There is a black handgun. The gun has been bent and twisted into a knot so it is not possible to shoot anyone with it. At the bottom is a message that promotes non violence. The letters are big and bold so they can stand out to the viewer. This image encourages people to take action in nonviolence and nonviolent activities.

In our society today, we come across many challenges that can cause people to become aggressive. We encounter many people who usually have the same idea as we do, and that is to excel in life and accomplish the many things they see fit. But not all of these plans are remotely friendly to our own plans. Some of these ideas are backed by huge amounts of power or energy that comes from a corporation or organization. However, despite this, the danger is truly present when an individual idea or multiple ideas are backed by a Nation when other Nations don’t see fit. The danger derives from violence, which can cause many horrible actions to be taken by the people who are encouraged to use it as a solution to their problems and disagreements. These actions can fall along the lines of heated arguments with a failure of two or more individuals and/or nations seeing eye to eye which leads to fighting breaking out between them, and even killing when it goes far enough. Violence is the solution nobody should aim towards, or at least, the solution everyone should turn to lastly when nothing else is working. Despite this, our country turns to violence and warfare as a solution in most situations. In fact, most of the United State’s past and present accomplishments were through warfare, such as the Revolutionary war, the Civil war, the Mexican war, the Spanish American war and many more.

Now that you have a general insight into Violence, you may be asking; “What’s so wrong with violence? When other countries come to fight, we fight back and win. In addition, violence has solved our problems countless times.” Well while this is all true in it’s own respect, we can solve our problems in a more pacifist manner that will allow us to build on our social ability to conversate with others by seeking a non violent route in a conflict that won’t cost the lives of possibly hundreds of people. While there are people truly evil at heart, most people who back a general idea that was spread, usually feel as if they were doing the right thing. People pick sides but not because they want to be “bad.” In fact, it’s most likely that the opposing side that one fights against might feel that they are good in their own sense. To back this up further,  Martin Luther King Jr. shares his thoughts by saying; “The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is standing against as the violent resister but he resists without violence.” Despite all this, we are never informed or even think about the other side most of the time when conflicts arise, and therefore, we are led to believe by other individuals, our world leaders, and our own assumptions that we are the “good” and that the opposing side are the “bad.” You can even pull the world wars into this line of view about who is really the enemy. One man, Adolf Hitler, somehow appealed to the majority of Germany’s population, and the Nazis who backed him most likely believed he was right. The people who supported the morally corrupt ideas of this truly wicked man at heart, were convinced that what he said was true. They didn’t view themselves as “evil”, they thought that his line of thought was “right” and by supporting him, they thought that what they were doing was “good” even though it wasn’t.

Since we now know about Non-Violence, you may be wondering; “So What causes violence to be the first solution? Well, we need to take a look into the origin of where all violence derives from. To do this, we would have to know what causes violent actions to take place. If we were to observe, we would know that violence comes from two key features, fear and anger. In Scilla Elworthy’s TED talk, she explains the following: “Anger is like gasoline. When you have too much, it spreads around, and when somebody lights a match, you got an inferno.” She further states; “My fear grows fat on the energy I feed it.” From this, we break the text down and analyze it. The text’s meaning is telling of how violence derives from anger and fear. When you let your anger take control of you, then you will be at loss for control over the actions you take from that point on until all the anger recedes. In today’s society, how many times have we let anger control us? Lots of times, we let anger do the talking when we get angry at another individual. Sometimes, in similar situations, anger can lead us to get upset over something stupid. Anger can even lead us to do dangerous things, such as driving when angry, to even attacking others. When one is too angry to control themselves, they can end up seriously injuring and/or kill themselves in the event that they were careless in the action they were taking part in. However, when it comes to the entire nation, anger can result in a violent war against the other nation that started the anger to rise in particular. In addition to this, fear also plays a big role in violence as well. When we fear of something, it’s usually for the reason of something horrible we are believing to encounter. We are genuinely afraid of many things, such as our house, our money, our Job, our life, and that’s okay. It’s okay to be afraid, but we must not dwell on it or we will never overcome it. Just like anger, too much fear can harm you and the others around you. Once you become too afraid by constantly feeding your fear with the horrors of your mind, fear will engulf you and take complete control of your life until the day comes where you will face that fear. The day you face that fear will have a different outcome determined from how much your fear grew. And it’s because of fear that one may make hasty decisions and choose to try and hide from the responsibilities in life that lead up to this fear. A life constantly lived in fear from an undetermined outcome is one most likely wasted. Why wasted you may ask, because on your deathbed, you will most likely regret the fear you didn’t face. This rule of thumb for fear can be applied to great nations as well, which can result in many wars as an outcome. When one nation becomes afraid of another, they may try to stay on the one nation’s “good side” by constantly supporting them. Some nations will not fight back against an invading nation if they know the odds are against them and either surrender early or let the invasion go on. Some nations who own a strong military but weak economy fear for failure of the nation opposed to the other nation who may have a weak military but a strong economy (Such as North and South Korea, where North Korea has a small economy compared to south Korea. This leads to North Korea attacking South Korea to try and take their economy). This fear could lead to invasions to overtake the other nation to prevent a possible failure in the economy.

Non violence would offer a solution to all of these conflicts, however. If we could all remain nonviolent and seek friendship through the enemy, we could possibly go to greater lengths as nations. Martin Luther King said himself that “the nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding.” If we befriended all of our allies and foes, then we would have minimal conflict and more focus directed towards helping each other excel in life with what we have already accomplished so far. After all, who deserves to die over a simple disagreement?

Before I start, I would like to thank those who helped me with this essay, and I would like to thank you, the reader, for taking the time to read this. I focused mainly on the general atmosphere of Central High School and it´s learning environment as a whole. I am very pleased with being able to let my angry emotions flow out from the awful experiance at Central which allowed me to write this essay with a passion to let everyone know how the dreaded school made me feel. As a writer, I plan to write many more things that I can directly connect my feelings to in a similar fasion. I also work to revise how I input my emotions in future assignments. With No further ado, Lets begin.

A school's experience can greatly impact the way one learns. I am here to talk about Central High School, who greatly ruined my learning experience. ¨Central is such a horrible school¨ I´d tell myself every day I got home. Central was one of those schools that does not expect you to make any mistakes, and always expected you to be on your A game. However, even after trying my very best, it was not good enough. F here, F there, Fs everywhere I looked. It was impossible to pass with solid grades at Central, even after hours of study and hours of work. I believe that my ADHD made it very difficult to excel, because I learned at a slower pace than everyone. That being said, none of the teachers got the memo. Even after countless attempts to connect to the teachers and explain to them that I worked at a slower pace, while having an IEP to back it up, they just could not teach me in the way I needed to learn.

One teacher, in particular, was the worst.  My Biology teacher. Ms. Bonner was her name, and detention was her twisted game. Show up late, detention. Miss an assignment, detention. Ask for help, get talked to in a way that made you feel like trash, then detention. If that wasn't enough, she straight up lied to parents about how classroom and working conditions were student friendly. She also lied about her relationship with the class being on par with friendliness and connectivity to working on assignments step by step. If that wasn't enough, she lied to me about telling my old cab driver that I needed to stay after school for detention. It turns out that she never communicated that to the cab driver and when I showed up to the cab later than usual, I got in trouble with the cab driver due to him saying I wasted his time.

The story called ¨I Just Want to be Average,¨ written by Mike Rose, had a situation that was like looking in a mirror with my situation at Central. ¨My homeroom was supervised by Brother Dill, a troubled and unstable man also who taught freshman English.¨ Brother Dill acts very similar to how Ms. Bonner acted, and this quote reflects greatly on Ms. Bonner as far as her teaching skills go. These types of actions provide stress for many students, as they are pressured to retain a constant behavior each day. Said teachers also expect many of their students to refrain from making any mistakes, as if they expect them to be perfect.

 The only class I ever loved was my Mandarin Chinese class, where we had a nice, strict, yet compassionate teacher, who took his time with everyone and made sure we learned. However, staying at Central for the one class that I enjoyed was not worth me failing my other classes. I gave up hope when I received a notification from the school, claiming that I had failed too many times to participate in extracurricular activities.

This whole predicament is not just about teachers, It was also about the other people there as well. There were only about 3 to 4 kids that were friendly while the rest were pretty much stuck up jerks. There was 1 student that purposefully got on my nerves. He fooled me with his friends and then he called me gullible. He called me out in class when I screwed up. He criticized me for things I couldn´t help. But out of this all, it´s almost as if all the Central students hated each other, due to the school having such a bad atmosphere.

There was even a thing going around, in which, every Friday was dubbed ´Freshman Friday´.  On ¨Freshman Friday¨, most of the seniors aimed and/or picked on the freshman just for fun. Even after the principal said it was not to happen anymore, seniors still did it. Mike Rose describes a similar situation in his story. ¨I just want to be average.¨ In the story ¨I just want to be average¨ this line is spoken by Ken who is struggling to fit in. This quote represents how I felt amongst the people of Central when they treated me horribly.

Central put a lot of stress on me from these experiences, and yet I could continue to talk about so much more. Central, who claims to be diverse, is absolutely not diverse in any way. In order to be diverse, you can´t just accept a bunch of Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Indians, Mentally impaired, physically disabled people and such. You also need to prove that you can work with them as well. And Central Failed in the vast majority of this.

It´s imperative that schools should be honest, accepting, diverse, and have a warm atmosphere in general. Without these traits, it would be very difficult to retain a steady learning environment. Such schools, like Central, who possess little to none of these traits, Fail to sustain a suitable learning environment for everyone. In cases like these, the student struggles to sustain a suitable grade, which can endanger their future colleges and careers. The student may also be frowned upon by many individuals who would criticize them for things they cannot control. In conclusion, for Central to call themselves a ¨diverse¨ school, without possessing any of the traits listed, proves that they are not diverse enough to follow their own claims.

All in all, The only school that has followed Central's ¨Diverse claims¨ is Science Leadership Academy. In Science Leadership Academy, the students are usually teamed up with other students to complete group related activities. Science Leadership Academy mostly dedicates their time to making a warm and friendly environment, while still retaining hard work and tough challenges. The teachers are very friendly, have a nice and generally slow pace when it comes to teaching by making assignments easy to understand. The periods where we dedicate time to study up and complete assignments are controlled by teachers who try very hard to help you succeed and raise your grade by keeping you on track with what assignments you may of missed and advice to do better jobs in other classes. And best of all, this school accepts any race, ethnicity, and mental/medical conditioned student in order to try to help them excel at their own pace.

REVISED FINAL DRAFT

(Scene 1)

I remember when I was a young kid at my Church’s annual picnic . I got into a fight that I wanted no part of. In this picnic area, there were 2 pavilions, one for my church and one for another group. In this other group, there was a kid that really did not like me; however, I never knew the reason and to this day, I still do not know why. It was a nice, sunny day when the picnic started. I was busy playing with all my friends in the feild when we all saw a small playground area. At one point during the picnic, when I was playing on a slide,  the kid started to hit me. ¨Stop!¨ I shouted over and over again. However, the kid ignored me and kept hitting me. Since I was young, I ran off and was upset. I told my parents and they said if I ever saw him again, that I was to stand up for myself and fight back.

(Scene 2)

After this fight, I decided to carry on with my day.  I returned back to my church’s pavilion to hang out and ignored the kid who had hit me. After some time playing some sports and running around the picnic area with my friends and family, the kid came back and started hitting me again. I was scared out of my wits but I could hear my parents shouting from behind me to defend myself.

¨Hit him Noah!¨ Shouts mom.

¨Defend yourself!¨ Shouts dad.

     I wanted to run away so badly, but I knew I couldn’t, so I fought back. I took a few hits but I fought back until he gave up and started to cry.  To this day still feel bad; however, I learned I could now stand up for myself and I was not afraid anymore. I was never in a situation like this since having fought that kid.  I learned that when you need to defend yourself, that it’s important not to be afraid to fight back because there are some people who just won’t back off without a fight.