Raise Your Voice!

If there were one thing I was not prepared for when I signed up to lead a school safety walkout for March 14th, it was the amount of pushback I received while planning. There were days it felt as if I was standing in a room full of people, all wearing headphones, screaming, "You don’t want to die here either, right?" with little-to-no effect. Many, even my friends, couldn’t understand the point of a walkout. Some students didn’t want to side with the gun-haters. Many didn’t like the phrase, “gun control.”

I live in a very politically divided place. In my small, rural Maine town, you can guess just by looking at a classroom full of kids who owns a gun, whose family makes more than $30,000 a year, who is planning on going to college. There are few secrets when it comes to political leanings, and gun control is a particularly heated issue because of this. I had no idea how hard it would be to be a leader of these students, or how hard it would be to rally people for a cause that seems so obvious.

Most killers you hear about on the news, or you see on the covers of magazines, but not mental illness.

Millions of people are affected by depression, anxiety, substance addiction, and more. And sadly, sometimes mental illness can end in suicide. It is hard to diagnose many mental illnesses, especially in teens. Many things can cause mental health issues, and for young people that are affected by mental illness, schools should be taking a much larger role in educating youth on their mental health and how to take care of it. Mental illness is too big of a problem for people to ignore. 

I started going to school in Richmond in sixth grade, and in my first year there, they changed the grading system to standards-based.

For the first year, the new passing grade was 2.5 out of 4.0, but the next year they changed the passing grade to 3.0. A score under a 3.0 meant you weren’t proficient in that topic, and you could not pass without the teacher’s help. 

When they raised the passing grade, some people had to finish work from the previous year that only had a 2.5 because it wasn’t passing anymore, and that was when I started to dislike the new grading system.

The vision of the ideal college applicant grows in complexity every year.  It’s no longer just about your grades. It’s about your grades, your extracurriculars, and what kind of person you are. Many colleges, especially the most selective ones, have instituted the holistic admission process. 

Holistic admissions means that the college or university looks at the applicant as a whole as opposed to just bits and pieces. Although every admissions counselor will agree that your transcript is the most important part of your application, this is simply just the foot-in-the-door. The cold truth is that everyone has good grades and test scores if you are applying to a selective school. You have to distinguish yourself with your extracurriculars, community service, and most importantly, your character. 

It’s been about two months since the shooting in Parkland. As a student, I’ve been asked how I feel by well-meaning administrators and teachers, family friends, strangers and most often, my friends, as they try to hide how afraid they are now. In the lunchroom, we talk about bulletproof windows, our safety at marches, and lockdown procedure. I tried to find something, anything, to say to comfort my friends.  But I didn’t believe any reassurances myself. I tried to write something for Raise Your Voice. But I was too afraid. I couldn’t process what had happened. Whatever I said felt like it didn’t do justice to the gravity of 17 people, and a generation impacted. 

I had the privilege of being able to avoid thinking about what happened. But that’s exactly what it is, a privilege. Not everyone has it. There are kids who were at Parkland or any one of the other school shootings in our country. There are kids who have to fear gun violence in their communities or from the police, a status disproportionately affected by socioeconomic standing and racial tensions. 

We know how it feels to huddle on the floor and fight against wondering what’s outside. School shootings are real for us, in a way they weren’t for our parents or grandparents when they were in school. This is a shared experience of our generation. My school had an unscheduled lockdown very recently following the shooting. We’ve had drills and mistakes before. This was a false alarm. But it was different. Everyone in that room was completely silent. I can’t forget crouching there in the dark, and knowing this was how it felt. This is how it starts. 

High school: "You failed.”

Going to bed at 1:00 am, waking up at 6:00 a.m. The test sits on our desk, and our minds go blank. Four or more hours making flash cards, looking at our notes, memorizing it all just for our minds to shut off. The bell rings and we look down to only see a couple questions answered. 

The next day we go to class and our teacher sits us down to talk. They’re disappointed: “Why didn’t you study? You failed the test. I thought you were better than this.” 

Over and over again we think of the word "failure," but never did our teacher ask how many hours we studied. They never listen when we say, “I really did study. My mind just goes blank when I look at my test.” They only seem to show interest in the way we learn when the grade is above average. 

Writer Ashley Merryman’s article, "Losing is Good for You," published by The New York Times in 2013, challenged a popular trend. She argues against giving out trophies to children who participate in sports, and questions whether it is a good idea to give everyone on the team a trophy regardless of their accomplishments or athletic ability.

It’s a common practice, and in her article she mentions the American Youth Soccer Organization in Southern California, a group that gave trophies to every player just for being a member of the team. Merryman points out that children respond well when they are praised for their accomplishments, and will try harder; but on the other hand, those who know they will be rewarded regardless of their effort do not learn problem solving skills. 

Merryman adds that those who struggle will not try harder because they know they will be rewarded anyway, and those who do well may feel cheated that they are not getting special recognition. She believes that the long-term effects are harmful because children will grow up thinking that they just have to show up and not put in any effort. Her conclusion is, “Our job is to help kids overcome setbacks, to help them see that progress over time is more important than a particular win or loss and to help them graciously congratulate the child who succeeded when they failed.” 

Maine is a swing state; this means I live in a “swing” city and go to a “swing” school. My classmates come from rural and urban areas, and the sociopolitical views held and expressed range widely on every spectrum. This is a trait I believe necessary for the continuation of human social evolution. Like the necessity of biodiversity and mutations in science, differing opinions, philosophies, and ways of thinking are the driving force of our progression as a society and race.

However, when it comes to expressing our views, the tendencies we have tend to follow two trends: either points of views go unheard as conversations are hindered, or discussions lean more towards arguments with two iron-willed sides. These are both issues that threaten to obstruct any potential for meaningful conversations that are necessary for our growth and seem to create a toxic and divisive atmosphere for youth.

In my desk drawer there are snacks. There are over 250 books on my shelves, and wooden letters on the windowsill that are supposed to say “READ” and “TEACH” but often say “THE CAT,” “KITTEN,” or if someone is feeling really snarky, “CHEAT.”

I coined ‘High Five Friday’ in November after, at the bell one Friday morning, a student came to my desk and asked for “one good one” to take with her before she left. Sometimes their hands and arms are so tangled around books and binders I might get an elbow, a foot, or yes, at times a forehead -- but everyone gets a high five from me -- a hand to guide them through the weekend. 

I can confidently say that, whether you stand with the left, right, both, or neither, we need a change in this country, and we need to not let school shootings and people dying become the norm from here on out.

Though I can see the argument from each side of the dispute, I believe we need firm gun control and much more in-depth mental health and background checks. At the same time, I believe people do have a place to their 2nd Amendment rights, and that just taking guns away completely would abolish part of the idea of what freedom is in America.

Unfortunately in this subject, there is no real right or wrong answer. There’re people who have their own beliefs, and that’s just a part of human nature. Except now, people’s lives are being lost because of faulty systems and loose laws, causing loopholes for someone to get a firearm when they lack the real mental capabilities to properly use it. In my opinion, no one in any country has a need for an AR-15, or any gun that nears having the same semi-automatic to automatic capabilities of one.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out why people care so much about their guns.

I think back to an evening in a rural Pennsylvania college town, our AirBnb scattered with take-out Chinese that tasted like nothing except MSG. My friend’s dad had a fear of silence in the house; the news was always on or he was always talking or both.

When he would wake up at 5 a.m., we’d hear CNN blaring through the thin doors, the same morning announcers’ privilege-driven voices repeating the same two words over again: Parkland Shooting.

There have been enough school shootings in America to understand there is a gun violence issue in this country. We’ve all heard the stories and seen the headlines. School shootings have taken over the media. How many tragedies have to happen before a lesson is learned and changes are made? School is supposed to be a safe and positive learning environment. 

Lately there has been a growing eruption of conversation around gun control. I was having a conversation with my teacher after the Parkland shooting and she asked me “What are some things we can do as a community to prevent school shootings before they happen?” That was when I realized the answer is not something that can be defined by our community alone.

Every school has steps to take in order to be the most positive and safe institution as possible for students to learn and grow. Although a good community is the first step in ending school violence, without proper gun control the problem would still persist. 

I asked a handful of people on the street to answer a quick question: “Can discomfort and failure be used as learning tools?” Generally their answer was yes, and focused heavily on failure; discomfort was merely its side effect. This got me thinking about a few things: Do most people know that failure is a positive thing? If so, why is it still so hard as a society, and as an individual, to accept failure?

Is discomfort giving us a negative outlook on failure? I’m conflicted about this assumption, but I think others are too. Discomfort, being an unpleasant emotion, is hard to handle when it arises. But if we were to fail without it, would we have the incentive to learn from what we did wrong?

Personally, my recovery and growth that stems from failure is because of my desire to not fail like that again. And even though I know that we need to fail, I still don’t want to. I want to avoid those negative emotions. What if we were to embrace discomfort, similar to how we should be embracing failure? If it were to become an expected tool to help identify flaws, would that remedy that initial rejection of failure? Even if it did fix the failure dilemma, how do we embrace discomfort, how are we to be “comfortable” with discomfort?