Wear and Tear Bears a Scare

If every student in Brien McMahon High School must exercise in order to graduate, and all athletes are students, then shouldn’t every athlete be forced to exercise to graduate? I believe yes, but only to an extent.  I believe the exercise required for the everyday athlete should come after school during practice, not in the middle of the school day.  

Physical Education is proven to enlighten its students for further classes during the day.  It is thought to “wake up” many young high schoolers and jumpstart their minds for school.  I believe this is true but unnecessary for athletes.  Most athletes including myself have to stay after school several hours before reaching home and starting their homework.  As a result, many are kept up late working to complete the different tasks assigned to them.  This may not seem like a big deal but, when the next morning comes, it hits you.  Imagine waking up in an aching body.  Imagine feeling as if the joints of your body oxidized and rusted over once you woke up.  This is something we athletes become attuned to.  We get used to this to the point where being sore is an everyday, normal thing.  And realizing that you have gym today dampens the mood.  Now you have to exercise your already depleted body for no particular reason other than to waste the little energy you’ve regained last night that you could save for an upcoming test or quiz.  

Energy is almost as valuable as time for the average athlete.  Both are rare and both depress you.  The thought of wasting your time in a gym when you could be working and getting ahead eats you up.  You’re tired but you want that hour tonight to relax so you must get your work down as soon as possible.  The only problem is gym; if you had study hall that hour could be possible.

There is such thing as over-exercising.  It results in pain, injury, and trips to the hospital.  Just yesterday my friend Evan Collins was hospitalized due to an illness within his intestines.  This illness causes him to lose tremendous amounts of strength and weight.  It relapses when the body is being pushed too hard.  Evan didn’t work that hard for the illness to trigger.  He’s been playing football which, in case you may not already know, really wears you down over a long period of time.  Once he took the pacer test, a simple running test not that physically demanding for an athlete in good shape, Evan relapsed and was transported back to the hospital.  He is still there.

I believe athletes should, in essence, be given the opportunity to take physical education while at the same time not be forced to take it.  There really is no reason behind why an already active athlete in season should be forced to take gym over and over.  One full season should equal one-fourth of a credit.  If you’re on a roster then you gain a quarter of a credit.  This is how it should be.

Why Athletes Should Be Exempt From Physical Eduation

Humor

Aggressiveness

As an athlete I know first and foremost the physical requirements to play a sport.  I know the difference between myself and all the other people in the hallways I see each and every day at school.  Work ethic.  Whether we want to or not, athletes condition themselves preseason, mid-season, and offseason for their sport.  This training, during the season, is put on top of the already constant physical requirements to endure a game or practice.  Could you imagine how many calories the average high school athlete burns? So why, may I ask, must athletes be forced into taking a full year of gym in  order to graduate high school?

The typical physical education class takes place every other day for a semester at Brien McMahon High School.  So, for most students, it takes two full years to complete the necessary gyms required.  I know for sure that athletes don’t necessarily take physical education seriously. Many of them upon entering the class look at gym as some necessary waste of time intended to keep the less athletic and less active students moving.  But why do athletes have to waste their time in gym? Most of the time we barely break a sweat and look for other interesting classes to take.  Forensics. Marine Biology. Art. Photography.  All these electives must be put aside for gym.  Therefore, opportunities for learning often pass by athletes as they’re being forced to waste their time and energy doing nothing of importance to them.  

Not only is the athlete deprived of an interest in certain learning, the classes he intended on taking could have greatly benefited his search for a career.  It could look great on a college transcript.  It could help you take steps into building a successful career.  I will not be taking Biotechnology or Engineering at Brien McMahon simply because there was just not enough time at my disposal.  Unfortunately for me, entering high school I knew when I grew up I’d either want to be some sort of engineer or surgeon.  By not being able to take a class in engineering I wasn’t able to fully decided which career path I’d like to step into.  In the end, unfortunately, I cut out engineering from my future entirely to make room for medical courses and well, gym.  Who knows? Maybe I could have been an engineer when I grow up but as of now, it looks like I’ve strayed far off that path.

Maybe you have a double-period in one of the science courses that carves up your schedule.  You can’t put another class in that time slot and therefore, are resulted to either Health, P.E., or Study Halls.  Study Halls.  They help us athletes.  They really do.  I hate coming home from football practice at 7 pm just to do my homework until 10 pm before go to sleep.  Talk about no social life.  The grind many student-athletes have to go through is tremendous which makes time even more important than before.  

Stress is the plague of the average high school student and, by giving the student more time, stress is reduced. My sophomore year in high school was pact with work and athletics.  In the fall, my schedule consisted of school, football, homework, then sleep, every day for about 2 to 3 months.  My junior year consisted of practically the same schedule, only I had more study halls.  As a result, I was no longer the social outcast out of school that I was when I was a sophomore.        

Gym for Athletes? Paragraph Comparison

In Antiuga, people speak of slavery as if it had been a pageant full of large ships sailing on blue water, the large ships filled up with human cargo--their ancestors; they got off, they were forced to work under conditions that were cruel and inhuman, they were beaten, they were murdered, they were sold, their children were taken from them and these separations lasted forever, there were many other bad things, and then suddenly the whole thing came to an end in something called emancipation.  Then they speak of emancipation itself as if it happened just the other day, not over one hundred and fifty years ago.  The word "emancipation" is used so frequently, it is as if it, emancipation, were a contemporary occurrence, something everybody is familiar with.  And perhaps there is something in that, for an institution that is often celebrated in Antigua is the Hotel Training School, a school that teaches Antiguans how to be good servants, how to be a good nobody, which is what a servant is.

At Brien McMahon, administrators see physical education as a fundamental key to physical fitness, the physical education responsible for fit students--these students; they were assigned gym, they had to complete four gym credits to graduate, they were bored, they were too athletic, they were wasting their time, they lost the ability to take other precious classes they could have had time for, there were so many other interesting classes, and if only the athletes could forget about taking gym.  Athletes have no need for physical education, for they already condition on a normal basis for their sport.  A "Green Beret" is a form of football conditioning, that, when fully endured, yields 2200 yards of sprinting, a deafening amount.  And that would, without a doubt, yield more exercise than what a P.E. class would yield, therefore taking the class' place, proving it more inadequate for athletes.      

Things That Grind My Gears...

Around School

• How half the time your GPA means nothing compared to your SATs score.
• Cliques. Too often there are people left out, alone, without any people do be friends with.
• Being forced to complete 1 full credit of gym when you are an active athlete. There are other classes I want to take before I graduate and taking four gym classes are wasting my time.
• Lack of in school computer access. We live in an increasingly technological world that is constantly adapting. Our classes should take more time taking trips to computer labs to work behind computers and take advantage of the Internet.

Around Town

• Littering. Around Norwalk there is a plurality of loose garbage on street corners and off roadways. Though our city will surely not be able to fully eradicate litterers, we can surely mass-produce garbage cans that can be placed around town at heavily populated areas where littering would most likely occur.
• The failure to maintain public parks, fields, and roadways. Across the city there are abundant open fields either small or large that are being overgrown by brush and weeds. At the least we could cut grass bi-weekly in these locations to make a prettier, healthier Norwalk. Roadways should be paved more oftenly as to reduce the amount of bumps, bruises, and potholes the streets have to offer.

Around the Country

• Pretty Little Liars--the show that your girlfriend comes over to watch, where she shuns you throughout the whole show and commercials, then leaves without even having a decent conversation.
• Ads and propaganda.
• The constant one-upping between the United States and Russia for the past century.
• Constant American intervention in International affairs that no other country seems to get involved it.
• Militarism of all kinds. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ― Albert Einstein

Around Morality

• The phrase: " Good guys finish last." It's true.
• People who betray you, stab you in the back and make you wish you've never met them
• People who think they're too good for you and believe in social status. Ergo letting their worry over social status determine who they become friends with.
• Judgement without incite.
• People who never let a man and a woman be happy together and try to mimic Mr Stealyogirl.
• People who are ignorant and never look at how their choices affect others rather than themselves. They are selfish and pathetic almost 100% of the time.
• People who pressure you into doing things you don't really like. Or better yet, people who try to push you too far into doing something you actually do like and, therefore, spoils it for the both of you.
• Liars.
• People who make fun of you for their own amusement. I have feelings too and these feelings are about to do you some damage.
• Haters on one's great ability or achievement. When one person becomes successful those around him should root and cheer in admiration rather than heckle and torment in jealousy.
• People who play with your emotions when you have strong feelings for them--making you want to just roll over and die half the time.
• Cheering up. It always makes everything seem so much better until you wake up in the middle of the night crying because it finally hit you how traumatic your life is.
• Myself for not being able to control my feelings over certain issues or people which ends up in almost inevitable disappointment.
• People who live on their phones even when they're with someone who means a lot to them. And in doing so they shut out that person and make them feel as if they don't exist.
• Constant depression because you know time is flying by and you're wasting too much of it.
• Relationships. Their endings always hit me like a train.
• Stereotypes. Especially that men can't be at all sensitive.

Drew Peace? Yeah Let's Just Go With That..

Michael Andrew Pace was almost born on February 19^th, 1997.  Although, a last minute change of heart led to the creation of Andrew Michael Pace, or AMP.  To those who don’t already know, amp is short for ampere, the IS unit of measurement that measures power.  Yes, this may seem as a bleak and useless connotation of my name, but with further research I’ve been able to find out more about my name’s relationship with power. 

Carl Pace Sr., my father’s father, was the youngest and only member of his immediate family to be born in the states.  His two parents Joe and Angela and three other siblings were all born in the kingdom of Sicily—at the time a small yet prominent and wealthy kingdom in the Mediterranean Sea.  This small island receives most of its wealth through the trade of agricultural, sea merchandise, and slaves.  Yes, this beautiful island kingdom wasn’t that beautiful after all.  It was the host of tremendous amounts of mafia control and organized crime.  Most of it held its roots in the city of Polermo, the city where my grandfather’s family grew up.  These mafias held tremendous amounts of power which eventually spread from their small Sicilian districts to the United States. 

The Pace family, ironically, dabbled here and there in mafia affairs and, as a result, was stringed into the business.  I know it’s surprising.  I mean how on Earth can such a nice, genuine child like myself have roots in such a dark and merciless business?  That’s what appalls most people I encounter.

 

This is the point where all irony seems to unfold thanks to another small piece of my name: my surname.  “Pace” may be a nice little adjective describing the rate of time but it is also the root of a much more important word from the Italian language, a word the world has almost deemed impossible to obtain in real life.  Even Plato, one of the founding fathers of philosophy and learning, has stated “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”  By saying this, he was implying that world peace will never be found.  In Italian, the word “pace” (pronounced pa-chi) means peace.  Prior to its Changing at Ellis Island, my surname literally was the Italian word for peace.  There wasn’t even a pronunciation difference.

The fact that my ancestors wore a name meaning peace yet at the same time spent much of their lives within the Sicilian mafias is pure irony in itself.  I’m not exactly a pro-peace sort of person and neither am I a person with a lust for power.  I believe I’ve fallen somewhere in between and, as a result, I’ve realized that my ancestors’ lifestyles aren’t my own and will not affect how I plan to live my life.  They will not define or convict me, and neither will I define or convict any of those who follow me through this everlasting family tree.  Don’t get me wrong, I take pride in who I am and how I came to be.  My name is Andrew Michael Pace and though words like power, corruption, peace, and love float around my name and my roots, I will not let any of those words define me without my initial consent.