no day but today..

Anonymous asked: what's your diet?

it’s basically how i’m eating now but more structured. tons of fruits and veggies, oatmeal or fruit for breakfast, yogurt or a whole wheat bread sandwich for lunch, chicken, salad, and a carb for dinner and snacks can be fruits, veggies, a granola bar, or almonds.

it’s honestly so much like how i eat now, i just really wanna push this on myself. and i’ll be running and working out 4-5 times a week. 

starting my diet tomorrow.

i feel gooood. it’s not THAT different than how i eat now, but it’s more organized and structured. 

gonna tone up and lose that weight, bbeeee

Anonymous asked: who are some of your best friends and why do you consider them the best?

some of my best friends would be eden, jonathan, ethan, and steph. i consider them the best because of how comfortable i feel around them. with either one of them, i feel comfortable enough to be myself. i can make the jokes i want to make, laugh at what i want to laugh at, and just be myself. they’re really fun and entertaining people who brighten up my day whenever i need it. i may not speak to all of them every single day, but they really just are amazing friends and people and i love each one of them so very much.

Race To Nowhere

For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s a documentary talking about the “race to nowhere” that students go through since day 1 of kindergarten. the idea that a student MUST do well now in middle and high school to get into a good college (by what definition though) to get a good job in the future, to make a lot of money, to ultimately be happy. the whole documentary was meant to talk about the pressure put on students to succeed in life and how it affects them negatively. how the educational system is so broken as it causes so many students to undergo tremendous stress.

thoughts. okay, so i’m going to start with what i think was wrong with movie, and then say what i thought was right.

now what they did wrong. first off, they brought students mostly from California to discuss the stress they’ve endured in school. they discussed elementary-high school. one thing i should mention, though, was that the woman who made the film was a mother of two, and made the film after a 13 year old girl (same age as her eldest daughter) committed suicide due to “stress in school.” now, i put this in quotes because as the girl who committed suicide’s mother claims “there were no signs” that she would commit suicide. no depression. nothing. just that she got an F on a math test (math was very important to her) and that’s what made her kill herself. (this is of course with no disrespect to Devon’s death, but what the mother claimed to be the reasoning behind the suicide doesn’t make any sense). back to what i was previously saying, the woman who made the film has two kids. one boy in 3rd grade, and a girl in 7th. they both discussed how much stress they endured. how much homework they had. how late they stayed up doing homework. how difficult the homework was. let’s be honest here. 3rd graders have little to no homework. if a 3rd grader is getting homework that is taking them hours to do, they should be placed in a lower level class, or taken out of the school, which is clearly too difficult for them. a 7th grader should not be receiving enough homework to keep her up until 1 am. that’s ridiculous. all this shows me is that these two children cannot handle any form of stress and that they’re probably being placed in classes far too challenging for them. not only that, but practically all the other students that the documentary interviewed, were the extreme cases of the 0.5% of students who actually go through THAT much stress. a girl who became anorexic, a girl who was admitted to a stress clinic, a boy who dropped out of schools, etc. it completely diminished their credibility. it was way too obvious that this film was one sided. they had students complaining about how late they stay up doing work and how they can’t handle it. but we’re talking about students taking tennis lessons, playing soccer, are vice president of their school, and play the violin. no shit you can’t do all your work. you can’t have time to do everything. you’re no superhero. it also seemed very early on that a lot of what the students said were bullshit. some of what they said sounded like a load of shit that the woman who made the film told them to say. had they gotten a broader spectrum of students and scenarios to help prove their point, they would have been much more effective. they went on a whole rant about how homework should be abolished, how tests and grades should be abolished, and how the entire educational system is broken. clearly, it’s not.

and now onto the good things. i think that the creation of this documentary was needed. it definitely was an eye opener to those blinded to what is going on in schools. they pointed out a lot of things, which i as a student feel were very important. they touched on the fact that a lot of the homework given to students, is busy homework. that is, it’s not homework intended to teach them anything, but rather it is done to keep them busy. they also mentioned that there is no necessary link between homework and learning. i found that to be very interesting. another thing that some of the students interviewed brought up was that for the most part, we’re not learning in high school. we’re memorizing. we’re learning for tests given at the end of the year. teachers aren’t teaching us to teach us. they’re teaching us so that we do well on the test, so that they can get a bonus at the end of the year. i can recall many classes where i have never felt that i was learning a thing. i was learning how to take the tests and do well on them. if you were to give me tests that i took during high school, i would do miserably on them simply because i forgot what i never learned in the first place. teachers have even admitted to me that they feel that they’re only teaching so that their students pass the end of the year test. this is a real shame. i also liked that they talked about parents needing to understand their children more and understanding what they are capable of and not overdoing it on them. they talked about how parents need to give their children freedom and independence so that they can make their own decisions in school. i agreed with this, but also found it to be wrong. if my parents didn’t have such high expectations for me and didn’t put a slight amount of pressure on me, i would probably not be doing half of the homework i have to get done. i’m not denying that. i do agree that parents need to lay off, but only to a certain extent. they also talked about cheating and the causes of it. pressure, ultimately. i completely completely agreed with this part. think about the SAT scandal, for example. i honestly believe that those kids cheated for no other reason than pressure from their parents and school. i think it’s sad that so much pressure was placed on theses students to become someone i guess they’re not and go to the schools that they can’t go to, that they had to cheat. they had to pay people to take these tests for them to ensure “success”. they didn’t mention this specific case, but they should have. 

i can’t really think about what else i liked/disliked about the documentary other than that it was incredibly one sided and extreme. i feel that if they had gotten students who do feel stress, but aren’t stressed ALL the time to speak, their message would have been much stronger. advocating that the entire school system is flawed was wrong. it’s not ENTIRELY flawed. of course there are things that need to be changed, but going out saying that everything should be abolished because there are some students who can’t handle pressure and who are put in classes too difficult for them is ridiculous. as a student, i agreed with a nice amount of what they said, but their method of getting the message across bothered me. 

this documentary isn’t going out in theatres, i don’t think. totally worth seeing, other than the fact that it was a bit too long for my taste, but totally not an issue. i’ve seen better documentaries but if you want to be educated on the topic (or on their side of the topic) go see if a school near you is showing it. i agree with the idea that were all in a “race to nowhere” i just don’t agree with their methods of fixing it. 

the end! 2/5 stars, i guess. eh