Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Planning Ahead: a Fifth-Grader's Perspective




All my life, I have strived to put myself in the best position that I could be in. I have an older brother who is about to go to the University of Illinois to play football. He had many offers from different colleges like Ole Miss, Memphis, and many others. Throughout this whole recruiting process, I’ve had many learning experiences as well. But there’s one thing that I’ve held on to, and that’s the grades that I have to have to succeed. While watching my brother do his school work, and play football, I wondered how I’ll be when I go to high school. Will I be a football star, and make excellent grades, and as a result get a lot of offers? Or will I be a football star and make poor grades, therefore get little offers? In life, most people don’t realize that our time is short. We are only on the earth for a little amount of time, then we're gone. The question God has for us is how will we spend our amount of time while we are here? Will we spend it out on the streets selling drugs and acting like fools? Or will we spend it making good decisions? All of it is up to us. I went on one Official Visit with my brother at the University of Memphis. It was a life time experience that I will never forget. Hopefully it will not be my last one. While I was touring the campus, I felt a little older. The classrooms where amazing, and I was really impressed with the school. The coaches were really nice, and treated us well by by feeding us gigantic steaks and baby-back ribs. They took us to the Grizzlies’ game, where we watched them play the Hornets. The life time experience was amazing. While going through this whole process I’ve realized that it’s up to me to be the best I want to be. And that I’ll have to work for it.

9 comments:

  1. Young man, you will go far because you realize that life is about choices and you are chosing the right directions. Continue acknowledging God in all that you say and do. Continue doing your best throughtout elementary, middle, high school, college, and of course, in life!

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  2. You are exactly right, it is about choices. My goal in my classroom is for my students to learn how to learn so they can be successful in high school and college or trade school. Education allows us to have choices while a lack of education takes those choices away.

    Whether or not you excel in anything: sports, art, or music you will still have to make good decisions to help guide your life. It looks to me like you have a pretty good handle on what is important. Now you have to show it.

    Mr. C

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  3. Thanks for taking the time to comment! My students are spending time checking out your blog and writing comments on your blog posts as well:-)

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  4. Thanks for the comments! I enjoyed reading them. Please break it to your students gently that my iPad post was an April Fool's joke. We didn't get to play with them early ;)

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  5. Wow! This is such an expressive piece of writing its wonderful on so many levels. What a wise head you have on young shoulders, the fact this is labelled perspectives is absolutely right what a great perspective to have on all this! A wonderful, wonderful piece of writing that's blown me away!
    Mr Webb and Room 8, Melville Intermediate School, Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand.

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  6. Mrs Trefz
    On behalf of my class of students in New Zealand I would like to thank you all for your wonderful comments that you left on our site. We're currently in the school holidays at the moment so I can't get all the students to comment back for another week or so but thank you SO much, they are always excited to get comments from around the world, the USA especially and they will love hearing about all your comments (which I will get them to reply to) on April 19th. Thank you so much!
    Mr Webb and All of Room 8, Melville Intermediate, Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealnd.

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  7. I loved reading this and sharing it with my fifth graders! Your post prompted a whole morning of discussion and a journaling session. So, not only did we love reading and talking about it - but my kiddos were thankful for the morning diversion! Thank you for sharing!

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  8. Mrs. Gentis,

    Thank you so much for the wonderful feedback that you have given regarding my blog post. It is a great feeling to know that others are reading and talking about what I wrote and that I can make such a difference.

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  9. Mrs. Trefz,

    Thanks for sharing this wonderful paper written by one of your 5th grade students last year. His paper reflects remarkable writing skills, and displays amazing wisdom from someone so young. The author’s thoughts are very articulated, expressive, detailed, logical, and significant. This young man's faith along with his knowledgeable insight about life should help him become very successful throughout life. I look forward to Jacob’s writing talents being fine-tuned this school year, so he can eventually produce written products as great as your other students from the previous years. Thanks again for working with Jacob this school year.

    Mrs. Bita Webb

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