For this essay, I decided to play with our chosen theme a little bit. Instead of suggesting alternatives to violence, I stated that humans are inherently violent animals, and that the “powers that be” use ideology and coercion to temper our aggression. In a way, it does address the theme, but in a creative, unexpected, and philosophical way.  

Humans are inherently violent creatures. Civilization and ideology are used to temper our destructive nature by directing it towards certain topics. There is very little that stops humanity from sliding back into animalistic carnage when the opportunity arises. Ideology, however, usefully contains our animalistic nature and directs our anger towards physical targets. In the end, ideology is the driving force which poisons the world and damns us for all time, yet is also necessary for the containment of random destruction (as opposed to systematic destruction).

Perhaps every living person on Earth has been indoctrinated into some sort of ideology ever since their day of birth. Whether it is political, religious, or something else entirely, ideology is something all of us have been inoculated into. People who believe greatly in an ideology are prepared to put everything, including their own lives, on the line for the good of their own beliefs. They are willing to destroy anything and everything that lies in their way of the triumph of their ideology, leaving destroyed lives, reputations, and nations in their wake.

In a way, ideology, poisonous though it is, is necessary to channel the natural, violent impulses of humankind. Without some sort of vague direction, we would be consumed by a dark orgy of destruction and decimation. For instance, the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, bloody though it was, gave the anger of the masses a target-the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the “enemies of reason”. Enlightenment values were the ideology culpable for that, and it proved deadly-but no deadlier than other great killers, like nationalism, communism, fascism, and imperialism, as well as countless religious differences and doctrinal squabbles. Indeed, ideology is maybe on the biggest killers of all time. In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton questions Aaron Burr about his lack of principles: “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?” Hamilton taunts Burr for not having any guiding cause and being seemingly amoral. But perhaps it is for the better of all of us that Burr did want to die or give everything for simple earthly causes-even if lack of principles costed him dearly. For the guiding principles of others also cause much grief-as Hamilton’s love of ideology leads him into a bloody revolution and creates a naturally unstable nation that would end up collapsing into civil war.

But ideology is not the only killer within the human race: our own savage nature is perhaps even greater. Despite the trappings of civilization, we are still animals and we still have animal desires and needs. We still have the reptilian brain within our heads, separated from the higher reasoning that the other portions of our mind are capable of. This holdover from deep prehistory governs our most base and impulsive functions, and is rigid, unable to really fit into large civilizations and society. From here springs the roots of paranoia, the desire of fight or flight, simple habits, and aggression and dominance-and it is what our normally advanced, simian brains fall back on in times of great stress or crisis.

The line between an organized society and complete anarchy is incredibly thin. Once the normal comforts of civilization are removed, people revert to a competitive, aggressive state of “every man for himself”. Thomas Hobbes, the British philosopher, referred to this as the “state of nature” in his treatise Leviathan and suggested that humans must give up certain freedoms in order to have some sort of security and peace of mind. If we all were to do whatever we so pleased, Hobbes declares, all of the fundamental tenets of civilization would shut down-as he famously wrote, there would be “no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. While things like this can certainly occur within “normal” society, the vast governmental controls which Hobbes cynically offers as a solution end up keeping our worst impulses in line-until, of course, we revert back to our old ways, and turn on one another without direction or purpose other than base territoriality.

Perhaps civilization and society themselves do not really exist. As soon as the Leviathan of the State removes itself and we are allowed all of our basal freedoms, we return back to our normal selves-sometimes violent, most definitely selfish, and uncompromisingly competitive. However, the state-nay, the leviathan-keeps us somewhat appeased and directs our rage towards something or someone palpable. We steal, we lie not for a greater purpose but for short-term gain, we betray our friends-and all of this happens on the daily in nominally “controlled” “society”. Society is simply a contract which states to try your best and be as agreeable as possible, but its numerous riders and clauses-such as war, discrimination, rebellion, and rioting, as well as just the messy movements of the government itself-means that it is, in effect, controlled chaos. So, as flawed animals, we should simply be the best versions of ourselves that we can be, as this is the most esteemed protection against the surrounding darkness and destruction.

Sources:

"THE BRAIN FROM TOP TO BOTTOM." THE BRAIN FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. McGill University , n.d. Web. 27 Mar. 2017.

Hobbes, Thomas. "Chapter 13." Leviathan. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 62. Print.

Introduction:

This essay, to me, is a survey of what it means to have or lack faith in the modern world. I myself am an atheist, but I can see the purpose of religion both to individuals and society. The landscape of belief has changed much in the past two centuries, and I have attempted here to chronicle how different thinkers and artists have viewed this seismic sea-change in our consciousness. Whatever your opinion is on this subject, I would advise entering this essay with an open mind towards the idea of the decline of belief (at least in the West) and the philosophical quandaries which arise from this.

It seems that depression and the supposed absence of a deity or higher power are our current zeitgeist, the spirit of our age. A Marxist would chalk this up to the alienation caused by the capitalist system which dehumanizes the human person and relates everything to money. Meanwhile, a traditionalist conservative would say that the liberal reforms of modern times have destroyed humanity’s relationship with God by making “Man the measure of all things”. Whatever portion of the political spectrum you fall on, humankind seems to have collectively agreed that whatever used to reign from above has abandoned us en masse in the light of modernity and postmodernity. Some have reacted to this by challenging the accepted orthodoxy of the past, while other have clung ever more tightly to their constantly dying faiths.

“‘Whither is God?....I will tell you. We have killed him.”, asserted Friedrich Nietzsche through the mouth of a madman in a parable in his 1882 work, The Gay Science. At first, this would sound as if Nietzsche, a rather nihilistic, committed atheist, is celebrating the collapse of the old system of deities and spirits and hailing the new humanist outlook of our species. However, it soon becomes clear that, despite its author’s beliefs, this is not a cause for celebration: “‘How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers….Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?’” For the great bulk of human history, cultures and peoples have had deities and spirits and legends to comfort them in their worst and darkest of times. Faith was a light to many; that, despite the darkness of life and the tragedies of existence, there was something watching over you, something to comfort you, and another life that existed after passing on. In this newly faithless world, there is no comfort if what you believed was comforting you is gone. In fact, the very deed of killing God, Nietzsche seems to say, is such a mammoth undertaking that a group of hairless apes on a tiny planet would not be worthy of doing such a thing, especially when most of them are not sufficiently independently-minded and stable to fathom exactly what they have done.

In order to slay God, Nietzsche insinuates that humankind would have to rise to godhood in order to make it seem like slaughtering their deities was a good idea. And, in the minds of many, this is exactly what we have done. We have placed ourselves at the center of our existence and elevated humanity to a position that perhaps it doesn’t deserve. It presumes that humans are far greater than they really are, that we are more than just creatures lost in space. It puts political ideology before religion as well. While politics and religion have often intertwined over the millennia, religion has always seemed, in the end, to nourish the souls of our species more than mere politics. Perhaps the worst and most shocking revelations are that there is no reason why we are placed on Earth, that life and history is essentially random, and that all of our deeds are for naught. It is immensely horrifying to us that we argue, fight, and go to war and yet there may be no reason for such things in the end. Without a deity, without myth and legend, we realize that we are not important, and that, no matter how much we try to deify our species, we are still small and still striving for something to elevate ourselves above the mundane-in short, to regain our lost gods.

“Big Sky”, a song by the Kinks from their 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, is perhaps the ultimate “Death of God” song. “One day, we’ll be free, we won’t care, just you see…” croons frontman and lyricist Ray Davies after listing how “Big Sky” (re: God) does not particularly care about those beneath Him on Earth. Despite this strong desire for the eventual extinction of God and the freedom it should entail, Davies sings about the comfort and tranquility religion can provide in a world bereft of it: “And when I see you/And the world’s too much for me/I think of the Big Sky/and nothing matters much to me”. While religion can been seen as a mind-killer-making nothing matter to someone-it also gives help and love to those most in need of them. Like it or not, humanity’s identity throughout the ages has been dominated by religion and belief. Moving forward, we will need to square our own simian egos against the vastness of the universe and the strangeness of eternity.

In the absence of a higher power, humans often turn to political movements to nourish their souls. However, these ideologies fail to become transcendent, and are instead base and materialistic. Some put all their faith in politics, seeing a movement as undying, always finding new human conduits. However, deep down, humans know that these ideologies are ultimately earthbound. They lack the rituals, the comfort, the inner, mystical dimension of religion. They are merely something which we can latch onto in an increasingly chaotic world.

One final thing we should realize is that, no matter how great and mighty we become on Earth, everything down here is transient. Fame is fleeting, nations and empires crumble into dust with regularity, nothing is eternal-not even the gods. Rudyard Kipling was aware of this when he penned his poem “Recessional” for Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee. This was at the height of the British Empire’s power, and the celebration would have recalled for a happy, slightly pompous poem. Instead, Kipling wrote a work which warned of the smallness of Earthly greatness in the light of eternity. “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre”, he wrote, naming two once mighty ancient empires that have since gone extinct. In the final verse, Kipling uses the phrase “All valiant dust which builds on dust”. This wonderful, mystical phrase warns that, in the end, all human civilization is doomed. We simply build upon the remains of older cultures. Despite our advances in society and technology, we are not so high and mighty after all. It can be taken away at any time. We will never escape the lingering remnants of the old gods, always there to tell us that nothing lasts forever. Night will fall, and a new day will dawn upon the remnants of us all.

(Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm.) The Gay Science. N.a. n.a. Print.

(Davies, Ray Douglas.) The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. The Kinks. Reprise Records, 1968. Vinyl recording.

Kipling, Rudyard. “Recessional.” 1897. Print.

I.

I was in the third grade, and Christmas was rapidly approaching. My class had gathered in the school library where a special treat was awaiting us. Clad in polo shirts and jumpers, we plopped down upon the old grey carpet and awaited our treat from our librarian.

The librarian wheeled in a metal cart of books. It was maybe three shelves high, and was absolutely jam-packed with a variety of books celebrating the Christmas season. Because this was a Catholic school, they could give us books which were explicitly Christmas-themed and not really allow other holidays in. There was great jubilation as a sea of small children rushed forward to nab books from the shelf.

I looked at the choices in front of me with some distaste. They were primarily oversized pictures books with maybe a few short children’s novels thrown in-all things that I felt I had mostly outgrown by that point. I had known for a long time that I was an advanced reader, and had even been in a gifted reading group at school in kindergarten. I was completely bored with the choices arrayed before me.

Scanning the shelves, my eyes finally alighted on a book on the bottom shelf, shoved unceremoniously among a group of cutesy stories about Santa and elves and the baby Jesus. It was A Christmas Carol, the evergreen classic by Charles Dickens. I was already familiar with the story, as many people are-the tale of the miser Ebenezer Scrooge who is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve who force him to alter his cold-hearted ways-but I wanted to see the original book myself, to see how Dickens wove this story that nearly everyone seems to know.

I was only a few pages into the book before the librarian came over and snatched Dickens’s novel right out of my hands. “You’re too young to read that”, she intoned angrily, “Pick another book”. I was absolutely livid with anger. She was a bat-like retired nun, with a scrunchy, wrinkled face and a bad attitude, especially when it came to kids who seemed to be just a little bit too bright. Looking much like Scrooge himself, she glowered down at me over a pair of glasses. After this, I only remember crying and my parents being upset at the librarian’s behaviour.

II.

There is a tremendous hatred towards gifted and talented students in the United States school system. Compared to other nations, we tend to want to cut down the best and the brightest-something known as “Tall Poppy Syndrome”, which is also prevalent in other Anglophone nations like Australia and Canada, but might just reach its apogee in the USA.

We feel, being a nation founded on the ideals of equality, that those who are smarter or more talented or more inquisitive than us are simply “spoiled”, “privileged”, or “unfairly ahead”. After all, they didn’t “have to work” to be smart, they were just intelligent already, from the day they crawled out of the womb. Clearly, they have to be discouraged because their ideas are a threat not just to classroom stability, but to society at large! If one child knows more about a topic than the teacher does, then we are on the road to anarchy! Or, conversely, they are undermining our pre-determined script and cannot be allowed to have their ideas flourish! So goes the thinking of many an American.

This can be seen in my own career. In kindergarten, I was a part of a small group for “advanced readers” that read more challenging texts while the other students did their typical “ABCs”-level work. I do not recall much of it, but I do remember it being more rewarding and interesting than what I typically worked on. Then, suddenly, it was yanked away from me for no apparent reason, especially as we entered the lower grades. I would never have a real advanced/gifted programme after that for the rest of my schooling career, which frustrates me to no end. There were so many hours wasted in the classroom with kids who read aloud at a snail’s pace, or who stumbled over basic facts about geography, or who didn’t know who so-and-so was, or teachers who bungled simple things and hated to be corrected, that I felt like I was going insane. Sure, I could do the work. Sure, I suppose I liked it on some level. But year after year, I always had some teacher who despised me and didn’t appreciate or understand my intelligence or the intelligence of others, who instead taught towards the middle and ignored those who might have wanted to stride above and beyond the pablum vomited at us by the mandated curriculum.

And, controversially, this has not improved now that I have arrived at SLA. I still feel like teachers are teaching towards the middle, that students make stupid mistakes, or that they feed us stupid stuff (like Terence from Housman’s famous poem). We are trapped in limiting streams that force us to work with people who may or may not care about the fate of our projects. Our assignments, projects, and benchmarks themselves seem to have descended into frustrating busy-work that only serve to bore and anger the inquisitive.

III.

One of the great quests of Civilization is to preserve what has come before it. The great corpus of works that has defined the history of literature stands as a testament to humanity’s collective glory and wisdom. Without its light to shepherd us along the path of life, we would be lost, adrift without any signals as to how the human person works, lives, loves, and suffers.

We cannot allow it to be subsumed by the foolishness and myopia of a series of present-day bureaucrats. We cannot allow the Beacon of Civilization to be snuffed out, and for the heritage of the world to be destroyed.

But presently, it is under grave attack. It is being subsumed by a series of cheap, small-minded quasi-reptiles who cannot see the necessity of our traditions and our lifeblood.

That is why our gifted and talented children are central to the preservation of our heritage. They can understand our fallen nature as imperfect beings and how that even includes our highest authority figures-even our teachers. They can see the light at the end of the tunnel, much like the monks scratching away in the monasteries and chapels of Ionia over a thousand years ago. They can see that, though there is much darkness, there is also greatness and light. They shall persevere. They shall preserve.

My ILP at the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent has been going swimmingly. I’ve been alternating between researching and writing blog posts for their website and working at the front desk. The staff, including Joanne, Kristen, and Bob, have taken a shine to me and have been really kind and helpful. Occasionally, I get inspiration by walking around the museum and looking at the artifacts and paintings there. My ILP alternates between Wednesday and Saturday, depending on the week. I would like to finish this off by including the link to the blog post I wrote about Benjamin Franklin and his legacy:

(Tommy Smithson stands in the darkened parlor of his parents’ house. It is 1916.)

I don’t know what to do. I’ve already seen too many of my old buddies go off to France, off to Flanders, and come back home in boxes made of wood. I’ve heard the stories of the carnage in the trenches, and I don’t want it. It makes me bloody nauseous. But here I am, standing in my parent's’ living room, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the darkness of war, in 1916, not even independent enough to live by myself...

I should probably run away. Yeah, that’s the ticket, away from the poppies and towards the moors...I’ll live like a savage! I mean, the war itself is already so barbaric, it’s just the same thing! You know what-I’ll go right up to that man in khaki at the draft office, look him straight in the eye, stand toe to toe with the bugger, and...and…

...And I will just go to the war like the rest of them. If I dodge this one, they’ll find them. They’ll haul my arse away to jail in an instant. I can see it now, right at the top of the Sunday Times, “Tommy Smithson, scion of Kent millionaires, arrested because he chickened out of his duty to his country…”

And they said war was fun! You get to buddy up with your boys, they’ll be your friends forever...all of the mademoiselles down there, you’re bound to find a pretty one...and most importantly, you’ll get to stick it to Jerry! You’ll kick the hun right where it hurts! Yeah, we’ll have the Kaiser quaking in his boots! Yeah! Of course, of course, I could...I could...die…

Why can’t things be the way they were before the war? Summer was endless then. It was always mild, everything was quiet. Garden parties lasted long into the night. We ruled the waves, we ruled the world! When I was a boy...oh, that seems so long ago now...I had no cares. All of the wars were far away, in the Transvaal, in the streets of Peking....not right next door! I could romp happily in the yard, climb up the tree, crawl around the nursery, entertaining my little sister…(he starts to cry)

Uncle, I know you can’t hear me. You’re too old to go to the war. You shielded me from this, told the draft board that “he’s too young”, “he’s valuable to the family”, “he has more money than Lloyd’s of London”. Of course, my parents said for me to go, to be a man, to stop shirking my patriotic duty. Mum said, “Tommy, this is for your country. If you don’t go, then we’ll have rows of kraut soldiers in the streets, in the towns, raping our women and killing our children. I don’t know why your uncle coddles you like this…”

They beat him down...those bloody monsters known as my parents brainwashed the bugger. My uncle, he should have protected me. But he went and told the man at the local draft board to sign me up. Dragged me over. Gave me a hideous khaki uniform, a helmet, and a rifle. (Picks up the helmet).

You know, I wonder...maybe there’s a man just like me, over in Germany, and he’s twenty-one, and he’s pampered, and he doesn’t want to go to fight country. He’s just like me. He’s an accidental traitor.

Oh, he loves this country...this...this...Fritz. Yeah, his name is Fritz. Fritz loves the rolling hills and lovely people and busy towns of his country. He just doesn’t love his nation’s generals, that’s all. He despises his generals, full of useless pomp and sparking medals on their chests, only there to commemorate how many men they’ve killed.

(He pauses. Tommy breathes for a moment, puts the helmet down, and sits on his bed.)

But I really have no choice, do I? I’m just bargaining with myself. Trying to buy a little bit of time when I don’t have any. I can hear the machine gun fire already. I can feel the mud and the muck up to my knees. And then I go over the top, and I hear the boom of the cannonfire and I see  the fiery eyes of the hun…

Before he died in the fields of Flanders, my friend Jonathan sent me a letter. He told me the one thing war taught him. He said that, at night, he could hear the moans and whines of Jerry over the muddy expanses between the trenches. He said he saw those German bodies, right next to the British bodies. And he said they’re all the same. Both cold, both stiff, both with eyes shut.

(Sigh)

I think I know where I’m going tomorrow…

(He puts his head in his hands. The lights slowly dim)

“Wuhter”, my father said. His Philadelphia accent is almost nonexistent, especially compared to the deeper accent of my mother. However, it comes out in certain words, like the usual English term for H2O.

“Water”, I correct him. I always correct people, certainly my parents with their sometimes bizarre Philadelphian pronunciation, which are seemingly dying out anyway. I’ve corrected what is probably the most annoying pronunciation of all, my mother saying “iron” as “ahrn”. (I have heard that this is an exclusively South Philly thing). I tell my father that they are “sprinkles” and not “jimmies,” and my mother that it is “sauce” and not “gravy”.

All in a day’s work for a so-called (by his own mother, no less) “grammar Nazi”.

It’s not just grammar, though. Every word I say is carefully chosen and very formal. Sometimes, in the presence of friends, I let my hair down a little and might curse or use slightly less stuffy language. But otherwise, I probably sound more like an Edwardian gentleman than a 21st century teenager.

I hardly, if ever, use slang words. Most of them sound cheap, synthetic, and disposable, the junk food of language. I balk at them because they sound unnatural and useless. Further to the point, they have no place in a sentence – they sound like they’re tacked on merely to sound cool, while the best words will last forever.

For some people, it’s easy to use slang. But I like rigid routines, and order. I like to control, and it isn’t even really my fault. It is something that you can’t detect at first glance, something you can’t really see. It is  Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism.

It’s not like I’m trying to make everything perfect. For me, it just flows naturally, just like other teenagers say “get turnt” or “on fleek”. I can’t help it that I speak and write in a patrician manner – it’s just part of my mental hardwiring. My brain is different from everyone else's – and I’m proud of that. I don’t care if you think I sound like a snob or take things literally or can’t stand mispronunciations,I crave order and stability in a world that offers very little of it.

It’s perhaps a choice of lifestyle, as well. A lot of teenage and youth slang revolves around an eventually unsustainable lifestyle-partying, concert-going, urban exploration, and living life like there’s no tomorrow. Meanwhile, I prefer quiet moments – looking at small architectural details, analyzing the lyrics of British rock bands, overthinking things, and generally just enjoying the company of either myself or a close friend.

I think my family has something of a choice as to whether they could speak in a more formal and proper dialect. There are plenty of Philadelphians and ex-Philadelphians (including some of my aunts and uncles) who you’d think had never been inside the City of Philadelphia in their entire lives. However, there are many people in my family, who, when they open their mouths, sound absolutely embarrassing, if not in reality, then at least to my ears.

In the musical adaptation of “Pygmalion”, “My Fair Lady”, the protagonist, Henry Higgins, sings, “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him/The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him”. Change “Englishman” to “American” and you can see that there really isn’t much of a difference in lingual judgement once you cross the Atlantic. In the United States, we look down our noses at people depending where in the country they come from. A Bostonian might regard a Texan as sounding slovenly, and a Texan might find a Bostonian’s accent snobbish. As James Baldwin once wrote, “A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending what the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal.” In this same manner, I find my relatives’, specifically my mother’s accent, to be thoroughly grating.

The fact that a lot of my friends, especially those in the middle class, have parents from other parts of the country does not help – indeed, some of them have no family at all in and around Philadelphia. While this can be typically chalked up to gentrification, it also makes me feel slightly nervous, knowing that I sound absolutely proper, and it’s not because of my breeding. Through a pre-existing mental condition, speech lessons, and an exposure to British television programming at an early age, I sound like I should be on the CBS evening news, instead of (with apologies to Mr. Springsteen) the streets of Philadelphia.

When I think about all of these other places, I think about where I want to go. On one hand, I feel a very deep kinship to Philadelphia. I am absolutely smitten with the precise terraces of rowhomes, the way the stoop meets the sidewalk, the diverse styles of architecture, the abundant (if sometimes wild) streetlife, even the relative lack of green space as compared to other cities in the nation. However, my very voice betrays my ambitions. Even though I am of nearly pure Philadelphian blood, I sound so polished and formal that I don’t really fit into a neighborhood of bizarre mispronunciations (that my mother seems to use constantly) and an inability to say “drawer”. Although I resent the gentrifiers, and the way they displace hard-working residents, I am, in a way, closer to them than the natives. I speak properly, have obscure, intellectual interests, and listen to the Who and Radiohead rather than Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. I love Italy (I still have vivid memories of my visit to Rome in 2014), but disdain the cheap mockery that Italian-Americans are unknowingly doing to their heritage.

When I walk through my neighborhood, I don’t feel like a native. Sure, I know the streets like the back of my hand. But with my quirky t-shirts, and headphones plugged into my phone, I could easily pass for a hipster or a yuppie. I walk among the rows and churches, and despite my deep roots, I feel like a “stranger in a familiar land”. I have the experience of being both at home and completely alienated.

And yet, sometimes, this feels perfectly fine. I am me, and nobody else. I don’t care if I really don’t sound like the rest of my family, or if I alienate myself from my friends occasionally. I’m me, and only I have control over that.

Raul: Huh? Who’s there?

Pedro: Just some friends we would like to invite you over to our house.

Juan:  Yeah, do you want to come over?

Raul: Uhhh….

Juan: They’ll be candy….

Pedro: And tacos….

Raul: Sounds tempting, where are we going?

Pedro: Mexico City, home of the slums and the dru-I mean, the candy and the chocolate!

Juan: So whaddaya think? Do you want to come with us?

Raul: Yeah, I think so. It sounds good!

Pedro: NOWS OUR CHANCE! GET HIM!!! HE’S A WANTED MAN FROM THE RIO GRANDE TO PATAGONIA!!!

(Raul Starts running)

(Pedro and Juan chase with batons)

(We circle around the room a couple of times)

El es Kaamil. Kaamil vivo en calle de dieciocho en Fairmount, Filadelfia. Pero, los ancestros de el madre vivo en Florida. El gran bisabuela es desde Barbados pero vive Florida. Su tío, tía y primos viven en Kissimee. En 1940s, los ancestros vive Filadelfia. Kaamil atender Grover Washington Jr. la escuela secundaria. Antes de Grover Washington Jr. la escuela seundaira, Kaamil atende Richard Wright la escuela primaria. El conoce American Sign Language. El vive con su madre, su padrastro, su abuela y su hermano. La madre es el técnica en la farmacia mientras el padrastro es el cocinero. Con su familia, el encantada va a ir la cena, juega juegos en viernes y sabado y ver la tele.

Kaamil normalmente va de vacaciones en Pittsburgh con su familia y van muy a menudo. Para la diversión, canta, sale con amigos y actúa. Su fiesta favorita es Navidad y estación favorita verano. También disfruta haciendo ¨students run¨ después de la escuela. Él no juegan a cualquiera ahora, pero Kaamil solía tocar el violín y guitarra. Comida favorita de Kaamil es el pollo. Así se lo come a menudo come muy saludable. Su materia favorita en la escuela es el inglés y su menos favorito es matemática. También le gusta escribir secuencias de comandos y escribir música en su tiempo libre.

SLA: un lugar para aprender

Hola! Bienvenidos a nuestros escuela. Nosotros somos Thomas, Anthony y Tatiana, y nuestro equipo es Archbishop Romero. Tenemos catorce años pero Anthony tiene quince años. Somos estudiantes de Science Leadership Academy. Esta en Filadelfia, PA. Está cerca de tiendas y  también el estacionamientos. Nuestros escuela es más o menos pequeña pero es bueno. SLA tenemos 600 estudiantes con cerca de 50 profesores. Hay 30 estudiantes en una clase con uno a tres profesores. Nuestros escuela tenemos cinco pisos pero uno piso no lo hacemos utilizar para la escuela porque la gente vive en la escuela. Ofrecemos deportes como baloncesto, softbol , ultimate frisbee y más. También le ofrecemos clubes, programas, y especial clases ; drama, la ingeniería , el arte y la tecnología. Para más información, ven con nosotros!

Yo tengo español, matemáticas, historia, inglés, bioquímica, y arte. Historia es interesante y nosotros trabajamos duros. Necesitamos computadora y cuaderno. Español es muy difícil. Para tener éxito en Español, nosotros prestamos mucho atención. Tenemos que hacer la tarea. En Español, nosotros escribimos palabras nuevas en nuestras carpetas. En bioquímica, a veces necesitamos la bata de laboratorio.  

Yo tengo súper professores. Nos favorita es el Señor Kay. La Señor Kay enseñar la clase de inglès. Su clase es muy divertida. Enseña muy bien. Nosotros leemos muchas libros. También, tenemos las clase de matemáticas. La profesoras son la Señorita Giorgio o la Señorita Thompson. Son inteligente de todo, pero muy inteligente de matemáticas.  Tenemos 600 estudiantes. Los estudiantes en SLA son muy divertida. Son sociable y súper artistico.

Nos encanta SLA. Lo que más nos gusta de SLA es el libertad durante almuerzo. Tenemos libertad con todo. Podemos crecer fácilmente. Nos encantan la ubicación. Nos gustan la historia y las personas en Filadelfia. SLA es divertida, pero difícil de aprender. Necesitamos trabajar duro, pero está valer.

Intro:

Los Seres Queridos en mi vida.

Yo:

Me llamo Anthony. Tengo catorce años. Los ojos cafés y el pelo ser pelirrojo. Me fascina historia y leer. No me gusta nada videojuegos. Asisto a SLA en Filadelfia. Yo tengo irelandés.

Luis:

Su nombre es Luis. Tengo catorce años. El pelo negro y el ojos café. Le encanta carros. El conocimos en escuela y somos amigos por cuatro meses. Luis es puertoriqueño. También, el hablar español muy bien.

Jekyll:

Jekyll es mí gato. Ella es muy guapa y súper inteligente. Le fascina dormir. Jekyll es bastante adorable. Ella juega con gomas. Los ojos son verdes.  Ella pelo son café y negro y muy largo.

Eleanor y Liv

Su nombres son Eleanor y Liv. Ellas tienes catorce años. Ellas asisten a SLA en Filadelfia. Eleanor le fascina astronomía. Liv donde es Nueva York pero vivo en Filadelfia. Eleanor visita la República Checa cada años. Liv le gusta dormir.

Asher, James, y Jess

Su nombres es Asher, James, y Jess. Nosotros tenemos catorce años, pero James es quince años.  Nostros asisten a SLA. Nostros gustamos esuchar música. No nos gusta nada practicar deportes.