It is all about the mark

It is all about the mark

By Jason Hu

At 7:00 am, the alarm clock rings,

Groggily, I hear the birds sing,

Their song of enchanted love,

And so, another day begins.

Shower, breakfast, run for the bus,

Getting to school is always a fuss,

Trying to get a grade that’s above

The last one that made my mom cuss,

Which is not a great way to love.

What’s the reason to attend school,

With its myriad of silly rules,

When we can learn anything online,

With results that are just fine.

Is it a school,

Or is it a prison?

We are basically locked up

And forced to believe

School is where government

Tells us what and how to think,

But do as I say, not as I do,

Teaches us not to believe what we are told.

At the assembly we hear a man talk,

About how we should do something

Or we shouldn’t do another thing

Which makes us want to try it.

We are told we have to agree

Because if we don’t,

We lose marks,

Marks! Marks! Marks!

We nod and agree,

It’s so bad to a bully

Or what we are told to do

That particular week

But do we agree?

Well, many do not,

But we have to,

Because we’ll lose marks

Count the days until we are gone

To a better place

Where eager learners

                                                     Can control their own thoughts and lives

Poem Project Part 4

My friend filmed me while I was reading the poem to people.

This is a video that I read the poem to a father with his son in a beautiful afternoon~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxJajeBKqco&feature=youtu.be

This is a video that I read the poem to two lovely old couples~
https://youtu.be/zpLZmIABdmE

Poem Project Part 3

I read the poem to random people in the street and gave them a copy of it. I gave out about 20 copies but only have 3 pictures taken. 

Poem Project Part 2

In order to let more people have the chance to read my poem, with the permissions of the managers, I put the poem on windows of Save On Food, Blenz and a seafood store.Interestingly, I got many cool comments back~~

Poem Project Part 1

I posted my poem online and got approxmately 150 likes in total!!!

ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENT

I consider myself a very active person. I have been going to gyms for many years and I fully understand the benefits of it. Before I started working out heavily I found it hard to maintain my weight and I was tired all the time, like a weight was pressing on me all the time. Now, after four years of working out, I feel great! I have loads of energy and sleep very well at night. It is not easy going to the gym when I have a lot of homework, or my friends want me to do something else, but I have promised myself that I will do four full work-outs a week. I start with 30 minutes of aerobic exercise with a steady heart rate of 170. Then I do weight training and stretching for another thirty minutes. It is really hard doing this, and I very often try to talk myself out of it, but I always make myself go. The result is I look and feel a lot better, and I can study much more effectively after I have worked out; I just feel so energized and refreshed after a work-out. It’s my drug of choice, and I hope I never stop using it.

Medina’s research is completely in line with what I have myself experienced. Since I started working out, my overall healthy and strength have really improved, and I have seen my grades improve, too. As humans, we hunted and gathered for thousands of years, and then farmed for thousands more. The sedentary life we live is something pretty new so it seems that is common sense that we should move our bodies. I can’t for a moment  think how anyone could be a fat, lazy lay-about. It must hurt!

For me, my exercise program is going very well. I have been doing it for five years now, and I have steadily increased my work-out. I run faster, at a higher incline all the time. For next year, I am planning to just keep doing what I am doing, that is slowly and steadily increasing my work-outs. I don’t want to be a body builder or anything, but I do enjoy looking fit and feeling good.

“Do Seek Their Meat From God” is a short story written by Canadian writer, Charles G. D. Roberts. There is an allusion in the title that is form Psalm 104 “The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.” The panthers in the short story are just like the lions, roaring to the meat, to this extent, mean that seeking or praying for what they desire. From the Psalm, we can learn that seeking for your desire couldn’t accomplish any will but making you realize what you want must be earned from God. Lions roar because they want meat but never gain from God because the lack of seeking. And now we should tie the quote of Psalm 104 back to the short story “Do Seek Their Meat From God.” The panthers roar to the child because of hunger and range just like the lions do to meat. However, I found quite interesting that neither of the panthers’ in the short story nor the lions’ from Psalm dream comes true in the end, although the panthers are killed by human instead of finishing with God’s punishment. From above, the title of Roberts’s short story matches with the quote from the Bible pretty well. The end of  "Do Seek Their Meat from God" is a duality: for one specific group, it concludes happily while for the second group, it ends badly. This short story tells about a family of black panthers and a family of people. The panther's behaviours are motivated by the need to catch their next meal. The people's behaviors are motivated by the desire to find friends and the need to have food around all the time. For the panthers, they follow their natural feeding instincts and find a young boy trapped in the dark in an abandoned shack, it ends tragically when both female and male panthers are shot and killed. For the humans, it ends happily when the father finds he has without knowing saved his own son from being eaten by the panthers. The ironic climax of the panther's terrible luck is that later, the man finds the two panther cubs lying dead in their playroom.