A Day in
10 The Borah Senator
Passion unearthed in numbers, brush strokes By Sara Rostron
Illustration by Sara Rostron
Curvy lines become straight and narrow, building bridges upon each other. They form into buildings and sidewalks and streets, and stretch across the city; limitless. Colors fade into black and white, numbers dancing everywhere. An understanding for technicalities dawns upon me as I walk a straight, perfectly calculated path. This would be my life if I were to understand and enjoy math. Just thinking about this makes me apprehensive. My life is consumed with art and creativity. I’ve always had a difficult time understanding rules and schedules because I feel that they constrict the creative process. To me, math is all about rules, rules, rules and I don’t understand the point of them. It’s like following a religion blindly, a faith which I don’t believe. Every day I must battle those rules and question their legitimacy. I understand that you need math for most careers and even simple tasks
Academic explores club-based life By Kristin Bracewell
There is always the idea of taking a walk in someone else’s shoes. I recently experienced this idea with a girl whose life revolves more around her outside commitments than just her school work. Now don’t get me wrong, she is still active on her grades, but not to the point of my dedication and stressing over a specific GPA. Junior Delaney Klevens gave me the privilege of “shadowing” her to experience our differences. I wake up each morning with the same thoughts pounding through my head: school, grades, college. I am like a well oiled machine, where my life revolves around advanced placement and accelerated classes, and my GPA. Sure, I am involved in other things like sports and student council, but
they are not things that dominate my life. Unlike me, some people including Kleven have more life pleasing activities that dominate their mind set. When Kleven wakes up, her first thought is just the desire to get through first period. She wakes up, goes to school and “dreads first period,” she said. “It is my only AP class.” I attend my first three classes, all AP level, and take these classes with the possibility of getting further ahead. She’s dedicated to cheerleading, something with which she and I vary. “I am committed to my school work, but I am so committed to cheerleading, I plan on going pretty far with it.” “It’s fun to be up in front of everyone and help everyone support their team,” she said. For someone like me, academic driven, instead of being involved like
Kleven, I join organizations like Student Council or Newspaper to get my thoughts across and be involved. However, I see the joy she feels being involved in such groups. Shadowing someone else’s life for a day, I saw there is always the chance to discover similarities with a varying personality type. You may have the same music interests, such as country, or the same color. But the main thing I learned was that stepping out of my comfort zone might help. Putting academics aside to pursue a dream could benefit someone in the end. Delaney Klevens is one person that should be seen as dedicated, having a higher dedication to her passion. For all you academically driven people, take the chance to see the other side. Take the time to put passion before grades, adrenaline before GPA.
in life; however, I still remain slightly close-minded to this process. But after talking to intellectual and charming Jenna Phillips, junior, I can now see the beauty in both worlds. She loves the world she is in, just like the passion I have for mine. She is doing what she is best at, and most importantly she’s happy. Perhaps I am not meant for mathematics and numbers and rules, but I can appreciate them. Our world is made up of different individuals that share an array of opinions, and each personality brings talent to the mix. As George Russell once said, “Our hearts are drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see.” For me, that means that there is a hope, a dream, that runs inside each one of us that we love; a passion that never dies. And now I can truly understand that burrowed inside, even if we’re not alike, we’re not all so different because we have a passion that burns deep inside our hearts. Photo by Savannah Harrelson
Photo by Kristin Bracewell