Charlotte’s Chronicle

           Earlier this week, when asked to analyze my personal style I found that it was a lot harder than I would’ve thought. I struggled to find an exact word for the way I dressed because it felt like I was trying to fit myself into a box I was too big for. Like one of those children’s toys where you place the shapes into the matching hole, only none of the openings quite matched up. Although I wear sweatpants and a sweatshirt everyday to school, I didn’t feel right to call my style lazy because I’m meticulous about the upkeep of my nails, skin, and hair. Still, I dress too comfortably to say my outfits are “preppy” or “trendy”. Furthermore, even though I enjoy playing sports and tend to hang out with the “jocks”, I also enjoy playing video games and reading, which typically doesn’t fit the description of an athlete.           Yet despite the complexities I saw when trying to determine how I was marked, others would likely ...

                  In Troy, we like to believe we're inclusive and open-minded, but we’ve also never been in a situation where we needed to prove it. The metro Detroit area is still one of the most segregated areas in the country, and Troy is no different. It's easy to point fingers at Francis Howell for being racist and closed-minded. However, what would happen if suddenly our school district was placed in the same position?  Desegregation only works when everyone is willing to let it. The parents of Francis Howell believed  “schools failed in the past because black children were forced in… not the other part of the equation, that white families chose to leave”. In reality, “in the schools where white families chose to stay, test scores for black transfer students rose”. This proves that the issue with desegregation falls not on lower income transfer students, but the white families who refuse to accept the change in their comm...

    Earlier this week as we began to discuss modern racism in our area, I was shocked to find that little was known about the dark history of sundown towns in Michigan. Sundown towns were very prevalent in the lives of African Americans in the past as they were potentially dangerous and deadly. They were also all over the country and there were even many near where we lived now, including Livonia and Gross Point. Yet, most of the people in our class didn't know anything about them or even that they existed. The only reason I knew about them was through watching a Tik Tok, a notoriously unreliable source of information, and choosing to do my own research. Sundown towns were never mentioned to me in school, or at least not in a meaningful or memorable way. This predicament brings up the question of whether the knowledge being taught in school is really the most beneficial information for us to be learning. I for one remember spending days learning about the conditions of th...

Now that our study of the novel The Great Gatsby is wrapping up, a great debate has broken out over whether or not we should be allowed to watch the movie version as well. While movies and books may communicate a story differently, there are definite benefits to each that, when paired together, lead to an increase in overall comprehension of the viewers. Movies allow audiences to more easily visualize scenes from books that may have been unclear when they are being read, especially when those stories are written using complex and formal language such as in The Great Gatsby . Lines like “ No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart”(Fitzgerald 96) can be hard to wrap your head around. However, hearing them spoken by an actor that has studied their meaning extensively in order to deliver them in the best way possible would make their meaning more understandable. Additionally, movies take much less time to complete so you can absorb the ove...

The story of the Great Gatsby contains lots of commentary on America during the 1920s and the negative effects wealth and status can have on a person. The main character Gatsby, one of the wealthiest men in the story, dies at the end of the story after being corrupted by his greed and ambition. Nick even describes the wealthy of the story as a “rotten crowd”, a word that implies decay and corruption (Fitzgerald 154). This story is only hypothetical, exaggerated to communicate a lesson. But what if there was a real life example of just how status can lead to corruption.  The radium girls lived in the 1930’s and like Gatsby, the wealth and status they accumulated ultimately led to their untimely deaths. The radium girls worked in factories, painting watch faces with radium paint to make them glow in the dark. After working with the paint for a while, the girls found that their skin and clothes were beginning to glow as well. Most would assume this abnormality would be cause for conce...