No Excuses

Give a damn and figure it out

     Give a damn and figure it out, good words to live by. Mr Fitzsimmons my English teacher at Fenn said "Give a damn and figure it out". I've heard this from the beginning of the year and in almost every single class, "Give a damn and figure it out". I remember the first day of class when he gave the class our first assignment. He said something along the lines of, if you don't know how to do it then give a damn and figure it out because you'll probably find a way to work around it. The next class everyone came in having not checked the blog for the homework because we "forgot". We tried to say things like, "it wasn't on the calendar", or "it wasn't posted", because it was what we were used to. But we knew we had homework, we had heard him say it in class. But all of us just wanted to make an excuse to not do our homework. The class after that we started to understand the meaning of this ideology more and more. It was more then just a saying, it's a life style. To try and to rely on yourself to get stuff done. If you hand in something incomplete or not well written, its no ones fault but you own. In this class I've learned and I've failed. I've made mistakes and I've fixed them. This saying has made me a better student and worker. Its helped to not blow things off when I should be working on them. Its taught me the lesson that when you make mistakes they are your mistakes and no one else's. Mr Fitzsimmons has made me not only exponentially better at writing but he has made me a better person too. Fitz's English was more than a class; it was a experience, a life lesson.

    Failure To Success

The only way out is through

Failure can turn anyone into a determined machine. In the short story Through The Tunnel, a young boy who is eleven years of age is swimming in a rocky area and meets some older boys. These older boys know of a tunnel under the water and when they are leaving they use this tunnel " Then one, and then another of the boys came up on the far side of the barrier of rock, and he understood that they had swum through some gap or hole in it" . It took these boys about two- three minutes to get out on the other side. When this boy was unable to do it he felt disappointed in himself and he felt like a failure. So he begged his mom to get him goggles so he could see under water, he begged and begged until he got them. "But now, now, now! He must have them this minute". After he got them he dove under water until he found this cave. Once he found the cave he realized that he had to hold his breath for a long time. So he trained for next couple of days by just repetitively going under water and holding his breath for as long as he could to the point where his nose was bleeding profusely and his head was throbbing. "That night, his nose bled badly.". But eventually he's able to swim under the tunnel successfully.

He must go on into the blackness ahead, or he would drown. His head was swelling, his lungs cracking. A hundred and fifteen, a hundred and fifteen pounded through his head, and he feebly clutched at rocks in the dark, pulling himself forward.

He was determined to prove himself to those boys. He was determined to show himself that he could swim under the tunnel. He wanted to show himself that he wasn't afraid on the tunnel. Failure led this boy to his success.

https://youtu.be/vrGZJTJd_0A

All Quiet Reflection

By Parker Nagtegaal

Today I finished All Quiet On The Western Front, it was the most depressing book I have ever read. The author captured the pain, suffering, and utter madness that occurs in war. Paul suffers many losses in the final chapter. He loses not only friends but his belief in life. He loses everyone who he has developed a relationship with. But the biggest lose of all was Katzinski, Kat was his best friend through out the war, Kat had taken Paul in and saved his life. When Kat was shot in the shin Paul took him on his shoulders and ran for the hospital. When he finally got to to the hospital he realized that even though he had talked to him only moments before that he had been hit by shrapnel on their way back from the front. Kat was lost to the war. Paul was finally broken by this, he had nothing left. His family doesn't understand him; his old friends don't understand him; his town doesn't understand him, the only people who truly understood the horrors war where his comrades, and none of them had survived. He now had nothing. When he got shot it may not have said but I think that he purposefully stood up and took the bullet because he had realized that the Germans were losing and he had nothing to fight for. This made me sad for the Paul. Over all I'm very happy I read this book, it may have been hard and painful to get through but in the end I feel as though it was an extremely meaningful experience. I will ever forget reading this educational, sad, and well written book. The writing that I have done will help this book stay with me forever, and who knows maybe at some point I'll even reread it.

Horrors Of War

by Parker

The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque many of the soldiers face death on the front and others see the conditions of prisoners. "On a foggy morning another one of the Russian is buried;almost every day one of them die" no matter what form it takes all the soldiers experience the horrors of war one way or another. Most soldiers have participated in the endless cycle that is kill, die, kill, die.

In chapter eight Paul is heading back to the front very soon. But at the moment he is still at the training camp. They keep Russian prisoners there. The Russians are malnourished and their moral is low. " In the darkness one sees their forms move likes sick storks" Paul looks at them and starts to think.
"A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is sign by some persons whom none of us know"

This fact that he was being controlled scared him; The fact that he was being turned against soldiers not so different from him scared him; The fact that he couldn't do much about it scared him. All these facts horrified him because they were the truths of war.