CAS Blogs

Although it is a pandemic, my school has recently started up the volleyball team for the season. We've had two games and both were, well let's just say we had lots of room for improvement. As a setter, I have to be loud, aggressive and always get the second ball. I usually do one out of those three things. I try to be loud but I am just not naturally a shouter so, I need to really open up my lungs and yell "mine!" when the ball comes. As for aggressive, that means I need to not be afraid to shove people out of the way to get to the ball. Although I do martial arts, I am not generally a shover and I don't like hurting people, ironic yes, but instead of thinking of being aggressive, I like to think that I need to be more assertive and show my team that I will always get second ball and they need to move out of the way to let me. Some things I would consider my strengths is that I always try to help the new kids to the team. There are two new kids this year and they ...

 I recently made a deal with my father that if I learned the basics to use Adobe Photoshop then I could get a new computer that could use Adobe. This is very good motivation for a teenager with a terrible Chromebook that is falling apart. I watched a few videos and learned some basics of blending pictures or adding things to pictures. It looked super fun and interesting. When I finally learned enough, I put together a list of Macbooks for sale from craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Altogether that wasn't too challenging. However the next part was scary stressful for me. My parents had invested in me. They bought a fancy pretty much new computer for me and they were gonna pay a monthly subscription for me to use Adobe and create actual pictures and images and learn how to use it for business purposes. That is some scary stuff. Although it is the very beginning of this challenge , I have already picked up some skills along the way. I have learned to be more independent. I am alrea...

 For GHCF, I signed up for doing a book drive. Now I could easily get over 50 books within my own house but I wanted to get as many as possible so I asked my friends and cousins and grandparents. Got a good amount of books but the big fish to fry was the school. I love helping and I love books but I hate attention. I was trying to think through if I should send a high school email blast about a book drive I am hosting and set out a box in the front desk for donations. Although reading and literacy is a very important issue to me, I was still very scared to send out an email because then it means I will have attention on me. However the day before I would either send or not send the email I had jiu jitsu. And the coach said that this weeks homework is to do someone we are afraid of. We had to overcome a fear. Whether it was something big or small we had to do it at least once before the next class. Which is two days. Since I didn't feel like going to find a spider to hold, I decided...

I have been recently been elected as the president of GHCF which is a youth leadership group that gives out grants to non-profit organizations within the global/local issue we choose for that semester. This semester we chose human trafficking, usually we would plan activities and visits with three organizations and go do some work with them, however due to the pandemic that is not possible. We thought of new ideas for activities to do online. For the little kids we had to think of another issue alongside human trafficking to do work with because we thought human trafficking was too scary for them. We chose literature and homelessness. We could either choose to make snacks for the homeless or we could have a book drive to accumulate +50 books. I decided to do books because I am in love with books and it makes me sad that not everyone has the chance to experience the wonderful creation that is books. Getting a lot of books was fairly easy because I have so many books that I would be happ...