Papers

Personal Narrative
Emily Spittler

Mrs. Brownlee

College Level Comp.

15 September 2013

The Right-Angled Woman

            I walked alongside my mother next to the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy in July of 2011. The City of Canals was a two-day stop on our whirlwind European tour, and by far my favorite place in the world. It’s a winding metropolis on the banks of the Mediterranean, made of 118 small islands with a population of around 270,000 people, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. There are no cars, just serene gondolas and dapper gondoliers. While we walked along the canals near the famed St. Mark’s Square, we encountered a poor woman I will never forget that opened my eyes to the differences between the European wealthy and deprived. The phenomenon of hard work vs. the status you were born into is exemplified here in the glorious City of Canals.

            For a city built in a swamp on small islands, Venice is remarkably ornate, detailed, and rich. Blown glass workshops line canals, while St. Mark’s Square exudes wealth with its Basilica and a 100-meter tall bell tower. Overpriced gelato stores and coffee shops fill in the cracks next to souvenir stands shoving fake Louis Vuittons down your throat. Next to this magnificent display of wealth and prosperity, there is a group of people overlooked by the general populous and tourists alike: the poor.

The destitute and hopeless poor are seen, but not heard; just like some say children should be. Some perform magic tricks or act as statues for tips, but most simply beg. Tourists see them with their mostly empty hats or cups, hoping for coins, or if they’re lucky a small bill. But they’re ignored by most, shunned by all. One woman in particular is memorable to me. She was older, and so stooped over that she couldn’t pull the top half of her body up farther than parallel to the ground. She was a right angle of a human, holding a Styrofoam cup in hopes of leaving St. Mark’s Square with a few more cents than she started with. At the time, I didn’t think much of her. She was just one poor woman out of hundreds of thousands in the world. I couldn’t do anything to help her. Now, as I reflect on my time spent in the city, I realize I should have helped her. A euro could have made the difference on whether or not she ate that night, and I had no real use for the money, other than buying fake Coach bags, of course.

Not more than 20 feet away from the woman was a yacht large enough to rival my house in size. My tour group was told that to dock in St. Mark’s Square, you had to shell out 3500 euros a day, which is almost five thousand American Dollars. How could this giant difference in wealth be so close to each other? What I began to wonder was what has this wealthy person done so right that they had their own yacht in Venice while the nameless poor woman, stooped severely, begged for coins? The circumstances surrounding the wealthy person’s upbringing must have had something to do with their success. A supportive family goes a long way, and supplements hard work with resources and assistance.

My mother whispered in my ear. She had noticed me staring at the right-angled woman. “She’ll be okay, someone will help her.” I realize now the person to help her should have been me. I could live without a faux Vuitton, a counterfeit Coach.  But I focused on what she must have done wrong to end up in such a predicament; I didn’t feel pity for her, I felt disgust.  Now I realize I was wrong to feel that way towards her, because it’s more likely she was just born into a family deprived of resources. No matter how hard she could have worked, she was still destined to fail in life, just because of the situations surrounding how she was likely raised: poor. You hear great success stories of people who were born in poverty and achieve greatness, but these are rare. Most people born poor stay poor. While not as strict as the Indian Caste System, most of world subscribes to this basic belief: the poor stay poor, the rich stay rich, no matter how hard you work.

While hard work can provide you with the tools to have a good life, you must have access to opportunities only a supportive family/ environment can give you to truly become successful in life. This is what the right-angled woman taught me in two minutes without any words exchanged.

College App Essay

Emily Spittler

College App Essay

Brownlee

24 September 2013

Failing in Success

Everyone is unsuccessful at something in his or her life. Even that 4.0 GPA football star headed to whatever university he wants has struggled at history, or the girl in every science and math club at her school has perhaps flopped at painting. I personally know someone whose biggest failing is his inability to cope with failure; this is why he’s graduating as valedictorian with A’s in easy classes and I’m leaving high school with a 3.8 and Calculus (in which I earned a C. Proud of it, too). Perhaps your biggest failing is that you can’t crochet like your grandma did, or your poker skills need some work. While I’m working on my poker face and crochet skills, my biggest failure is deeply rooted in success. I am drum major for my high school marching band. Center field drum major, no less. Well, I was.

Drum majors have to be coordinated, musically talented, and have the ability to wave their arms around for twenty minutes uninterrupted. If you’ve been placed at the center of the field by your band director, that means you are The Best. The Best stands up on a five-foot tall pedestal to lead the rest of the generally unruly students. For about a month, that was me. Then came The Incident. Or Set of Incidents, really. First off, I dyed my hair pink. This didn’t make my directors all too pleased, even though the bass clarinet player was sporting cherry red hair. Then, a fellow co-drum major (we shall call him Jacob, for that is his name) started to work harder. He improved while my abilities stayed the same. On one fateful Thursday, I was replaced. He got the center spot, and I was pushed to the side of the field to conduct. I no longer was the one who started the marching show - the one everyone looked up to.

While I was still drum major, I was no longer the head honcho. And while I resented Jacob for taking my spot for quite some time, I began to realize that my director was right: Jacob was better than me. I was crushed. I cried on the inside for hours before I was finally granted some privacy to cry on the outside too, and drowned my tears in a whole box of Kleenex. I sniveled and sobbed for an hour, my trashcan was full of used tissues by the time I was done. I had failed at the biggest opportunity I’d had in the band. I’d failed my director, my band, and myself.  Then I realized something very cliché; I didn’t have to be the best to be happy with myself. I could find happiness inside myself, not from my surroundings. I realized I’m still a drum major; I’m still a leader. Just not The Best. I’m okay with that.

While not exactly succeeding at drum majoring, I can still be proud of the accomplishment that I was center drum major for the month of August 2013, and then just a regular drum major for the rest of the season. Jacob the drum major could be number one, and I would cope with second best because I was still happy with being a leader for the group I’ve been involved in for seven years: the band, which means the world to me. So while I still can’t crochet afghans like my Grandma or play Texas Hold ‘Em to save my life, I have succeeded through my failures. I have learned the lesson of finding happiness inside myself.

Culture Essay

Emily Spittler

College Comp.

Mrs. Brownlee

28 October 2013

Death is like a Casserole

Death is like a casserole. Everyone starts as an individual but then becomes this giant nasty mess no one wants to deal with. We as a species have solved this problem by putting our dead in the ground. Someone on Earth dies approximately every second, adding up to millions of corpses needing to be disposed of every year. For millennia humans have buried their dead in the soil for multiple reasons. Other methods of burial are less common, but still practiced. The most common of these is cremation, the burning of the body into ashes. Traditional burial and cremation both provide for basic disposal needs, show respect for the dead, and provide a sense of closure for the family and friends.  

            Traditionally, the body is buried underground for many reasons. Decomposition is a smelly and disease spreading process, and placing the body underground prevents the living from becoming sick. Burial prevents animals or other humans from eating or destroying the body, a symbol of disrespect in many cultures. As well, many religions and cultures believe in an afterlife, and the body needs to be properly treated for the soul to be received after death. Lastly, burial provides closure to the friends and family by removing the corpse from daily life and activities, so the living can begin to move on from the death.

In the United States and other developed countries, before being buried many bodies are embalmed to preserve the remains and to make the body presentable at a funeral or memorial service. This process involves multiple chemicals and devices to prevent the body from decaying before it arrives to its final resting place. The body is then dressed in generally formal clothes and placed in a casket for presentation and eventually burial. The funeral takes place, a graveside service as well; the casket is placed in a metal or stone vault to prevent contamination of soil or groundwater, and buried.

Cremation is the burial method of choice in many Eastern cultures and is gaining popularity in the United States and other Western cultures. Cremation provides for the basic disposal needs much less expensively then body burial.  There is little to no embalming, a casket isn’t necessary, and the process is faster for the family and friends of the dead.

Depending on when the funeral or service takes place, the body may not need to be embalmed at all. The body may be partially embalmed if the body is present at the funeral and cremated afterwards, but many opt to cremate the body quickly after death and only have the ashes present at the memorial service. Caskets aren’t needed because there is not a body remaining after the cremation, only a few pounds of bone fragments ground into “ashes”. Cremation also is quicker than body burial because the embalming time is eliminated or reduced, the cremation itself is a quick process, and the burial or scattering of ashes replaces the time of burial itself.

Cremation shows respect to the deceased by not allowing the body to be mutilated or disrespectfully destroyed and scattering or burying the ashes of the body helps provides closure for the friends and family of the deceased. The person may have requested a place to scatter their ashes, or the family may choose their own location, often a beach of natural area. Some religions that prefer body burial but allow cremation, like Catholicism, request that ashes are buried or placed in a monument for respect.

            While both body burial and cremation are very different options for disposing of the deceased in the United States, both provide for basic burial needs including removal of the body, respect for the dead, and closure to the living. So while a deceased individual becomes an ingredient in the world’s biggest, nastiest casserole, the practices of burial and cremation have crossed cultural lines.

Persuasive Essay

Emily Spittler

College Comp.

Mrs. Brownlee

8 December 2013

Why Schools need More Effective Sex Education

            On average, half of all high school students aged 14-18 are sexually active in the United States (Gish). Based on this national statistic, this means of the approximately 2800 high school students in the Liberty Public School district, 1400 of them are likely to be sexually active. The United States also has the highest rate of teen pregnancy of 3.1% in the developed world (“Teen Births,” 2013). This is often caused by a lack of information about sex due to unregulated instruction (Manhart). Sex education is a necessary part of curriculum in order to properly explain to students the facts of sex, understand and prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections, and be able to make informed decisions in their lives.

             Sex education began in the 1960s as small programs that stressed abstinence before marriage, which is now call Abstinence-Only sex education. However, by the 1980s, sexuality was being taught as a part of the larger human development or health courses and the HIV/AIDS outbreak caused more information about contraceptives to be introduced to curriculum to prevent the spread of HIV and other Sexually Transmitted Infections, or STIs. (Pardini) This combination of abstinence and contraceptive education is called Comprehensive sex education, or Abstinence-Plus today, and it covers all aspects of human sexuality, along with preventing unwanted pregnancies and decreasing the spread of STIs (Gish).

            Sex education is critical to today’s youth to understand their growing and changing bodies, along with their sexuality and sex itself. While both Abstinence-Only and Abstinence-Plus are effective methods of sex education, Abstinence-Plus has been shown to delay the start of sexual behavior and has been linked to the dropping teen pregnancy rate in the United States (McKeon). The teen pregnancy rate has dropped from 6.2% in 1991 to 4.1% in 2006 is also linked to increased contraceptive use, which is included in the instruction of Abstinence-Plus sex education, giving children and teens the information they need to know about preventing pregnancy (Manhart).

Opponents to sex education in schools argue that it is the responsibility of the parent to teach their children about their changing bodies, sex, and sexuality. This means that if a parent doesn’t wish to discuss this information with their child, they may never learn it. When asked how they responded to their 4-7 year old child asking them about sex in a British study, 38% felt embarrassed, and 31% didn’t know what to say, leaving this 69% of children with no information on what they asked about (“Many parents ‘oppose school sex education for children,’” 2011). This child will grow up in a world completely devoid of information they need to understand their own bodies and their future as adults. They may resort to the Internet or a friend for information, which is often inaccurate and unreliable, or experiment sexually, which could lead to an accidental pregnancy or the contraction of a sexually transmitted infection.

Parents who do explain to their children about sex outside of school may not have the most accurate and current information either. While this is better than completely ignoring the subject, it can lead to the child once again resorting to the Internet or a friend for missing information, which may cause as equally serious consequences as no instruction at all.

By placing sex education in schools, it is guaranteed that all students will receive medically accurate information about their bodies, sex, and their sexuality as humans. By having educated instructors provide children and teenagers with accurate and reliable information about sex and their bodies, children and teens will be less likely to make mistakes in their sexual lives, contract a sexually transmitted infection, or be involved with an unplanned pregnancy due to a lack of information and knowledge on the subject.

Works Cited

Gish, Alice. “Sex Education.” Grolier Multimedia Education. Grolier Online, 2013.          Web. 20 Nov. 2013

Gish, a writer for the online Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia published by Scholastic, explains the types of sex education in the United States and how the school district and state governments instead of at a national level decide curriculum. I used this resource to gain significant background information on sex education and learn about the two types of education.

           

“Teen Births.” Center for Disease Control. n.p. 5 August 2013. Web. 8 December 2013.

           

The Center for Disease Control, or CDC, is the government agency assigned to all aspects of health and disease in the United States. I used this small article to find out what the teen pregnancy/birth rate in currently in the United States and to see how it’s changed in the past 20 years.

Manhart, Lisa. Kohler, Pamela. Lafferty, William. “Abstinence-only and            comprehensive sex education and the initiation of sexual activity and teen                     pregnancy.” Journal of Adolescent Health. (2007): n.page. Web. 8 December                 2013.

           

Two doctors and a registered nurse who have worked in the pediatric and adolescent fields wrote this article from the Journal of Adolescent Health. It contains large amounts of useful information about the types of sex education and their influence on the recipients. I used this resource to validate that there is no increase of sexual behavior due to sex education and that comprehensive sex education actually has lowered the pregnancy rate in teenagers.

“Many parents ‘oppose school sex education for children.’” BBC News. BBC, 05 May              2011. Web. 8 December 2013.

This article from BBC news explains why parents of 4-11 year old children in the UK don’t endorse sex education in schools. This article was helpful to see why some parents don’t want their children being instructed on sex and sexuality in school. I used the article to see how parents reacted to their young children asking for information on sex.

Pardini, Priscilla. “The History of Sexuality Education.” Rethinking Schools.       Rethinking Schools, n. d. 8 December 2013

Rethinking Schools is an organization that publishes educational materials and is in favor of elementary, middle and high school curriculum reform. The article was very informative on the history of sex education programs and I used to include the years where sex education was significantly changed or impacted in it’s history.

McKeon, Brigid. “Effective Sex Education.” Advocates for Youth. Advocates for Youth,             2006. 8 December 2013.

               

This article on the types of sex education and facts about each is from the Advocates for Youth, an organization in favor of sex education and the prevention of HIV/AIDS. The article was very helpful by providing me with information about the outcome of each type of sexuality instruction, and how each works in schools.