ToW #30 - Advice to an APELC Newcomer: It's All About Perspective

Hello, success hopefuls.

        Welcome to Advanced Placement English Language and Composition. Congratulations on becoming successfully enrolled in this class. But, before you commend yourself on taking the "more challenging" or "higher caliber" class, know that APELC is not special; plenty of people adore it while plenty of others deplore it. At its very core, it is a course in which your goal is to learn how to consume and produce effective, advanced rhetoric. The course is honestly nothing more and nothing less than that. But, then, what brings some into seething hatred at the mention of its name while others feel glee when reminded of it? While the true content of the course is the same for all of its students, your success with it is functionally determined entirely by your predisposition towards and perception of learning; two factors which combine into your utmost perspective of the class.
        In the case of education, understand predisposition as how much you innately like and want to like a subject (like English) and, more specifically, a course (like APELC). Our personalities define our innate likes; thanks to your genetics and your positive past experiences, you cannot help but to enjoy eating chocolate, playing frisbee, reading an excellent novel, or drawing in your notebook. You are more than willing to do these things -- to varying degrees and under varying circumstances, of course -- and thus perform well while doing them. You knew this fact before reading this letter; it's a universal human truth that we all enjoy doing something. But then, what do you do when you aspire to perform well on something that you do not innately like doing? In a sort of automatic route to tricking yourself into doing that thing, you want to like it so much that you end up growing to like it. This starts off simple -- just a few more pages and then I'll reward myself with some chocolate -- but grows more complex as you grow familiar with it -- ooh, that metaphor made me smile; this book is written pleasingly well -- until it becomes something that you innately enjoy -- I think I'll start reading books in my free time. This, as I hope you'll find, is true for all tasks, fully including APELC assignments. If you truly wish to commit yourself to mastering this course's material, you will find that the most effective way of learning from its assignments is to learn how to love completing them.
        Then, perception is very much like predisposition; it involves your innate and desired likes but, rather than centering on the enjoyment of tasks, it centers on the enjoyment of the purveyors of tasks. This means that you may automatically like your teachers, their teaching styles, the classroom setting, and your classmates, or, if you wish to perform well in the class, you will learn to like them. As all of these factors affect how well you accept a task (you'll do homework more successfully if you respect the teacher assigning it), it is as important to like them as it is to enjoy doing the task itself. But what do you do when you simply cannot perceive these factors favorably? If the dislike is especially gratuitous, you speak with someone who can help you fix it, but if it is a minor grievance, you learn to shift your gaze away from it for the sake of your education.
        These truths apply as fully to AP English Language and Composition as they do to any other aspect of your life. If you wish to succeed in life and learning, you must attempt to guide your perspective -- to require of yourself the enjoyment of both being given responsibilities and of fulfilling those responsibilities. Some people are better at shaping their own perspectives than others, but know that, from my long and successful run as a student, enjoying your own education is by far the most satisfying path through any course, be it a writing course which demands a desire to learn or an uninvolved elective which has the potential to kindle a new hobby. I guarantee that, regardless of my skill with rhetoric, it was my positive perspective of learning that made me one of the many students who adored Mr. Yost and Ms. Pronko's wonderful class this past year.

Remember, you have the full capability to make your APELC career a success.

Thank you,

Ethan Reilly

ToW #29 - Documentary by Ken Burns: The Central Park Five

Judicial Injustice

    Without fail, every era of United States history has a great injustice committed by the legal system: Dred Scott vs. Sandford of 1857 invalidated the citizenships of African Americans; Plessy vs. Ferguson of 1896 legalized segregation; the Sacco and Vanzetti Trials of 1921 killed two Italian immigrants for being anarchists; Korematsu vs. U.S of 1941 legalized the mass forcing of Japanese-Americans into detention camps; and the Central Park jogger case of 1989 falsely convicted five teenagers of rape, assault, robbery, and riot. These teenagers, who had been detained for being around Central Park at the time of a few crime reports, were brought into a police station, interrogated harshly, coerced into fabricating confessions, and ended up serving sentences ranging from five to thirteen years. The Central Park Five is an account of those teenagers' misfortunes brought to life by the ever-acclaimed Ken Burns, detailing their baseless and torturous interrogations, their tired and incongruous confessions, their horror at the outcries of New Yorkers (including calls for the death penalty), and their unjustified prison sentences. 

    While the testimonies of the Five and of various historians prove outright that the teenagers were completely innocent, questions were raised upon the reveal of a lawsuit filed by the Five against the city of New York. Despite being exonerated in 2002 and filing the lawsuit in 2003, the Five have yet to reach a settlement with the City. The New York Times reports that the proceedings have taken so long because "the city's lawyers were 'dragging their feet'". In this delaying action by New York lawyers, the City is unintentionally but unjustifiably taking more years away from the Five's lives. Though it may be reasonable for the City to take some time attempting to lower the Five's claims of fifty million dollars each, eleven years is far too long for those men to go without reparations. Now all in their late thirties, the Five have given their entire young adulthoods to the injustice done to them twenty-five years ago.

    If this were 2004 and the men had already entered in negotiations, I would consider their price of $250 million higher than it should be. After all, millions of people have much worse than years of their life spent without freedom done to them without reparations paid in any sense of the word. But, by sheer principle, if someone is wronged by wasting years of their life and then voluntarily spends more years seeking what they believe would right the wrong, they deserve that reparation. And, understanding that the decision to delay must be bureaucratic in nature, very likely to involve some corruption of morals or of practice, the scales of justice impossible tilt even farther in favor of the Five. But promise now shows: after pledging a quick settlement for the Five in his campaign, Mayor Bill de Blasio has spurred recent settlement talks to take place. It looks like, after every little injustice and hardship that they have endured, the Central Park Five -- that is, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, and Kharey Wise -- finally have some legal meetings to look forward to.