2008 march

Page 1

Volume 56, Issue 7

Arcadia High School 180 Campus Drive, Arcadia, CA

March 2008

Students Earn Bragging Writes

In this issue:

Photo by JENNIFER HANG

PERFORMING ARTS pg. 8 Speech Follies: Finally, AHS students get the chance to see what Speech & Debate is all about Photo by ELIZABETH HARTSHORN

HUDDLE FORMATION Juniors Renaud Poizat and Courtney Lee and senior Justin Youngs win scholarships. By VICTORIA BIAN & KATHLEEN KAO

CENTER SPREAD pg. 13-16 Post Secret: Hear about the hopes, dreams, fears, and funny habits of your friends and fellow classmates

Photo Courtesy of JUSTINE LEE

STUDENT LIFE pg. 18 FBLA: How the aspiring business leaders performed at their recent competition

T

Staff Writers

hree students from AHS, juniors Courtney Lee and Renaud Poizat, and senior Justin Youngs, have defined “ethics” beyond its dictionary meaning. On March 7, 2008, to honor the three Arcadians for eloquently defining ethics and how it has governed their lives, the Rotary Club held a banquet at the Embassy Suites. The banquet, imbued with the club members’ good-natured humor and generosity, acknowledged their outstanding essays, but declared Renaud Poizat as the Arcadia district winner, because his distinctive essay had an extra tinge of uniqueness that set him apart from the two runner-ups. Though Poizat wrote the essay because it was an English assignment, he managed to churn out a heartfelt, eloquent response devoid of the conventional monotony found in many homework assignments. Through comparing his observation of American ethics with the ethics of his French culture, Poizat focuses on the negatives and the positives of both sides. But more than knowing that he needed to write it because the essay was worth a grade, Poizat felt self-motivated to put a great effort into the assignment, because the issue addresses both

his French heritage and his upbringing in America. To Poizat, his “Ethics” essay was more than a simple English assignment. It gave him an opportunity to involve himself in the Rotary Club and meet important members of the community, such as the Mayor and the officers of the club. One of the two runner-ups, junior Courtney Lee, focused her essay on the moral issue of honesty and how she was able to demonstrate this in her daily life. She centers her essay on one particularly memorable event that happened one night when she was eating dinner with her friends at a sushi bar. Upon realizing that they had been undercharged, Courtney and her friends collectively agreed that honesty outweighed any other reasoning and the waiter was notified of the error. Although Courtney discusses the issue of integrity based upon her own values, like Poizat, she also attributes her ethical roots to the influence of the moral cultural values her upbringing had and how this had positively affected many of the decisions she had to make in face of a moral dilemma. In a crucial part of her essay, Courtney said, “My practice and perspective on ethical behavior has always been positive and diligent. I believe it’s like a personalized piece of mental legislation-an unwritten resonance of Hammurabi’s Code that is comprised of your individual beliefs and opinion of what you feel is right and what is wrong, a crucial establishment of moral standards.” Upon having to choose between writing an analytical essay on Macbeth or the “ethics” es-

say for the Rotary club, senior Justin Youngs’s interest in expressing his ethical values outshone his love for Shakespeare. As the second and final runner-up, Justin addressed a current controversy concerning major league basketball, a sport that Justin is highly passionate and knowledgeable about. With recent reporting on the scandals of celebrity basketball players and their questionable uses of steroids, Justin felt that this issue was ideal for the discussion. In referring to basketball players and drugs, the theme of Justin’s essay centered on social ethics and how young generations are more vulnerable and easily influenced to imitate the imprudent decisions that celebrity figures make (that are publicized in the media). Through his example of athletes, Justin argues that to counter the harm that the media has unleashed upon exposed minds of today’s youth, his generation needs to set a stable foundation of ethics for future generations. Justin’s interpretation of “ethics” adheres more to the denotative meaning. In his essay, Justin agrees, “Ethics serve as an individual’s guidelines for them to follow in order to live in a proper manner.” Other than prize money, Courtney, Renauld, and Justin’s well-written responses to a difficultly broad topic has earned them acknowledgement and respect from adults and peers alike. Through eloquently defining ethics in their own ways, the three winners have shown a remarkable degree of insight, setting a new standard that the next batch of contestants will find hard to reach.


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2008 march by The Arcadia Quill - Issuu