The Parchment Pandemic

I am diagnosed with EPU, a serious pandemic. So serious, that even you, your friends, and especially your teachers have it. However, I don't control it, I'm just subject to it. We don't have a choice, but our school does. 

EPU is Excessive Paper Usage.

Public schools, and especially magnet schools, have been improving teaching. Curriculums are changing; new electives are spawning; chalk boards are disappearing. Very quickly everything has been connected to the internet, to the point where human kind is on the verge of virtual reality. According to New York Times, up to 8 hours a day are spent in front of a screen, whether it's the phone, computer, television, GPS, or tablet. Like sleep, that's a third of a human's life. From using electronics we save many materials such as writing utensils, poster boards, and paper. And yet, schools have turned this unavoidable step for technology in the wrong direction.

As a junior at the Center for Global Studies, I have five textbooks, three reading books, and get around five to ten handouts everyday, accumulating around two thousand pieces of paper per school year. If this is true for all my fellow classmates, it's no wonder at least two times a year our school has a paper deficit. Apparently schools haven't gotten the email we're in the twenty-first century. Despite involving power point presentations, reports from online articles, or typing essays, we're ironically printing and using more paper for the class. The only difference between now, and the age before typing, is that students now have a combo of writing paper, and printing paper. It's about time that the Center for Global Studies takes the leap.      

Upgrading to tablets will solve every paper problem. Tablets are cheap, light, and versatile. No more physical textbooks, paper handouts, and potentially no more note taking with paper. Considering the Center for Global Studies is a magnet school, it'll set the standard as the greenest and most innovative school in the Fairfield County. No more handing in the maclab's used paper that others wasted just for you. No more printer problems lowering your grade. No more folders and backpacks functioning as garbage cans for all the papers we use only one day. 

Let's cure our Excessive Paper Usage. Let's switch to using tablets.  

Unite: Improving to Perfection.

We are a community! From teacher involvement, to all the amazing events CGS pulls off, to the many clubs only CGS offers, by the end of freshman year everyone should know everyone.  We respect each other, no matter how much hair dye you have! For just one hallway, we have become the center of foreign pop culture, fashion, and art! Although we come for the language, CGS has turned into the hub of expression, while still balancing a very rigorous academic experience. CGS has very clear standards of academic achievement, while still accepting of every weirdo and outcast. It is through this ambition, I want to improve the CGS reputation as the best school for learning language and having the best community!

CGS needs to become the envy of the school district. We need to get past all these textbooks, and move onto a more advanced way of learning. Reading out of a textbook the entire period, is a period wasted. We need to be thinking in a way that we want to be thinking and I truly think that this is possible through introducing tablets and connecting CGS to the internet. For the best community, and the best learning, connecting everyone through the internet and using tablets will build friendship, creativity, and leadership skills, along with organizing many events. 

We are a community! 

Entering the Medium: The Reckoning That is Paperback!

From Barbara Ehrenreich's, Nickel and Dimed,

I was baffled, initially, by what seemed like a certain lack of get-up-and-go on the part of my fellow workers. Why didn't they just leave for a better-paying job, as I did when I moved from the Hearthside to Jerry's? Part of the answer is that actual humans experience a little more "friction" than marbles do, and the poorer they are, the more constrained their mobility usually is. Low-wage people who don't have cars are often dependent on a relative who is willing to drop them off and pick them up again each day, sometimes on a route that includes the babysitter's house or the child care center. Change your place of work and you may be confronted with an impossible topographical problem to solve, or at least a reluctant driver to persuade. Some of my coworkers, in Minneapolis as well as Key West, rode bikes to work, and this clearly limited their geographical range. For those who do possess cars, there is still the problem of gas prices, not to mention the general hassle, which is of course far more onerous for the carless, of getting around to fill out applications, to be interviewed, to take drug tests. I have mentioned, too, the general reluctance to exchange the devil you know for one that you don't know even when the latter is tempting you with a better wage benefit package. At each new job, you have to start all over, clueless and friendless.

Matthew Wagar's thoughts on getting rid of paperback.

I couldn't believe it, amazingly, all of my high school teachers want me to bring in a textbook for every class. Why didn't they just let me leave it at home, for my locker is literally on the other side of the school? I think the reason is that chiropractors are in "cahoots" with teachers, and the more books we're given, the more constrained my back gets. School boards across the nation rely on distributing millions of  textbooks that are the weight of bricks, and many times are lost or have new editions that are in need of being bought. Schools are already trying to implement new computers and Smart-boards, or even handing out laptops to everyone. Students who do have these laptops, such as AITE, still have book-filled backpacks, leaving even the technology schools with broken backs. If we upgrade to having eBooks/tablets, not only are we saving space, but we are also saving trees, among many more applications for students, such as paperless note taking,  and easy access to researching on the internet. From switching to eBooks/tablets, too, it opens up a new medium of reading and studying that could bring upon new ways of teaching a class. With eBooks/tablets, it's saving money, and millions of spines.  


(To elaborate more on mediums: many classes of mine want poster making, drawings, and presentations. Although powerpoint, prezi, and google docs make it easier than it was ten to twenty years ago, to be able to put together a presentation with a tablet is a lot quicker, and can be done in class without a trip to the maclab/computerlab or having to supply posterboard. Also to get back to my main problem with textbooks: you aren't able to annotate or underline without sticky notes, and so they make up for it with busy work questions. Textbooks are also just as insanely expensive as Tablets, and require so much more responsibility for students to carry around all five of them everyday. My thinking is, is that through incorporating new, organized forms of technology in schools, it opens up more creative possibilities for learning. Like how in CGS we have ipods to test our speaking, instead of individually being interviewed by the teacher. All in all, I really hate textbooks, and think they are a waste of space, and that teachers shouldn't rely on them to teach a class. Unless of course if it's an AP class, because then it has all the information you need for the test... though there should be an eBook form of the book.)

Issues that pester me!

Highschool:

• Large Classes: Many educators and politicians believe that more homework, and more class time is the root of "better education," when in actuality I believe we need smaller classes for more one on one teaching.
• Changing our classes: This year, Guidance is not allowing anyone to change their schedules so that they can't drop down from a class or switch into a different class.
• Civics classes: A required, yet useless course that is made to brainwash us kids to be future voters. 
• Making classes later in the day: Many teens suffer from getting up too early and losing sleep, when it's more natural for elementary school kids to get up early.
• We should split the year into a Trimester, in order to avoid summer brain, and get more breaks throughout the year. 
• We should switch from having heavy, hardcover, paperback textbooks, to switching to eBooks/tablets. And through switching to this we can have newer ways of learning.

CGS:

• Use the Zen Garden, or use the space for more classrooms for CGS.
• Use Maclab for new forms of teaching.

Norwalk:

• More kid friendly: There are no arcades, comicbook/cardgame stores, recreation centers, amusements, shopping or many restaurants that are primarily for kids or teens (except for Stepping Stones and My Three Sons). Norwalk has a bit of a dangerous reputation. 
• Clubs, Associations, or Groups for middle aged adults: My parents don't really have many friends outside of work.
• More Teen Jobs: Norwalk in the past 30 years has changed from teens working low wage jobs, to  more adults from the lower class working the low wage jobs. 

Buisinesses:

• Stop having stores such as Abercrombie, Gamestop, Hollister, and many other chains, make every mall I go to be Identical. Primarily Clothing stores.
• Toy Stores need new appeal: with us being in the age of technology and video games, many toy stores have been suffering and shutting down. Toy makers need to get with the century!
• Because of this new Technology age, authors should not be so constricted to making hard/soft cover books. We should not only save trees, but also create/use newer mediums of telling stories.

National/World:

• Charity!! Instead of putting in money for the sake of being a good person, Charities' intense advertising forces people to pay for charities either out of guilt, self riotousness, and/or because it's a social standard.
• [When you are told that the world is going to end, and you and two other coplayers are the last hope for saving the universe, only to find out IT WAS JUST A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT. (inside joke)]

My name is unclear, for it was created through jeer.

"Wager!" "Waggar!" "Wagaur!" "Wagner!" "Swaggar!" Throughout my whole life very few people have ever pronounced my name correctly on their first try without me pronouncing it first. Despite my last name only being five simple letters, I've gone entire school years of teachers taking attendance and never pronouncing it "Way - gur." Even life long friends still pronounce it incorrectly to this day. How did I get such a simple, yet complex last name?

According to a genealogy chart my father made (http://www.steve.wagar.com/stuff/new_genes.gif), my family name originated from the name: Weger (Vay - Gur). Because this name has been around for over five hundred years, it was never recorded as to what this name means since most people didn't know how to write. It was originally an uncommon Austrian last name, up and until Ebhard Wager traveled to America and changed his last name to have an "a" so that it could be pronounced in English. However his son, Ephraim Wagar,  then improved it to have that second "a" to be the way my last name is pronounced now. Because of changing this name twice, Wagar's are extremely rare. If you were to google image search it, the only pictures you may see are of me, my family and an old stuffy author which was my grandfather.

So I suppose I can't really blame people for messing it up all the time, because up and until 1766, it wasn't even a real last name. I've grown to get used to such a simply bizarre last name, and it's weird pronunciations have even grown on me. I like that it lacks fluidity, yet isn't blunt. In terms of my actual ethnicity, since I'm basically all of Europe combined (although mostly Irish and Lithuanian), I'm proud to say that I'm American down to my very name. I'm unique! Well, until you get to my first name... 

I like to think of myself as someone who craves for the weird, and someone who strives to be strange. And yet, my first name, Matthew, was deemed the fifth most common name in USA and eighteenth most common in UK in 2006. This name originated to be Hebrew, although many Roman languages have copied with names like Mattheo, Matthias, and Matthieu. Does this mean I dislike my name since it's so common amongst many cultures? Not really. When it comes down to it, my name is who I am.  If I could change my name, I wouldn't know what to change it to. I've always grown up around my name, so to change it would mean I'd have to start from square one all over again. Through just my name, I've built up this image of how people see me, and by changing it, I'd not only have to explain to every person I know that I have a different name, but also build a new reputation. It's similar to how when transsexuals or secret agents change their name; through the action and reasoning of changing their name, they change in personality and reputation. No matter how foreign, outdated, long, or simple someone's name is, their reputation they've built up for their name shows who they distinctly are as a person. Matthew Wagar is the perfect blend of normal and unorthodox, the perfect blend of complex and simple.

Although for real everyone, it's Matthew "Wagar!!"