The Audition

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The Audition

 

                Last week, we had choir auditions to determine what groups we will be placed in next year.  I have never even done choir before this year, and I started slightly before Christmas, when the choir director, who also happened to be my AP Music Theory teacher, convinced me that I should do it.  I said sure, I’ll try it, and he was very pleased with himself.  Anyway, I was forced to participate in these choir auditions if I wanted to have the option of doing choir again next year. 

                The auditions consisted of a choice between either America the Beautiful or My Country Tis of Thee, and then some other pop song of your choice, until they cut you off.  It was to all take place on Tuesday starting at 3:00 and continuing until about 7:00 or 8:00, or until everyone had finished auditioning.  I will have you know that nothing in the world terrifies me more than singing alone in front of people. Maybe dancing; I don’t know.  Therefore, I was extremely dreading this choir audition.  It also didn’t help that we had a choice when we auditioned, in that we could go in at any time, and all we had to do was write our name down immediately beforehand.  Right after school, I went down there, and there were heaps of people, so I decided I would come back later, and go home first.  I came back around 7:00, and fretted around for an hour before the door lady practically dragged me in.  She had been repeatedly telling the directors for the past thirty or so minutes that I had been waiting outside for four hours, too afraid to go in.  For my first song, I did My Country Tis of Thee, just like mostly everyone else, and then for my second song, I suddenly decided to sing Smoke on the Water.  However, after two or three lines of the song, I forgot what came next, and awkwardly stopped, at which point the main choir director said, “Alright, you’re done!”  Afterwards, everyone asked me how I did, and I basically told everyone that I had been so freaked out that I didn’t even know if I was good or not. 

                Afterwards, I asked myself why singing alone was so frightening for me.  I finally determined that the difference between singing and playing horn is that on horn, I have had private training for years, I know how I’m supposed to sound, and I know that I’m good.  I have developed a great deal of confidence through several high pressure solo situations, in front of professionals who know exactly everything that I’m doing right or wrong.  The difference with singing is that I lack this confidence.  I have never had a private lesson in my life, I’ve never had to perform before, I don’t know how it’s supposed to sound when I sing, and I know that compared to everyone else, I have almost no preparation.  At least, that’s my best explanation.



We're Number One

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We're Number One!!

 

                Apparently, according to the U.S. News and World Report, Kennedy is ranked the number one high school in Iowa for the first time ever.  And, Washington, who has historically been ranked number one for as long as I remember, isn’t even in the top ten.  Something about this seems either rigged, biased, or just a strange way of evaluating the quality of schools.  One of the major ways this report ranks schools is by their participation percentages in AP exams for seniors.  Since I learned this, it makes much more sense to me why Kennedy’s administration pushes the AP classes so hard.  They want their school to look superior to all the rest.

 

                Also factored into the score is percentage of students who take AP exams that pass (get a score of 3 or higher).  From my personal experience, this is a miserable score, and should under no circumstances earn any college credit at any school.  Even a 4 isn’t too hot, and in my opinion, students shouldn’t even have a chance to receive college credit from AP exams unless they score a 5 on the exam.  On most exams, a score of a 3 correlates to about a 40% on the exam.  Many people could walk in, never being trained in the area the exam is testing, and get that score just from using some common sense mixed with intelligent guessing.  In one of my AP courses during my sophomore, I had a pretty sub-par teacher, and wasn’t yet mature enough to learn all of the material on my own.  As a result, I was embarrassingly unprepared for the exam, but I was surprised to see that I scored a 3.  It’s just not that difficult.

                In conclusion, although I am very happy for my school to be ranked number one in the state, I don’t think the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings are totally justified.  In my opinion, Washington is a very slightly better school than Kennedy, and not even including them in the top ten really makes me question this report.  However, if you asked my opinion on a better way to rank schools, I wouldn’t really be able to tell you one.  It’s just a hard thing to measure, and there are so many different factors that should be taken into consideration.  In addition, how to properly weight these different factors makes the whole thing even more complicated.  Ranking schools just isn’t an exact science, and isn’t really as important as it is made out to be in the first place.



Poem "The Game"

The Game by Michael Kegel

My competitive spirit misses no opportunity
Nothing hurts more than defeat
I must always win, even on the academic stage
For I know there’s no one I can’t beat.

I stay up till one, sleep I must fight
I struggle up the stairs; I need to rest
A scream of terror awakes me in the night
Then reads, “4 AM. No wonder I’m the best.”

I would rather be starving in Africa
To lie down and die is my only wish
I begin to see and hear things that aren’t really there
My head silently roars at me in anguish.

Surviving on naps, the days start to run together
But look at my grades, they couldn’t be better!
I’m rising to Heaven as the weekend arrives
Then I realize, it’s better to be alive

Being the best becomes a kind of game
Nothing else makes me feel the same
Think what you want, call me lame
In the future I’ll be the one shrouded in fame

My journey is almost over, I can see the light
I’ve risen to the challenge, I’ve put up the fight
I ask myself why I put myself through all this strife
But then I decide that I really love my life.




​In my poem, I manipulate my diction (choice of words) to cause the lines to rhyme. I do this to give it a sort of rhythm, and I think it makes the words come alive. In the first line of the second stanza, I used the literary technique of inversion (inverted order of words in a sentence, or variation of the subject-verb-object order), because I think it makes the delivery more dramatic. In this second stanza, I am describing my lack of sleep, and I used inversion and rhyming to make it seem almost like a ritualistic chant. I feel that this intensifies the effect what I am describing. In the third line of the second stanza, I used imagery (language which appeals to one of the five senses), “A scream of terror awakes me in the night.” The startling imagery of a scream in the dark of night perfectly represents the feeling of being woken up by an alarm. It is also a metaphor (a comparison in which something is is said to be another, without using like or as), as I call the alarm clock a scream of terror, but in the next line I have hinted enough for the reader to figure out that I am actually talking about the alarm clock.
​In the third stanza, I describe the horrible adverse effects of my sleep loss. In the fourth line, I use a paradox (contradicting ideas used together for description), “silently roaring” to relay the feeling of a voice yelling at you from within your head, but knowing that in reality you are just hallucinating. This is also personification (describing the action of an inanimate object with a human verb), as my head, which shouldn’t be able to talk for itself, is roaring at me, as if it had a mind of its own. In the fourth stanza, I begin to transition into the much happier section of the poem, and in the third line I use a metaphor, “I’m rising to Heaven as the weekend arrives,” to show my intense jubilation that comes when I get a couple of days off from school.
​In the fifth stanza, I used rhyming words at the end of each line, to signal to the reader that I am building up to the dramatic climax of the poem. In the sixth and final stanza, in the second line I use the literary technique of asyndeton, which is the omission of conjunctions between coordinate phrases, used to intensify the content included in the two phrases. I then end the poem with a happy ending, deciding that despite the difficulty of my life, I still like it.

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