By: Lina Amraoui The feeling: The feeling of being left out can be overwhelming and unbelievably shocking, especially if it’s coming from the people that you thought were actually your “friends”. And I strongly believe that a lot of us have felt, at some point in our lives, this unwanted feeling. Even the most popular girl in your school, or the class clown, or just you. I know that this feeling can be daunting but one thing that I have learned from my experience with being “left out” was to actually acknowledge that the people that let you down were never your true friends. I know that it sounds too cliché, but this is the harsh truth that everyone needs to face. The first step to respect yourself is the realization that not everyone in your life deserves a place in there. You can not keep digging places for someone who loves the rays of the sun breaking through the clouds. This realization will make you open your eyes to another fact which is that “being left out” has nothing to do with YOU as a human being but rather with them. Jealousy is a disease, and you can’t really know it, but you still can prevent yourself from it by staying away from those “friends”. I know that a lot of you might be thinking that those friends make them feel less alone, especially at lunchtime… But at some point you need and have to face the harsh reality that they are not your comrade, especially when you feel left out from all the adventures or the fun stuff that teenagers do. You may feel alone, but it’s way better than hanging out with people who are just taking the place of the people that are meant and deserve to be part of your life. How to deal with this feeling:
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By: Thee Sim Ling Calling all young writers! Do you want to find avid readers, improve your craft, and change the world? There’s one way to accomplish all that: by starting a blog. As you may know, a blog is a web log on the internet that a blogger or a group of bloggers update frequently with entertaining posts for their followers. Successful bloggers have tons of followers, earn millions of dollars and even have gotten book deals due to their blogging. There are a few reasons why you should start a blog. The first reason is that blogging is a regular commitment to writing. Many of us find pleasure in procrastination, and crawling to our desks to write is a struggle. With blogging, you can’t slack off, and you must make a frequent effort to produce hundred-word posts every week or so. The second reason is that blogging provides you with a platform to use your voice and express your opinions. It gives you the freedom to be creative and attract like-minded friends in the process. The third reason is that with blogging, you have the ability to make a difference. Whether writing a humorous story to make someone laugh or an article advocating for civil rights, you can contribute meaningfully to the community. The first step in starting a blog is to find out what your blog is about. Blogs are often created to solve a problem you encounter in your life. Maybe you are an experienced pet owner who comes across many new dog owners needing help with taking care of their pooches. Maybe you are a budding writer who is frustrated at the lack of diverse female characters in fiction and decides to write some of your own stories. Maybe you are an activist who sees problematic views in society and want to inform people on issues such as disability rights and climate justice. When you find your blog’s mission, you can come up with a fitting name and design that aligns with your goals. The second step is to choose a platform for your blog. Free blogging software such as Wordpress.com and Blogger are simple enough for beginners. You can also create free websites with website builders such as Wix, Weebly and Google Sites. However, these platforms can be problematic because you don’t hold the rights to your content; often, the companies that allow you to build your free blog do, and they can take the content down anytime. Besides that, you are often left with a domain containing the name of the blog service (such as cuddlykitties.wordpress.com). WordPress.org is the top platform among professional bloggers. It allows bloggers to control all the rights to their blog, use their own domain name (cuddlykitties.com) and customize their site to their liking. The third step is to start planning your first blog posts. It is very important to create a schedule for your blog. How often will you be posting? Every day? Every week? Every month? Look at your calendar and consider your commitments, such as school, work and other hobbies. Be careful not to overload yourself. It is also important to come up with article ideas to keep writer’s block (or blogger’s block) at bay. List down any ideas you have in a notebook and set a time to write them. The fourth step is to write! Draw up a rough outline for your post and research your topic online. Make sure to use a lot of headings, subheadings and lists. Break up long passages into tinier, bite-sized paragraphs. If you want to attach photographs, please note that you can’t take a random picture off from the internet! Abide by copyright rules and source for photos only from royalty-free websites such as Unsplash and Pixabay. These websites do not require any permission from the creators to use their photos. However, it is basic courtesy to credit the creator in the caption of the photo. Finally, make sure your blog is accessible for everyone. Fill in the alt text of photos and provide downloadable PDF versions of blog posts too. Sometimes, you may feel discouraged by your lack of progress. Nobody but your mum is reading your blog, and it feels that your effort is wasted. You look at the blogs of popular bloggers, and you can’t understand why they can do that, but you can’t. All bloggers know that feeling very well. When you start out, you have a steep learning curve that seems like an insurmountable mountain. But, don’t give up. Learn from successful bloggers and pick up tips from blogs about blogging. Experiment with your blog and share your posts with the people around you. You can do it! By: Tiffany Zhang “Every generation has a “monoculture” of sorts, a governing pattern or system of beliefs that people unconsciously accept as “truth”” - Brianna Wiest I think collectively as a society, we think that our source of happiness should be extracted from our achievements and successes. We work every day at every second to reach those milestones because society tells us that that’s the only way we can be happy. But happiness is so subjective. It is not defined by how much money, property, friends, or kids a person has. It’s not a numerical objective that for example determines if a person reaches a net income of $1 million that they are “happier” than a person that only earns $50,000. In economics, the study determines a country’s well being by its income per capita. Yes, a country can have a higher number, but that number does not account for the wealth gap, the living conditions, or any other major problems the country is suffering from. Or from a psychologist’s perspective, we can measure the amount of serotonin (the “happiness” hormone) a person is emitting. However even if a person’s serotonin levels are high, because they are constantly comparing themselves to others, they might not realize how satisfied they “should” be. Since it is a feeling that is so personal, it’s up to each individual to understand what events or things grant them pleasure. When you boil it down, it is the small things that happen every day that have the ability to create a cumulative effect on the way you perceive happiness. I urge you to notice the little things that happen every day that brings a smile to your face. When you derive fulfillment that way, it can add up to become that large milestone of happiness. A journal of gratitude is a great way to get yourself to notice those things. And of course, if journaling is not your thing, actively realizing it in your head makes you more consciously appreciative of the happiness around you. I think that happiness depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. Your material wealth brings stability and comfort and based on that foundation, you can seek what is beyond. Each person’s journey will be different and we obviously cannot be happy every single day. However, each little step can account for your larger journey to become a more satisfied and optimistic person. By: Thee Sim Ling Frustrated at reading your textbooks? Irritated by the piles of unfinished study notes on your desks? Pulling out your hair at how you never can write a single great essay? Well, that is a common problem students worldwide face. But, have no fear! On the miraculous platform called YouTube where gamers and cute cat videos thrive, channels, where fellow students teach useful study tips, are flourishing. These stellar study savants are often high-achievers, ranging from first-place finishers for science courses at Cambridge University. However, with so much conflicting advice and so little time, how can you find the right study strategy and ace your tests? Lucky for you, I have nobly sacrificed some of my time to watch these videos and summarise the numerous tips into the five points below (so you don’t have another excuse to secretly watch a Netflix movie). Here are five study tips from the masters: 1) Note-taking: Use Creative Techniques Struggling with school? Maybe the way you take notes may need a little tweaking. Experiment and find which note-taking techniques suit you the best. Some top scorers believe in doing it the old-fashioned way and writing information on paper to promote muscle memory. Others prefer the computer because it solves the problem of ugly handwriting and is better for organising notes. Try using mind-maps, flashcards, and facilitate your studies with extra reading before referring to notes provided by teachers. This is called “active recall” — actively simulating learning during the process. It better helps store information in long-term memory, instead of “passive learning” (staring at your textbooks for hours). 2) Memorization Techniques The key to memorization, the masters say, is consistency: repeating it again, and again, and again. For short-answer or essay questions, use flashcards by writing down the question and number of points on one side and writing the answers on the other, and practice giving the answers. Practice memorizing essay plans point by point and writing essays down from memory. There’s no need to memorize a whole chunk of words, but you need to know your bullet points well enough to structure each paragraph. 3) Writing Essays: Practice, Practice, Practice Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to make you better at essay writing. Instead, you need to do it the hard way. All these masters emphasised that writing good essays takes practice, practice, practice. Once you have finished covering a topic, with it still fresh in your mind, it is the perfect time to reinforce learning with an essay. Find essay titles from past-year papers or come up with your own. Then, try writing your essays with the knowledge you just gained and, if your teacher is willing, submit it to be marked and obtain feedback to make it better. If you really are time-scarce, then an essay plan (an outline of what you would write) would suffice. These essays will familiarize you with the topic and help you vastly in your exam revision, especially when you need to prepare yourself for similar essay questions. 4) Effective Study Sessions Let’s face it: three-hour study sessions rarely work, especially if you have a short attention span. That’s why instead of one three-hour session a week, try splitting it up into three one-hour sessions per week. Draw up a revision timetable and decide which days of the week you will be studying a subject, for how long, and on what concept or topic. Research has shown that by spacing out your study sessions, you will be better able to store the information in your brain and not overload it. Remember, during your study sessions, it’s not all about studying! Use the Pomodoro method and set a timer for twenty minutes and take frequent breaks to rest your brain. 5) Be A Proactive Learner If you want to get good grades, the tough part is, you need to work for it. Yes, many of these student ninjas I watched succeeded in school early on and thus were able to make it into top colleges, but once they were in university, they didn’t slack off on their work. They started making study strategies and revision timetables and did the hard work that carried them to Number 1. And they got the grades they wanted because they were proactive learners. Learners who take initiative learn much more than learners who just highlight sentences in their textbooks (which we all have done at least once in our lives). They read the content they have carefully and make connections between different concepts. They don’t copy down lecture notes wholesale and re-read them over and over, hoping it would somehow stick to their brains because of their photographic memory. They digest what they learned, make their own notes, and use memory aids consistently to remember the content. They aren’t perfect, of course, and do make mistakes. They might have even failed an exam or two. But, the important thing is that they are willing to learn from their mistakes and improve their study methods. They read learning material before classes and consult with teachers on what they don’t know. And they aren’t satisfied with what they have — they do extra reading and research to connect the dots. This is how to be a great learner. You need to be proactive. So now, with these great study tips, what are you waiting for? Get out your textbooks and start studying now! References: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzB2DblN6BY&list=WL&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-46Vyiwat_Y&list=WL&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXqAKcSep0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDbxPVn02VU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXl7UxjeOZk By: Ira Sharma If you’re in high school, chances are that you are worried about your future- especially college. College admissions rank high on the stressors that high school students experience, alongside family, work, and grades. As college apps close out this year, changes are being made to standardized testing and the admission process. For one, the SAT/ACT essay requirements are getting dropped at some schools, while many schools are dropping any SAT/ACT requirements at all, including SAT subject tests. This shift away from testing has been slowly happening for a few years, but with the pandemic stopping students from taking these standardized tests, many institutions have decided to not make it needed. As test scores decrease in significance, extracurricular activities remain an essential part of the application. However, many schools are trying new things this year when it comes to getting to know a student personally. Many schools have changed their admission process to include much more personal questions about a student’s personality, values, hopes, and dreams. As colleges take an increasingly personal look, many college admissions specialists hope it will allow for a more diverse, talented group of students. Since the COVID-19 Pandemic took a toll on extracurriculars, sports teams, and other activities, it is also expected that college admissions in the future will be shorter and more to the point. Now that many students were unable to finish their last season of a sport or last competition for a club, the admission process will have to be a lot more streamlined. Another portion of the application changing involves scores- many colleges are actually allowing students to self-report scores. Having College Board send your scores to many universities can get expensive, so many schools have adopted self-reporting scores, and confirming those scores with College Board upon admission. Early Action/Early Decision programs are also changing. Many schools have started offering these options as non-committal, less restrictive, so you could apply to multiple schools for early action. However, with normal applications, many institutions are actually going to extend their deadlines to fill their classes beyond May 3rd. It’s expected in 2021 that getting information about acceptances could take longer, allowing more students to apply. Finally, a welcome change in the admission process is the prospect of more financial aid available now, in the form of need-based applications, and also academic scholarships. Universities fearing students not attending because of the price are putting more money into offering financial aid. This may prove very helpful to most students, especially those whose financial situation has been changed because of the pandemic. I’m a freshman in high school, and very excited to see the changes in college admissions in the next 4 years. There’s been such an emphasis on perfect scores and grades so far, so I’m excited to see that colleges are taking an interest in getting to really know students personally. Hopefully, this will reduce the phenomenon of burning out in high school, and give students more time to develop as a person rather than simply develop academically. By: A'shiyah Dobbs With more access to knowledge on things such as astrology, I have become interested in tarot cards. Tarot cards are packs of seventy-eight cards, each with their meaning, used to guide intuition, manifest goals, and envision your future. The purpose of tarot cards is to help guide you to develop as an individual and understand your strengths and weaknesses. Although they can often get associated with fortune-telling or witchcraft this is not always true. Reading the cards is based on symbolism, colors, and your own emotions which can change how you may relate the cards to yourself. This causes reading tarot cards to be highly subjective and based on intuition when interpreting them. This subjectiveness and emotional connection to tarot cards are why they can be used to help with starting a conversation about mental health.
DIFFERENT CARD TYPES: A pack of seventy-eight cards might seem intimidating to a beginner at first. However, these cards split into groups starting with major and minor arcana. Major Arcana represents the fools/ hero's journey and are cards labeled one through twenty-one. These cards show the hero's journey from a child to adulthood, with card zero (The Fool) representing the hero. Seeing as these cards are life focused, finding a card you relate to can help target different parts of life to improve but also help those around be their best self (this is why some people will limit themselves to these cards only). The Minor Arcana is made up of the other fifty-six cards and then divided into four suits representing a smaller section of a fool's or hero's journey. These cards can best be understood best by their suit and numerical meaning yet, minor arcana cards are the most affected through intuition and one’s interpretation. The four suits are: Cups: emotions, spirituality, and water Coins: materialism, wealth, and earth Swords: intellect, understanding one’s mind, and air Wands: creativity, one’s heart, and fire When I do a reading and want to check on things affecting my emotions I pay attention to cup cards and wands for creative outlets. A different example would be, the effects school has on mental health. When looking at cards, paying attention to cups ( emotional) and swords (knowledge) might help. Even not coming with a question in mind when pulling cards is fine because it leads to becoming more self-aware of the effect things around you have, and reflect. THE PROCESS OF DOING A READING: The first step after picking your tarot card set of choice is to do your first reading. There are many different layouts you can put your cards in depending on what you may want to know but doing a simple one card pull can give a forecast for the day/ month or answer a yes/no question. For this example, I have pulled the “The Tower” card. (description: A girl and boy both falling out of a tall tower that is lit on fire with only the trowns it was built on to fall onto. In the background, the sky is black fading into the red with clouds and lightning.) "The Tower" card is often associated with the fairytale Rapunzel. Similar to the Disney film and the feeling of safety Rapunzel has at the start of the movie before Fin climbs up, the tower is often why this card is associated with change and getting out of one's comfort zone. Along with this shift, you may have changed beliefs that could even destroy one's foundation (also shown in the movie though Fin becomes a love interest and discovering mother Gothel as the villain, for hiding that Repunzle was a princess). However, these are suggested interpretations of the card, and using this knowledge you must apply how these suggestions relate to yourself to get an accurate reading. In my case, this card relates to my avoidance of a situation that would bring change. In an era of social distancing and continuous lockdowns, the world has turned to ebooks and flimsy paperbacks to get their minds off the ongoing pandemic. And as 2020 comes to an end, there’s no better time to look back on this year’s best YA novels.
By: Bonne Leung We’ve all seen the films — a group of young elitists leaving a shining white school laden with marble and adorned with Roman columns, hair flowing in the wind as they made their way down their steps in matching school uniform, the crest of their school upon their breast pockets, strutting towards some expensive car. Perhaps, once, you might have even wished you were them, wearing their navy blue blazers and shining leather shoes. But the truth is, in private educational institutions that are so often glorified on screen, rarely do students ever have the chance to be so liberal in how they present themselves.
In reality, uniforms come with strict policies that usually perpetuate often misogynistic and insensitive sentiments such as only having options for binary genders (skirts for girls and trousers for boys) or being more concerned about the length of a skirt than a case of bullying. School is one of the primary sources of social learning for children, especially as schooling starts at such a young age. Children should understand from a young age that the sex they were assigned at birth may not always be the same as what they present their gender identity as and that it’s normal to see a classmate they may think of as a boy to wear a dress or a girl to wear trousers. Enforcing strict uniform policies can lead to children having a binary sense of gender, which for some could lead to severe dysphoria and discomfort whilst growing up. Not to mention, children often have no regard for what they say and how it may affect others, which encourages them calling classmates that don’t conform to the binary genders they’re familiar with ‘gay’ or a ‘tomboy’ well into teenage years or even adulthood. And let’s say that uniform policies were more flexible, that in a hypothetical situation, boys and girls both have access to whatever piece of uniform they wanted to wear and the environment they were in lacked the discriminatory situational factors. What of self-expression? I attend a fairly diverse international private high school, which comes with a comparatively long uniform policy that essentially states that nothing should detract from ‘the image of school uniform’. Beyond the basic uniform rules, we are only allowed a maximum of two piercings per ear, one bracelet, one ring, no nail varnish and hair cannot be dyed an ‘unnatural colour’. Most would argue that given the fact that students are already restricted in terms of what they can wear beyond what the uniform shop sells or the school permits, they should be allowed accessories at least as a form of self-expression. But why is self-expression important? Well, self-expression is indicative of inner thoughts and personal identity. Imagine yourself as a canvas upon which myriads of colours mix and mingle together, creating a cacophony of colours that don’t quite make sense to anybody but you. Because well, it is you. You’re all of those colours mixed and poured into the vessel that is you, and since nobody can quite make sense of all of these colours, the only way you can outwardly express it would be through how you present yourself. Be it brightly coloured hair or a preference of style, self-expression is important — certainly for young adolescents who have a hard time as it is trying to navigate the perplexing limbo of teenage years — because it encourages people to simply be. Reducing it to just that makes it seem profoundly simple — because it is. It’s so dumbfoundedly simple that it’s honestly the reason the whole notion of school uniform maintaining ‘school image’ or ‘disciplining’ students is somewhat asinine, to me at least. Hair grows back; piercings can heal. Make-up isn’t anything less than art, save for the fact that its canvas and mediums are slightly different to that of conventional art, it truly is an art form, and with each stroke, it reveals a different part of the person wearing it. I used my school as an example for what private institutions’ uniform policies are like, but truthfully, there is a lot more leniency — I feel, at least — in terms of how I can express myself. More often than not, teachers are willing to turn a blind eye to breaches, sometimes even compliment said breaches. But that isn't to say that there aren’t areas of improvements. As with all things, it’s never quite perfect. There’s still a culture of alienation when someone doesn’t conform to the norms of what is to be expected from a student. As a cis female student that is part of the ethnic majority at school, I can’t account for everybody’s experience, but improvements that my school could make could apply to others too: for example, accepting boys who would feel more like themselves in the girl’s uniform, eliminating insensitive comments, inclusivity for all ethnic groups and their forms of self-expression. So no, uniform isn’t inherently a bad thing. In fact, I enjoy my uniform. I roll out of bed, tug on a collared shirt and skirt and stick my head through a school sweatshirt and that’s me for the day. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that the way I express myself is widely accepted as a ‘social norm’ whereas others may not. A school community with unconditional acceptance is a long ways away for many, but we can start here, simply, perhaps with a small rebellion taking the form of a third piercing in one ear. We can start by allowing everyone to simply be. By: Aliya Hirji The day I turned 16 was supposed to be glamorously filled with parties, gifts, and more friends than I could ever imagine. I sit here, finally sixteen, with none of it. The day filled with hand sanitizer, mind-numbing tests, and a very cold sandwich.
It is certainly not the milestone I had imagined, and yet, I am still content. Almost a full year of self-discovery during a global pandemic has been interesting, to say the least. I have developed my self-identity, reconnected with my artistic passions, and established myself as a young and involved activist. I spent the last few hours on Zoom calls with my family. Not just a family of blood or legal documents, but the people who have shaped the person I am today. The people in my life who will forever hold a piece of my heart regardless of the physical distance we are separated by. The most memorable moments of the past year resulted from emotionally driven and impulsive decisions to take the job I never saw myself succeeding in, jump on a different subway cart, and join an untraceable amount of Zoom calls. Life is a series of moments and the only way to live life to the fullest is to live everyone. COVID-19 has given me a greater appreciation for life and the people who make my life worth living. I wasted so much of the last sixteen years dreaming about arbitrary milestones, instead of establishing my own. I have thrown away irretrievable time planning for a future so uncertain that I lost touch with the importance of experiencing the adventure of life. From now on, I plan on chasing my passions down the convoluted path of life surrounded by people who inspire me to take the tremendous leap of courage. |