Pencils and Erasers

  Back in middle school, when I was in 7 th grade, the Boulan Broncos basketball team only had 3 wins. The very next year, we doubled that. Now the pretty obvious reason why that actually happened was because I joined the team (I only had four points per game), but in reality, there was another thing just as equally important that contributed to our team’s wins. The new coach we had. The 7 th grade team coach was a perfect example of what Steven Pinker explained in “Words Don’t Mean What They Mean.” He constantly used vague speech like “this team has to put in more work” or telling me, “Just put in more effort for next year”. On the other hand, my eighth-grade coach, as any suitable coach should, pummeled just about every player on the team at one point. He pointed out every player’s exact flaws and would occasionally pull out the game tape to critique us right then and there. Every time we were down during halftime, the whiteboard in the locker room got absolutely fried. He de...

My father’s name is Bassam, but almost every American calls him Sam. However, unlike the text, The F Word, by Dumas which we read this week, my father never complained about the change or felt that it removed an important aspect of his life. For him, it was just something more simple for Americans to say, something flippant. Although the F Word highlights that someone’s name can carry heavy weight in terms of their personal identity, my father’s experience clearly demonstrates that not everyone views it that way. Some view their name as more practical. Especially when some refugees and immigrants are working incredibly hard just to get by, a name is the absolute last thing anyone could worry about. Now, I’m absolutely not saying that Dumas’s experience is wrong, but I’m aware of the fact that this obviously doesn’t represent all people trying to settle in the US. But this difference highlights something important; sometimes a person’s identity isn’t as fragile as we think. To my dad,...

       From the age of 5, every member of the Meritician tribe was required to enter into The Temple of Quantified Intellect. Some Meriticians chose to leave after a profuse thirteen years of work in the temple, while others elected to stay for an extensive twelve years on top of that. This temple lured innocent kids into a trap. In the beginning, the temple seemed promising, as it offered children a little less than an hour a day to think and act freely, without having to worry about the numerical honor ranking system they would be facing later on.        By the age of 14 when the Merticians arrived in the last stage, which was required by law, of the Temple of Quantified Intellect, they would all notice that the Temple seemed a bit odd. Instead of drawings on the wall, there would turn out to be metallic storage containers, but they would never have time to use them as there was only 6 minutes of time to roam freely before the mechanical calls...