January First is a memoir of Michael Schofield about his experiences with his schizophrenic daughter, January. Calling January by her legal name is a bad idea. If January is referred to as anything other than Janni, she will scream and hit. Janni gets violent very often, mostly towards her baby brother, Bodhi, and her dog, Honey. Janni’s “friends” are the ones who cause these violent outbursts. If Bodhi or Honey do anything to annoy Janni, her (hallucinatory) pet rats will “nibble at her brain” until she hits them. All seven of her rats (1 named after each day of the week) and many more friends live in Calilini, her hallucination wonderland. All of these symptoms are what causes her to be in and out of mental hospitals at only five years of age. Michael constantly finds trouble with the doctors at these mental hospitals. They rarely return his calls and are very hesitant to give Janni a diagnosis. Michael Schofield’s perspective as the father of Janni is a fascinating one to look into. Michael shows lots of disdain for mental hospitals, as he was in one briefly as a child. This book showed me insight into psychiatric care in America. The places described in the book are not only sad but riddled with rules that keep Janni from getting the care she needs. The doctors ignore Michael’s calls. When Michael finally meets with a doctor, they say more time is needed to observe her before giving a diagnosis. The doctors try drugs that have been shown to have negligible effects on Janni. The only place that helps Janni is UCLA, which she only gets into through a loophole in the system. The book showed me all the systems that do nothing but make everything slower and hurt people. There is a trend on TikTok known as “schitzo-posting,” People will upload images depicting symptoms of schizophrenia, but in a meme format. This results in a form of situational irony. You expect a relatable message when you see the meme format, but reading it will show you that the message is not relatable at all. Considering the vast number of these posts, I doubt any of the posters are actually schizophrenic. While I can appreciate the irony, I can’t say I find these funny schitzo-posts funny anymore. After reading January First, I see all the troubles these people go through their entire lives. They put strain not only on themselves, but everyone around them. They lash out, scream, and live in constant fear. But at the end of the day, no one will ever understand. No one else sees or hears what they do. Even if Janni finds someone else like her, they won’t have the same hallucinations. They have no one to relate to. I like to believe that I am a more empathetic person than before I read this book. January First has shown me issues that I can’t imagine having myself. This book has helped me realize that I can’t fix a person, but I can help. When somebody feels like they’re losing their grip, the best thing to do is stick with them and try to be their anchor. By Oliver Brummel
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The book is about two best friends, Justyce and Manny. Both of them are black, and they get confronted by the problems many black people have to deal with. At the beginning of the book, Justyce gets arrested by a police officer because he tries to help a drunk girl, but the officer thinks that he tried to kidnap the girl. After this, Justyce has to think a lot about racism. This gets even worse when his best friend Manny gets shot by a police officer just because they are listening to loud music. Something I didn’t expect was that the book caused me to think a lot about hidden racism. People who are confronted with racism often interpret racism differently from people that don't have to deal with it. It also let me think about racism in the form of normalized behavior that most of the people don't even recognize because they see it as a normal thing. This is very dangerous because when you are used to this ground level of racism that still exists in our society, you don't reorganize more extreme racism. This is also shown in the book in which one moment a person just makes a “harmless” racist joke but in the next moment Manny gets shot just because he is black. This example is very extreme because most people would never treat a black person differently from a white person. But “racism” is not just the discrimination against people with different skin color, it’s rather the discrimination against any person because they are different. This still happens a lot, especially in schools, where a lot of kids get bullied just because they are slightly different from the average. Everyone should think about how they deal with other people, and how these people think about that. This is what the book makes you do, at least in my case. The book changed my way of thinking about some things. I have a couple of black friends, and they are very open-minded. When they know that you don’t have a real problem with them, they also don't have a problem with dark humor. Sometimes they also make jokes about their skin color by themselves. Before I read the book, I thought this was great because it shows that no one has a problem with each other. But after reading the book, I see a good and bad side about it. I still think it shows that everyone accepts each other, in this friend group, as they are. But I also think that we should take the problem of racism more seriously, even when we don't have any problems with it in this friend group. A lot of other black people don't have the luck to have an environment that is so open-minded. By Leander Buettner Do you think you are smart enough to go to Harvard? What if you never had formal education? Everyone who isn’t lying to themselves would say no. But the book Educated would prove you wrong. Educated follows the true story of Tara Westover, a girl who did that very thing. Tara Westover was born the youngest of seven children in a house in Idaho surrounded by a serene mountain and a junkyard. Tara’s family were extremely strict Mormons, who were seen as crazy by almost everyone in the nearest town, which was predominantly Mormon. Tara’s father was the source of their ways; he believed they were one of the few righteous Mormon families following the correct life of God’s teaching, and everyone else was evil gentiles. He believed the government was the source of most evil and indoctrination, which among many, meant avoiding hospitals no matter the cost, attempting to have his children undocumented, and not placing his children in school. Tara endured extreme physical and mental abuse by her parents and siblings, most notably by her brother Shawn. Educated shows how slowly Tara starts to question the highly damaging lies her father fed her that she kept as truth for her entire life. Eventually, she decides to go against her father’s will and attend college. This was a hard task as she had never been to public school and her mother had failed at homeschooling her. After a lot of studying, however, she got a good enough score on the ACT to attend BYU. There she slowly learned how little she understood of the world. She was miles behind her peers in knowledge but had an extreme work ethic and natural smarts, and she eventually earned a scholarship to Cambridge University in London, then went on to get a Ph.D. at Harvard. Through her academic journey, she learned more about the world and became fluently aware of the abuse she faced in her childhood. Educated ends with Tara walking through the struggles of choosing to remove her family from her life, and the immense unexpected challenges she faces through the process. Educated is jammed packed with things I could write pages about. It makes it hard to write about how the book made me think as a whole without further focusing on one specific idea. One of these parts was the way it talks about Tara’s father’s mental health. When you think of someone with a mental illness, you immediately think of the effects it has on their life. But rarely is the first thought on how profusely it affects the lives of the people close to the person with a mental illness. It is clear that Tara’s father has some sort of mental illness. Tara spoke to many professionals and concluded that it could be bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, but he never took any tests so he was never diagnosed. Tara and her family's lives were completely different because of Tara's father. Tara wrestles with the idea of hating her dad. She hated the way he raised her and the struggles he caused her later in life. But since she believes her dad has a mental illness, does she hate her dad, or the illness? She tries to see her dad empathetically and instead of hating him for what he did, pity him for the delusion he is in. In the end, she decided to remove her dad from his life, as he was significantly detrimental to her mental well-being. This really made me think about balancing the sacrifice of some of our own well-being to help others, while also prioritizing your own mental well-being. Educated has made me realize how significantly someone’s background determines their personality. Before Tara went to college, most of everything she knew came from her father. Her thoughts and actions were completely different before she went to college than after. In the book, she doesn’t describe this change as normal growth, but as her actually changing into a different person. This book has significantly changed how I look at people and how they act. It doesn’t make me judge them for their background and make assumptions about what they are like based on it, instead, I find myself imagining what it is like to be in their situation. This greatly helps me understand why they do what they do. For example, one of my closest friends is the oldest sibling, with one middle school sister and two elementary brothers. I am the youngest sibling with an older brother in college. This isn’t a very big difference, but I can notice its effects on our personalities. My friend is the first child of his parents to go to high school, so everything seems a lot more stressful for them as it is all new. Meanwhile, my parents have already gone through the process of having a kid in high school, so they know what they are doing. Freshmen year was a lot harder for him than for me because he went in not knowing any of the upperclassmen, while a lot of the juniors and seniors knew me since a lot of them were friends with my brother and had been coming to my house every week for years. There are plenty of other examples of how this simple difference actually affects our lives and personality a lot. Recognizing this helps me to be a better friend as I am able to better understand why he may do some things differently, so I’m not quick to tell him that he’s wrong and I’m right. Educated helped me build empathy by showing how someone’s decisions may seem wrong to me, but in reality, their actions are just a byproduct of their circumstances. By Liam Chamberlain In this stirring book, I got to know Kimberly, who is a Chinese immigrant who moved with her mom to New York. I followed her through many years and hardships. The book opens with the apartment that her aunt helped them get, which is in terrible condition. They struggle with towering poverty, and adjusting to American life. Kimberly's mom works long days at a clothing factory that follows little to no safety protocols, and after school, Kimberly is expected to help out until they have fulfilled their quotas for the day. You see what it’s like for a middle school girl to try and integrate into a school while trying to overcome a language barrier. It's extremely gratifying to see Kimberly slowly but surely get the recognition she deserves for her immense amount of smarts and kindness. From love, to high school parties, to financial troubles, Girl in Translation is a wonderful story with a very honest feel to it. I was surprised at how much of a (excuse me) bitch the aunt was in this story. She was supposed to be helping her family thrive, but instead continually (and intentionally) kept them from improving. She kept them in a terrible, low paying factory job and a roach infested apartment that was going to get knocked down any day. She was constantly trying to make sure that Kimberly and her mom never did any better than her. When Kimberly ended up doing better than her son in school and getting full scholarships to a private school and Yale, she got so mad. The aunt then tried to threaten taking away their apartment and manipulating them in other ways. She never thought of anyone but herself, and relied on the undeserved authority she had over Kimberly and her mom to keep them beneath her. I was also frustrated about how unsupportive some of Kimberly’s teachers were towards her because of the language barrier. This changed my thinking about how I thought everyone would understand the difficulties of immigrating to America. I know very few immigrants, and so learning a bit more about the way people can get trapped in poverty, or factory jobs, was very eye-opening. I learned how little I know about how the immigration process works, and I still know very little. I don’t feel like one book is enough for me to say that I’m “changed” or “more empathetic”. I wish it was that easy, but I feel like I need to learn the stories of other people and what their experiences are today. I find myself more curious about child labor in factories, and what can be done to ensure that everyone is paid properly. It’s very easy for me to write the experiences in the book off as just letters on a page, but things like that happen every day. I hate that the people who have such excess live in such close proximity to people who heat their houses with their oven and cover windows with trash bags. Maybe I will be compelled to do something about this, or maybe I will forget about it amongst my comfort, as so many of us do. I am now realizing this book has made me more cynical. Maybe that’s for the best. By Andie Gegax Miracles and new possibilities really do happen, as long as the action is as strong as the want. “Iron Heart” follows very hard challenges, and very emotional successes of a walking miracle, Brian Boyle. At the age of 18, Brian was experiencing the whole high school dream. He was a very successful athlete, especially in swimming, and he had solid teammates and friends. Little did he know, his whole future could be changed in one instant. Brian was on his way home from swim practice, when his Camaro was plowed into by a dump truck. Brian was airlifted and rushed to a shock trauma hospital. He lost 60% of his blood, his heart had moved across his chest, and his organs and pelvis were pulverized. He was then put into a medically induced coma. “Iron Heart” follows his journey through recovery with many triumphs, along with various setbacks. Throughout the book, the reader gets an insight into the mind of someone in critical condition with a strong desire to fight, along with learning what a good support system looks like and how to take action for important goals. This book did a superb job of putting me in the author's shoes. Although it is nearly impossible to understand how a person in such a critical condition could be feeling, the author Brian Boyle uses so many descriptive words that brought me closer to understanding. I also really appreciated the internal thoughts. Obviously, when Brian was in a coma, he couldn’t speak, but he did a great job of bringing me into his thoughts and expressing how he felt trapped. I was really surprised with how much of this experience Brian remembered. I would think that because this was such a traumatic experience, some of the details would’ve gotten lost, but I felt that there were no descriptions lacking. This book really challenged me to be honest with myself. I realized that this story is not entirely impossible for me or any one of my classmates to experience, which was a hard idea for me to wrap my head around. As I look back on this book, my eyes and heart have been opened. When my uncle was young, he had an accident and was put in a medically induced coma. At the age I was when I learned about the event, it was almost impossible for me to imagine what him or any of his family members were feeling. After reading this book, I have a new perspective and empathy toward that situation. I am also more aware that in one instant, my whole life could change. I used to have the attitude, “that will never happen to me”, but after reading “Iron Heart”, I realize that I can’t take any moments for granted. Along with feeling empathy for challenges, this book changed my attitude on goals and success. Brian could have easily given up at any moment, but he had goals in life, and he quite literally fought himself back to life, so he could experience those moments. When reading about those successes he had to fight for, I was overcome with new inspirations. Reading this book did show me miracles and possibilities really do happen, I just have to fight for every one. By Leah Holland Addiction at its finest is an evil that is so hard to overcome that once you have recovered, there’s around an eighty-five percent chance that you will relapse again. In the book “Heroine” written by Mindy McGinnis, the main character Mickey Catalan is an above-average softball player. Although she always seems stuck in the shadows of her best friend and star pitcher, Carolina, Mickey Catalan has a bright future ahead. Mickey and Carolina have been best friends since they were kids. They’ve built their connection around softball, Carolina pitching and Mickey catching. On their way home, Mickey is driving when they lose control and crash. Carolina comes out of the crash with a broken arm and Mickey sustains more serious injuries. In order to recover in time for her senior softball season, Mickey pushes herself as hard as she can. With the help of her meds, she can play by the time their season starts. Although the meds helped her recover, she now starts to realize that she’s becoming addicted. As the drugs start to overtake her life, she meets new people and finds herself in new places. This book was difficult to read because the author takes you through the whole process of addiction. I found myself wanting to help the characters throughout different situations. This book challenges the way I think because I always thought of drug users as lazy or depressed. The author creates a very intense mood towards the end of the book but still writes in an unbothered tone. The author of this book made addiction seem human and I now can understand the thoughts behind the actions of addicts. I was surprised at how much I had in common with Mickey but also how much I despised some of the decisions she made. I felt very uncomfortable at a lot of different parts in this book but I think I’m a lot more sympathetic to people living in similar situations as Mickey. “Heroine” is an emotional rollercoaster. My feelings towards the book and characters changed from angry, sad, happy, and regretful. Watching Mickey throw away her future and feeling out of place in her own body was something that I can definitely relate to. I also really relate to Mickey when it comes to the pressures around sports, school, and always being pushed to do your best. Mickey’s escape from life was always softball, but after the crash, she started to fall out of love with softball. The drugs blinded her from the things she loved and she began to have a much different perspective on life. By Sara Johanningmeier January First is a memoir of Michael Schofield about his experiences with his schizophrenic daughter, January. Calling January by her legal name is a bad idea. If January is referred to as anything other than Janni, she will scream and hit. Janni gets violent very often, mostly towards her baby brother, Bodhi, and her dog, Honey. Janni’s “friends” are the ones who cause these violent outbursts. If Bodhi or Honey do anything to annoy Janni, her (hallucinatory) pet rats will “nibble at her brain” until she hits them. All seven of her rats (1 named after each day of the week) and many more friends live in Calilini, her hallucination wonderland. All of these symptoms are what causes her to be in and out of mental hospitals at only five years of age. Michael constantly finds trouble with the doctors at these mental hospitals. They rarely return his calls and are very hesitant to give Janni a diagnosis. Michael Schofield’s perspective as the father of Janni is a fascinating one to look into. Michael shows lots of disdain for mental hospitals, as he was in one briefly as a child. This book showed me insight into psychiatric care in America. The places described in the book are not only sad but riddled with rules that keep Janni from getting the care she needs. The doctors ignore Michael’s calls. When Michael finally meets with a doctor, they say more time is needed to observe her before giving a diagnosis. The doctors try drugs that have been shown to have negligible effects on Janni. The only place that helps Janni is UCLA, which she only gets into through a loophole in the system. The book showed me all the systems that do nothing but make everything slower and hurt people. There is a trend on TikTok known as “schitzo-posting,” People will upload images depicting symptoms of schizophrenia, but in a meme format. This results in a form of situational irony. You expect a relatable message when you see the meme format, but reading it will show you that the message is not relatable at all. Considering the vast number of these posts, I doubt any of the posters are actually schizophrenic. While I can appreciate the irony, I can’t say I find these funny schitzo-posts funny anymore. After reading January First, I see all the troubles these people go through their entire lives. They put strain not only on themselves, but everyone around them. They lash out, scream, and live in constant fear. But at the end of the day, no one will ever understand. No one else sees or hears what they do. Even if Janni finds someone else like her, they won’t have the same hallucinations. They have no one to relate to. I like to believe that I am a more empathetic person than before I read this book. January First has shown me issues that I can’t imagine having myself. This book has helped me realize that I can’t fix a person, but I can help. When somebody feels like they’re losing their grip, the best thing to do is stick with them and try to be their anchor. By Oliver Brummel If someone had grown up an only child and then found out suddenly they had a sibling they had never met, their life would be completely changed. For Yahaira and Camino, their lives had already been turned around by their Papi’s sudden death. Their Papi had been the center of both their lives, but still hardly present in either one. Each with different mothers and in different countries (the United States and the Dominican Republic), the two girls had no way of knowing about their father’s split life - until Yahaira finds a marriage certificate that did not have her own mother’s name on it. Then, several months later, their father dies in a plane crash flying between the two countries. In the aftermath of his death, both families reeling, the sisters discover each other first online and then in person. Yahaira flies solo to DR for their father’s ceremony. While navigating the rules of sisterhood, each girl must measure what their fathers presence in their life really meant to them and how they can reconnect with themselves through their new other half. Clap When You Land explores the meaning of family through a complicated and poignant story that also addresses the topic of sexual assault and, on the sidelines, unplanned pregnancy and queerness. For me, this was a really good read because I had not been expecting that and I wouldn’t have read this book were it not for this assignment. As Acevedo experiments with point of view, the reader learns from both of the girls’ perspectives. She leads up to when their paths finally cross and you see how their surroundings set them apart from one another. It makes me curious to know how similar they would be if they both grew up either in the U.S. or in DR. This book definitely taught me the importance of those people in your life who you might not see on a daily basis, but are still just as important as the ones you do. The fact that it’s written in verse makes it easier for me to connect with the characters, because the author is not afraid to say the things that are often deemed bitter and uncomfortable in normal conversation. I relate to some of the content easier because of this. I think I am more empathetic after reading this book because we, living in rural Iowa, are hardly ever exposed to what life is like in poor countries and what life was really like for Camino. By Elsa J. He didn’t do it, yet the whole world is against him, rooting for him to go to juvie. Amal Shahid was set up by society. His entire world is turned upside down when he is convicted of putting a white boy, Jeremy, into a coma. He was there, but he didn’t throw the last blows that put Jeremy in a coma. He is blamed for someone else's mistakes. He is the perfect scapegoat; he’s not overly wealthy, he has a temper, and he is a Muslim African American. His teachers betray him by telling the court he was different, he was bad, he was angry. Actually, he was just misunderstood. He skipped art school to go to museums, and he talked back because he was curious. Yet, the world has already decided and has written his story. He is a troubled black boy and deserves to go to a juvenile detention camp, they said. In juvie, he has a hard time finding hope after being a victim of the racist justice system. He finds hope and friends through poems, art, and letters. Even when he felt alone in the world, his grandma, uncle, and friends were rooting for him to keep going and not give up hope. After a while, he sets into his new routine of being in juvie, and then he learns that Jeremy woke up from his coma. This book struck a chord with me, and it showed me the racial inequalities in the justice system. I was surprised that Amal was put in juvie even though he didn’t give Jeremy the final blow that ultimately put Jeremy in a coma. In the book, it mentioned how, for him, the judicial system saw him as guilty until proven innocent and not the other way around. I thought the writer’s voice was exquisite, and it was a beautifully written book. I have fallen in love with verse books, and this one helped further my love. Though I sometimes found the metaphors to be hard to understand, I think it gave room for interpretation and thought. I like a book that makes you think, and I believe that verse books make you dive deeper into the real meaning of a story. In this book, the author doesn’t flat out tell you what happened. Instead, they brush around the point and use figurative language to hint at the evens. You, as the reader, have to connect the dots. I believe this book has changed me. Even though I would say I have read many books that talk about inequalities in the world, I think it reinforced my thinking of how racial inequality is everywhere. The book strengthened the idea that I have the upper hand in society due to my skin tone. It’s heartbreaking to think about all the people who have been put in jail even though they didn’t do it, and how their skin color played a role in their loss of years in the real world. Amal talked about how he was set up to fail by society. He was supposed to be troubled, the scapegoat, and a thug because he was of African descent and was Muslim. This book made me think about how many people’s lives have been affected due to racism, specifically judicial racism. By Annika K. When you’re different from everyone around you, it’s easy to believe that you’ll always be alone and never fit in. That’s how Lilliana (Lilli) Cruz felt when she first transferred schools. Lilliana is a Latina teenager who transfers from a mixed race school in the middle of Boston to a predominantly white school an hour away in some suburb. We get to see the world through Lilliana’s eyes in the book “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From” by Jennifer De Leon. At the beginning of the new school year, Lilli is greeted with the shock of going to a new school, and leaving her best friend and neighbor, Jade, behind. Lilli was accepted into the METCO program, which allows students of color to attend nice schools with resources with only one requirement: must be a student of color. With no other choice, she begins to navigate a new life, where all the regular students ignore her and the other METCO kids seem to hate her. Things don’t magically get better for Lilli when she arrives home each day, either. With her family on a tight budget, now more than ever with her dad out of the picture (for now), life is tough. Things somehow manage to get worse for poor Lilli, when someone makes a racist meme on the real reason her dad isn’t around and may or may not know her family secret. Is there anything Lilli and the METCO kids can do? Can she really help undo the racism in her school? It turns out, she can. At first, I struggled a bit to find a book that fit the reading without walls guidelines, as I am part of a minority. I did find this book, though, and thought it would work, but to be real honest I didn’t think I was going to like it much. However, I did enjoy reading the book, especially from the first person perspective, it allowed me to connect with a person in a different situation (even if they may be fictional). Lilli’s story was heartbreaking at parts and showed the raw reality of inner-city life, and it made me realize just how different our cultures are, and yet how similarly we think and feel as humans. It was almost comical and just as painful to see how the other students in Lilli’s world let simple things like color obstruct from daily life and relationships, and to know that these things are happening in our world. Reading Lilli’s story opened up my eyes as to how sheltered and oblivious people can be to others when they are privileged. As much as no one wants to admit it, race still has a significance when a group is not diverse. The regular students didn’t react well to the race presentation because they couldn’t understand the problem as they had never experienced it first hand. The thought of this emphasizes my belief that education is the best way to deal with hatred. People fear what they don’t understand, and that fear turns into anger that’s taken out on those they don’t understand. Lilli brought this full circle when she created the “wall” to help the other students connect and understand each other's struggles. The first perspective of the book allowed me to see the raw emotions shown in the characters through the story, making it more relatable for me as a reader. By Amelia P. |
AuthorSTenth grade students at Decorah High School share how they're reading outside of their own experiences and how it has changed them. Categories
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