The skills we learn in school can be often be used in our daily lives. However, not all of those skills can be used. For example, as you get older the math you learn in school becomes less and less usable in daily life. The only real acception is a career that has a lot to do with math, like engineering or something involving physics. My main point is that school can’t teach you everything, and not everything you learn will be usable later on. The goal of school is to increase your understanding of different topics.

There are kids that lack things like social skills, and a school is not really focused on developing social skills. That is where the scouting programs come in. Scouting helps develop social skills even if the scout has Autism, which makes it harder for someone to develop those necessary social skills. I know because my older brother has aspergers and scouting has helped him to be more social. He still struggles with those skills, but his social skills are much better than they were. Scouting doesn’t just develop social skills, it also develops skills a scout may need to react to an emergency.

On October 11, 2017 the Boy Scouts of America made an announcement that starting in September of 2018 girls will be allowed to join Cub Scouts, progress into Boy Scouts, and earn the rank of Eagle Scout. Most people, like the BSA’s Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh,  agreed with the decision, and thought it was a great idea. “‘The values of Scouting—trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind, brave and reverent, for example—are important for both young men and women,’ said Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh in a statement. ‘We strive to bring what our organization does best—developing character and leadership for young people—to as many families and youth as possible as we help shape the next generation of leaders.’” However, the decision also received backlash from both Boy Scout and Girl Scout leaders. “‘The need for female leadership has never been clearer or more urgent than it is today—and only Girl Scouts has the expertise to give girls and young women the tools they need for success,’ the Girl Scouts said in a statement.”

I agree with the decision made by the BSA, and think it is a good idea. Like Surbaugh, I think the values that the BSA teaches are important for all people. The BSA’s main goal is to teach the scouts how to be better people. The Boy Scouts does a great job at making sure each scout leaves the program as a better person. Just like an Eagle Scout I remember from when I first joined my troop. His name was Christopher Alvelo, and I had only known him for a short time when many news reports like this one came out, “A teen Eagle Scout, killed in a car crash, is being hailed as a hero for taking the wheel of his stepfather's SUV after the man suffered a medical emergency. The teen's actions saved the lives of the man and two other passengers.

17-year-old Christopher Alvelo, his stepfather, 51-year-old Joe Snyder and two friends were driving home from an Eagle Scout trash clean-up project in Pennypack Park on Saturday when Snyder suffered a medical emergency shortly after 12:30 p.m.” The friends in the SUV were two scouts also in my troop. Here is what happens next, “Alvelo, who was in the passenger seat of the 2007 Ford Explorer, grabbed the wheel and tried to take control of the SUV.

The teen was able to steer the vehicle off the road and into a parking lot for the North Philadelphia Jet Center at Northeast Philadelphia Airport along the 2800 block of Red Lion Road. However, he couldn't get to the break and the vehicle slammed into an unoccupied Paratransit van.

Alvelo died at the scene.”

These tragic events happened on October 26, 2013, but if Chris wasn’t a scout he may not have been able to react the way he did and save three people’s lives. At that time I had just started Boy Scouts and Chris was one of many scouts in the troop, so I didn’t really know him. However, I do know that at the time that Chris died he wasn’t technically an Eagle Scout. In order to earn the rank of Eagle Scout the scout must have a certain number of merit badges. Then, the scout must complete a service project they come up with and supervise. Lastly, there is a ceremony acknowledging that the scout has earned the rank of Eagle.

There never was a ceremony for Chris, but my Scoutmaster and my dad, the Assistant Scoutmaster, decided that Chris met all of the requirements needed for the rank and that he lived the Scout Oath and the Scout Law. So even though Chris wasn’t there to receive the Eagle Scout award, he saved lives and he truly earned the rank of Eagle Scout.

Intelligence versus what is considered smart. What’s the difference between them? You can be intelligent and smart, you can be intelligent and not smart, you can be smart and not intelligent, you can be neither smart nor intelligent. This is because in order to be intelligent a person has a vast knowledge on any particular topic. In other words the person knows a lot of things. In order to be considered smart a person must know how to implicate the knowledge they know. The person doesn’t necessarily have to know a lot of things but they do know how to use what things they do know to their advantage in life.

In I Just Wanna Be Average, Mike Rose argues that teachers in vocational education struggle with helping students apply knowledge: “Students will float to the mark you set… Vocational education has aimed at increasing the economic opportunities of students who do not do well in our schools. Some serious programs succeed in doing that, and through exceptional teachers… students learn to develop hypotheses and troubleshoot, reason through a problem, and communicate effectively- the true job skills.” The reason why teachers struggle with helping students apply knowledge is because the students are not being given enough knowledge to apply to things. That is because the students give up on themselves and, eventually, the teachers give up on them also.

This leads into another idea about knowledge. In Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit elaborates on the idea that knowledge is controlled by other people: “These issues include: the power of the teacher over the students; the power of the publishers of textbooks and of the developers of the curriculum to determine the view of the world presented;… and the power of an individual or group to determine another’s intelligence or ‘normalcy.’” To put this idea into simpler terms, people do not control what knowledge they take in from their education. This makes it easy for textbook publishers and educational leaders to control what students learn. A lot of times the textbook publishers and educational leaders limit the amount of knowledge the students take in. This leads to the students not being given enough knowledge in order to be smart or intelligent making it hard for the students to succeed in life.

In Superman and Me, Sherman Alexie points out how someone’s identity can influence whether other people think you’re smart or intelligent: “He reads ‘Grapes of Wrath’ in kindergarten when other children are struggling through ‘Dick and Jane.’ If he’d been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy.” In this quote Alexie is referring to himself and the reason why he probably isn’t considered a “prodigy” is because of his race and his family’s background. His race should not influence whether or not he is considered smart or intelligent. However, in our American society race does influence whether or not people think you’re smart or intelligent.

Many times racial influence can lead to people making assumptions about other races and whether or not that race is smart or intelligent. For example, in Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit assumes that White people are very closed minded: “When you’re talking to White people they still want it to be their way. You can try to talk to them and give examples, but they’re so headstrong, they think they know what’s best for everybody, for everybody’s children.” Based on this assumption, the closed mindedness of White people causes them to not be as smart or intelligent as other races. This however is an assumption because in 2015 the SAT test was given to elite people in the United States with a variety of races. After this test the mean scores were taken and White people had the second highest mean score. The race with the highest mean score was Asian people. Now if White people are not smart or intelligent then why did they have the second highest mean score? The answer is that most White people are not closed minded and therefore are smart and intelligent. There are only a few White people that are very closed minded and not smart or intelligent whatsoever.

Advanced Essay

I am going to start this paper with a scene from my life. This scene is from when I was playing in a football game when I was eight years old. I was well under four feet tall and weighed less than fortyfive pounds. I was the smallest kid on my team. This is interesting because my last name, Gorski, means mountain. So anyway, it was the second quarter, first down and ten, the ball was in the redzone. Ironically, I was playing right guard, a position normally played by one of the bigger players on the team. I lined up against my opponent, a defensive tackle two full heads taller than me. The center snaps the ball and I struggle to block my opponent. Eventually he knocks me down and gets to the quarterback sacking him. He was fast getting up off the line but I knew I was faster. Next play and the center snaps the ball. Then, almost instantly, I am in my opponent’s face. I get my forearms under his shoulder pads and push up with all my strength. This time he goes down, his face frozen in astonishment. The quarterback makes the throw and… Touchdown! At the end of the play stood over my opponent and said, “Don’t get back up or I will knock you down again.” At that moment his coach pulled him off the field and didn’t put him back in the game. In this scene I did not expect to knock down the other kid. Especially not after he knocked me down the play before. I knew I could block him. So I did do better than I had expected. After reading this scene some people might say that I can be a little arrogant at times. They are right but also wrong at the same time. It may seem like I am being arrogant but if I put my mind to something, most of the time I can do it.

At my old school there was a mentally gifted program. It started in fifth grade and went to eighth grade. You have to take a test to get in and if you get a good enough score they put you in the program. I was able to take the test and I had been the only one to get into the program with a one hundred percent that year. I knew I was smart but I didn’t know I was the smartest kid in my grade. I thought that someone must be smarter than me, but nobody was. However that didn’t surprise me too much.

This scene is from when I was playing lacrosse in seventh grade. I had been playing lacrosse for two years prior to this and for the second year I played goalie. In this game I played goalie for the entire time. The referee blows his whistle and asks the starting line up for each team to line up at mid field. He asks the goalies, me and the other one, to shake hands and then go to our goals. Then the rest of both teams shake hands and it was time to start the game. By the end of the first quarter my team was winning and the other team still hadn’t scored on me. The second and third quarters ended the same way. However towards the end of the fourth quarter the other team scored I was disappointed in myself because it was an easy shot to stop. The game ended and my team won. While I was still beating myself up for letting that shot go in. Then the head coach for Father Judge High School’s junior varsity team called me over. He said that their goalie didn’t show up for their game starting in a few minutes and that he saw how good I played in the game before. Then he asked me to play for them. I was really tired at that point so I respectfully declined the offer. So the backup goalie for my team played for them. In this scene I also did way better than I had expected. However this scene is different because I was not thinking about how well I did. I focused on the negatives instead of the positives. Everyone from my team was happy we won except for me. Until the coach from Father Judge High School showed me that I did really good. Good enough to play with kids two plus years older than me. I do regret not playing in that game but if I did I probably would have done well.

Ochosi es un poderoso dios quien nunca falla con acro y flecha o nunca falla su víctimas. Él caza a menudo.  Es conocido por número tres, número cuatro y número seite. Tres porque ello tiene tres Flechas y tres and three perros de cazador. Siete días de la semana. Él caza cada cuatro días de un nuevo mes. Ochosi vive en un caldero de hierro con Ogún. Ogún es un fuerte Guerrero, es también muy buena con sus armas es mejor amigo de Ochosi. Ogún es un herrero y maestro de tecnología. Ogún llevo un machete y es muy fuerte. también es un médico, un tiempo Ogún quitó el cáncer de un mortal para salvar su vida.

Ambos dioses están llenos de bondad llenan sus días de ayudar y enseñar a los mortales. Un día un campesino envió una oración para un tipo especial de arma para matar al ganado para el alimento. Ochosi y Ogún respondieron a la oración, pero no sabían que el otro respondió. Esto causó mucho conflicto porque querían ayudar. Lucharon con las armas para ver quién era el mejor ajuste para resolver el problema del campesino mortal.Ochosi y Ogún tenían una gran pelea mala. Esto arruinó su amistad, cuando de repente Eleguá les dijo que estaban locos, y que necesitaban ayudar al mortal juntos.Con el asesoramiento de Eleguá que estaba Ochosi y de Ogún buen amigo, ellos crearon el arma perfecta para el campesino. Ahora todo era bueno con los dioses, eran mejores amigos otra vez.

yo soy bajo, pero muy fuerte.

Mi familia es grande,

Tengo mis padres,

tres hermanos, una hermana,

dos perros, y un gato.

Oigo mi talento de la música.

Veo las notas de la música en el papel.

Toco las teclas en mi piano.

Saboreo mi inhalación antes

de empezar a tocar mi música.

Huelo mis nervios sudando.

Monto a caballo - es mi videojuegos.

Yo dibujo de vago.

Juego al fútbol - es mi televisión.

Yo soy alemán, polaco, y irlandés.

Somos productos de Europa.

No somos europeos.

Hablamos inglés:

La lengua de queso bifes, y pretzels.