. I began to understand why my mother was so on top of me all the time. The number of issues that go wrong, at least in my school, were consistent. I almost failed Physics my freshmen year because I was in the wrong class. I was put into the only class without a learning specialist. To this day I struggle to make sure I am getting the accommodations I need. Even in college I am struggling to achieve the correct accommodations, due to many issues. My mother steps in when I need her and when I cannot handle it on my own. Due to this experience of verbal abuse and segregation by my teacher, I struggle with every assignment, class, and being called on in class.

Grace Duguay is undeclared but pursuing Early Childhood Education. She hopes to own her own daycare in the future. She grew up in Watertown, MA, and has lived there her entire life. She also has been playing field hockey since 3rd grade and is on the Lasell College team.

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