gdbye middle, hello high (YB)

summary 

    This year went by pretty fast to be honest. But that doesn't mean it was a difficult one. From learning flexibility to last minute schedules, this year was a handful. Leadership started getting involved in school activities right away. A couple weeks before school, we did registration. We came a couple days a week. When school started, we just got back into distance learning. Online is already hard to get used to so when we got back into it, it was kinda tricky. Which meant headaches and migraines :(. But I'm flexible :). I also visited San Diego for a month. It was a pretty fun experience to learn in a different state lmao. Then we got into fall break. For me, fall break had to be my favorite part of the year. I was pretty anti-social, so when I went with friends on Halloween, I was a skeptical. But I ended up having an amazing time and we did pretty crazy but fun things together. Something inside me clicked that night though. Why spend your teen years being shy and independent? Let yourself enjoy other people's company, make bonds with friends, and just overall enjoy your young years. As fall passed and winter came, we started working on our hero projects. We started with picking our leaders. I had two leaders, one from Hawaii, and one not from Hawaii. My big two were Queen Emma and Agatha Christie. For winter break, I visited family in Arizona. It was a pretty crazy trip, partly because my family can be crazy sometimes and also because of the time change. I was getting up at 11am and ending school at 6pm. Our next assignment was to pick a hero. We also had to make a video and google slides. My hero was my dad. Overall, I learned a lot about my dads heritage, home life, and his life as a teenager. I was kinda nervous to present, but in the end I felt a lot of pride towards my project. I also finally got into clubs. My club was a book club and we read A Walk to Remember. Honestly, it wasn't the most incredible book club. One of the girls only wanted to read books for 13 and younger and so we were stuck with that book. But we still tried to make the most out of it. And finally, after a fun spring break, we had our last quarter. We started prepping for graduation. We first designed a sketch of what we want graduation to look like. Then we started adding decorations. We made 3 ala moana grass looking things and used letter balloons to make words. We also were assigned shifts. We go Tuesday through Friday on the last week and help students have a fun and memorable graduation. And yup that pretty much sums up the quarter.

This year had so many ups and downs, I'll just put it in bullet marks :).

Highlights:

• Being 8th grade treasurer
• Getting back into Leadership events
• Halloween
• New friends
• Reading :)
• Visiting new states
• Being a 14 year old :)
• Reading the book (it was ok)
• Going back in person
• Getting to work on graduation

Lowlights:

• Being online
• Having headaches and migraines
• Being cut off from people during quarantine
• I-ready

    lesson learned

    My lesson learned. There were many lessons I've learned this past year but one stood out to me the most. You are not a teenager forever, so make the most out of it. Hang out with friends, travel places, meet new people. Don't spend your teen years sulking in your room and being anti-social. Really though, what's the worst that could happen? People don't want to hang out with you? Their loss. Find people you can connect with and genuinely enjoy being around.

    One thing I would do differently would probably be choosing a different hero. My dad is an amazing hero, but it would seem fun and creative to have a hero I could research about thats in my family that I don't know that well. That way I could learn more about their life and how they were raised.

I-ready(we had to do soo much of it this year)

Me, Sadie, and Tiera at the grad :)

These were the Ala Moana grass things