Fun Fact about Sandy: She loves dancing around to her iPod Shuffle as she walks the dog early in the morning
Dreaming About Summer
March 15, 2006
All I know is that this summer will be memorable. I recently selected my classes for my upcoming senior year: AP Literature, AP Government, AP Environmental Science, Trigonometry, and Photography with early dismissal. For a while, I had doubts about early dismissal because I worried that it'd appear lazy in my transcripts. Most of my friends seemed to think so, and they encouraged me to look for a job and take work experience instead. I cannot work during weekdays because I still have clubs/leadership my senior year. My family has already made clear that I should work during the weekends to help pay for expenses, so early dismissal will at least give me a few extra hours during the week for homework or 'me time'.
So where does that leave summer? It seems everyone has an opinion about what I should do my junior summer—study for the SAT's or get a job are the basic choices. Getting a job this summer would be helpful for next year because I'll already have one and can switch to working weekends, yet the new mall being built nearby (a gold-mine for a teenager looking for a job) won't be completed for some time. I'm completing all my tests this year as a junior (I'm booked for consecutive testing starting April 1st), so other than the bundle of summer assignments given at school (and reading), I have no plans.
For a while now I have been wondering whether or not I should begin to visit the elderly at a retirement home. I have completed a fair amount of service already with my local library, however the retirement home means more to me than hours—a friend who works there recently informed me about an elderly couple who come from my homeland, Peru. They speak some English, some Spanish, but primarily the Indian language 'Quechua'. My family has not spoken the language for many generations and few beside natives speak it today, even in Peru.
Although I'm still not 100% sure about my future career, I know I would like to work with the natives of Peru to help protect their culture and continue their growth through education. My dream schools (Stanford and UCLA) are some of the few schools in the United States that offer Quechua as a language, but I would love to speak to this couple and learn about what they know. I feel confident that I will learn a lot this summer from the homework assignments given at school, but I feel that I could learn so much more from the retirement home; not only from the elderly Peruvian couple, but from the other people there as well. With this in mind, I can't wait for summer to arrive.