Schooldays Time Essay Example for Free

Schooldays Time Essay According to a popular saying,schooldays are the happiest days of your life. Is there any truth in this? Answers to this question are bound to vary greatly from person to person. A person’s answer will depend on how happy the person’s schooldays actually were and on how happy the rest of his or her life has been since. To give a really true answer to this question you have to be fairly close to the end of your life. Hopefully,by this time you will have lived a long time. If this is the case,then you will have a long period of time to look back on.Will no other period of your life have made you happier than your schooldays? This seems rather unlikely. There are certain momentous times in a person’s life which are usually accompained by a great feeling of happiness,even of ecstasy. One of these is being in love. Another is a person’s wedding day. Yet another, and many parents would put this at the top of their happiness list, is the birth of a couple’s child. These are milestones in human life and they bring happinessto the majority of people who experience them. However, apart from these emotional milestones, there is a wide variation in what makes people happy. To a large extent what brings happiness to a person depends on what they are interested in. For example, athletes might well regard their period of supreme happiness as the time they won a major track or field event, especially an Olympic event. Footballers might regard the peak of their happiness as the time they played for a top-ranking team and scored a crucial goal in an important game. Ambitious businesspeople might be at the hightest point of their happiness when they bring off a particulary successful and shrewd business deal. If there are all these opportunities, and many more, for achieving happiness in life, how has the idea arise that schooldays are the happiest days of our life? It is at least partly because people’s memories, particularly older people’s memories, tend to be imperfect when they look back on the past. Not only that.Especially where childhood is concerned, older people tend to look back at past through rose-coloured spectacles. For example, they might remember the weather during the summer holidays as being much better than it is now. That has nothing whatsoever to do with modern climate change. It has to do with looking back on the past with affection and nostalagia-and a lack of realism. A few people’s schooldays might genuinely have been the happiest days of their lives. On the other hand, some people’s schooldays might have been an absolute nightmare with stern schoolteachers administering harsh punishments and fellow students teasing and bullying them, not to mention the often unbearable pressure of exams. For most people,neither of these extremes fits the bill.Their schooldays are the usual mixture of happiness and unhappiness,like the rest of their lives.Schooldays are not the happiest days of their lives.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been Essay examples -- Literary An

In her short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, Joyce Carol Oates presents us with a well known maxim: children cannot wait to get older. Tired of her boring and powerless childhood, Connie, the main character, searches for cheap thrills she likens to adulthood. Thus, Connie’s surreal experience (Arnold Friend’s sudden and unwanted appearance in his car) represents a suppressed fear of the inevitable and unknown - growing up. Connie, a stereotypical fifteen year old girl, views her life and her family with dissatisfaction. Jealous around her twenty-four year old sister, June, despite June’s outward plainness, and tense around her irksome mother, Connie escapes to the mall with her friends. She and her clique of friends feel like they own the place, and the rest of the world: â€Å"Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (1-2). The sense of freedom intoxicates them. Sometimes, they sneak across the street to a drive-in restaurant. Crossing from one world to the next, they leave the well known layout of the mall and adopt the turf of the older kids. They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly- infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for (2). Here, they rid themselves of average, familial and school-age problems and bask in the glory of teenagerdom, drinking from their Holy Grail of liberty. Here, listening to â€Å"the music that made everything so good† (2), they finally taste the maturity they yearn for. However, growing up often comes too quickly. A boy, Eddie, soon arr... ...ate. As the last lines of the story suggest, despite her terror through the piece, she is finally forced to accept her future: â€Å"†¦the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him - so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it† (9). After spending so much time acting more grown up than she actually was, she now must face the truth of growing up, despite her trepidation, like all children. With complex themes and multifaceted symbols, Oates presents a girl so eager to grow up, but not yet ready to face what that truly entails. Arnold Friend represents the bare actuality many children ignore when looking at the far unlit unknown of adulthood and growing up. In essence, this story acts as a way to warn â€Å"be careful what you wish for† and â€Å"life’s not all it’s cracked up to be†.

MythBusters: Walking on Water Essay

Adam and Jaime are to conduct an experiment to see if it is possible to walk on water, but before they could begin their experiment they must have completed some research. They began by looking back into the history of the ninja and ancient Japanese myths, and then continued on to search for a modern day ninja. They discovered the â€Å"mizugumo†, which is a circular flat wooden disc that might have helped the ninjas stay afloat as they walked over the water. Description of experiment – Kelsey Alvarez (Ms. Garrity) The mizugumo is said to distribute the ninja’s weight evenly on the surface of the water because of the wide surface area. Due to this, the ninjas would not be able to sink. To make the mizugumos Adam decided to measure and cut 2 circles of pine wood. They were then each sliced into 4 pieces. Later, he painted the 4 pieces a shade of brown. When this was completed he sanded the paint off. When the 4 pieces of wood had that worn look color he proceeded to adding a rectangular block in the middle of the 4 pieces. He tied the 4 pieces and the block in the center with twine, repeating this step for each one. Adam has now created an exact replica of the mizugomos. When the footwear was complete they proceeded to the actual experiment. The twine that was left over was used to tie the mizugumos on to Adams shoes. Adam was now ready to â€Å"walk on water†, however, after taking his second step into the pool he sank right down. Jaime then explained that in order for Adam to walk on water he would have to be able to take very fast steps across the water. In Adams second trial at attempting to walk on water he decided to increase his momentum like Jaime suggested, and even with this done, he still sank right after the second step. Adam and Jaime then concluded that Mizugumos were actually a myth and were never actually used to walk on water. However, the team did not give up yet. Adam decided to make a pair of modern ninja shoes to test what it would take to actually walk on water. This time he used aluminum, a packing foam, and snow boots. In order to make this work he used the principle of water displacement. This principle states that an immersed object is maintained above water by a force that is equal to the weight it displaces. Adam continued to cut the shape of the boot on the packing foam boards and glued 4 layers of packing foam together with the snowshoes in the middle. In order for the foam shoes to not fall apart he covers them in aluminum sheets and tapes it on. He also adds a light rail in order to keep it firm. Before testing them out Adam paints the shoes entirely black. Using his aluminum shoes Adam is ready to test and see if he can walk on water. On his first trial with the shoes Adam walked too quickly and ended up sinking. On his second trial however, Adam gently stepped on the water and tried to gain his balance; he was finally standing! Although he was standing on the water, it was impossible to move forward. The team then concluded that the shoes could not be used to walk across the water. < Jaime’s cornstarch solution

Baz Luhrmanns Production of Romeo and Juliet - 1683 Words

Baz Luhrmanns Production of Romeo and Juliet Romeo seems like a passionate, romantic and excitable young man. He seems to like the idea of being in love, although I would suggest the feelings he has for Juliet begin only as infatuation and grow throughout the balcony scene. In the beginning of the scene Romeo is portrayed as determined, wary and possibly a little frightened as he knocks over furniture and scrambles up the trellis. His eyes are continuously darting around and you get a sense of desperation because he is panting. When he climbs the trellis in the hope of seeing Juliet but discovers the nurse instead, his facial expression turns from one of lust and longing, to one of utter†¦show more content†¦Juliet is a very capable young lady who truly believes she is in love with Romeo; during the scene she is portrayed as a shy, naà ¯ve and innocent child, but also appears to be a very determined, sensible and practical young lady. Karen Clark 27th October 2003 Romeo Juliet Baz Luhrmann Production 1(ii) Dramatic Devices In the beginning of the scene we see Romeo climbing the orchard wall in complete darkness, but when he enters the swimming pool area the fairy lights illuminate the immediate vicinity, coupled with the floral trellis this makes the setting quite romantic. You get a sense of the era because the house is traditional in style, from the authentic continental windows to the ageing balusters on the balcony. The size of the house, together with the presence of a swimming pool gives the impression that Juliet comes from a very affluent background. The costumes seem appropriate for the period; Juliet wears a simple plain white dress, possibly portraying virginity and virtuosity and Romeo wears the costume of a knight, which could signify valour and gallantry. In contrast we see the security guard sporting a very modern outfit complete with baseball cap, earpiece and headset. 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