Time Flies When .... The Summer Approaches??

Isn't it crazy that it's almost the end of the school year? It seems like it was just a week ago that I was school clothes shopping with the buds, and now I'm turning in text books. This year has definitely been one of the best school years ever. It's been stuffed with all the high school goodies: stomps, football games, School plays, dating (finally), NHS, lots of violin festivals, and of course all the wicked parties me and my friends threw. I've loved writing for the paper, and just being a part of "The Lion's Den." Aside from school, YW has been only fabulous! I seriously live in the best ward ever. I love all my girls and the fun times we have. To top this fabulous year off, there was HOBY :) Great memories, and so much to learn.
Every year seems to go by faster than the last, and I can't help but wonder what the future has in store. I've bounced back and forth between career options a while, and to be quite honest, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do yet. I suppose that's okay considering I'm a sophomore, but you know me, I've gotta have a plan for everything. Haha. Anyways, I digress. . .

Planning for girls camp has been oh so much fun. This year I'm a YCL, and I'm super excited. The stake leader over the YCL's is so friendly and upbeat, she is really going to help us make this a great year for all! We have a bunch of fun activities planned, and my certification group has some great ideas for teaching certification this year. We all agreed that we absolutely LOATHED certification when we were 1st years (who we're teaching) and so we have made plans to spice things up this year. Ya know, candy, reenactments of ridiculous case studies, etc. Yup. It's gonna be legit.
Prior to girls camp, I'm going to EFY for my third year. WAHOO! I love that place. Nothin's better than making new friends and strengthening your testimony. Ever since I got back from HOBY I've just been so excited to go and continue to meet new people and learn new ways to really contribute something positive to the world. Seriously, what would the world be like without all of these OUTSTANDING youth programs??

Now that I've managed ramble about nothing once again, I best get going. Over and out!


P.S. Girls nights are a gift from above.

Before I jet, here's a few pics:

HOBY and General Thoughts About Life.

Each year, Payson High selects two students who show leadership potential to represent them at a leadership conference, called HOBY. I heard about HOBY from one of the yw in my ward, and decided to apply. The application process basically consists of me writing an essay about leadership and answering a few questions to go along with that. After you turn in the essay, the HOBY adviser (Mrs. Earl) reads over them and looks over teacher recommendations and GPA's. Any ways, you guys get the idea. So.... By some crazy miracle, I was one of the students selected to represent PHS, and I have to say that HOBY was one of the best experiences of my entire life.

When I first was placed in my group, the orange group, I was a little skeptical. It seemed like when we were creating our flag, there were just so many "leaders." Everybody had something to say and it felt like everybody wanted to be in charge. It was a little stressful to be quite honest. Nevertheless, we completed our banner and it looked awesome! I was so so proud of us... Any ways, we continued on. For our first meal, everybody's wrists were tied together, let me tell ya. It was quite an adventure. Our basic strategy was that everybody would let their left arm go limp and eat with their right hand. Our idea actually worked pretty well. (for me, this meant, yes, there is hope that we may amount to something). As the weekend went on, I really appreciated all of the activities we had. We talked a lot about leading by following, and how sometimes, the best leader isn't the loudest. Typically in life, I've been one of those types of leaders who is deemed "the leader" basically because I can talk louder than everybody else. I'm grateful that the activities we did forced me to sometimes sit in the background and just try to be a contributor rather than the one in charge.

I met a lot of truly amazing people at HOBY, and they taught me so much. I made some amazing friends that I hope to continue to have for the rest of my life. They taught me so much about what it means to be a leader, and what it means to be a friend. We only knew each other for three days, and yet, we were so willing to share our lives with one another. It amazes me how close we got, and how much I now miss all of them. They changed something in the space where my brain is suppose to be, and I'm so happy I was able to meet all of these incredible people.

I had the best councilor and JC ever. Hands down. They both taught me so much about service and judging a book by it's cover, and just life in general. I appreciated their insight and caring. I really loved the one word pep talks my councilor Jackie gave us. Words like "electric" "juice" and "krush" will never be the same for me again. Man, do I miss em.

I sure do miss all of the friendship and support these people gave me. Thank goodness for things like being a JC and Clews to get us all back together. Anyways, HOBY was incredible. I learned so much about service, and how much we can really do to help our communities. I love HOBY. I can't believe it was only a week ago. Time flies.

Oh and we went on this AH-MAZ-ING trust walk. Everyone in our group was blindfolded and we weren't allowed to talk. We were led up, down, and through things, going through puddles, sand, and all sorts of stuff. It was so cool how we created our own language. It was full of sounds, textures, and hand gestures.I loved it. loved it. loved it. Afterwords, we as a group talked about how we as leaders, need to follow as well. We can't make a difference in the world alone, just like we couldn't get anywhere alone during the walk. I just loved this activity and I love my group.... Did I mention we won the award MOST OUTSTANDING out of all the groups at HOBY??!! This means we were the best there. We were the closest,had the best discussions, and we were just an amazing group of youth to have together!

I'm not sure what else to put, so much was packed into those incredible three days, and to be honest, I don't know that anyone really is interested in each individual panel, so I think I'll just stick to the summary idea.

I think one thing that has made it easier to come home is the fact that I have so much here. I have the best friends in the world and I love them so much.I have a loving family, with two parents who work so hard to teach me, and I have an amazing ward to takes care of each other. I love it here in this little town.

Prom 2010

I'm sure many of you got the whole story of prom from my mom's blog (miller family blog on sidebar), so here's just a few pix. To wrap up the night : Super fun date with a TON of laughs!

Dress Code: To be or not to be???

Here's that opinion article I mentioned earlier, but first the nutshell version of the story with the administration.
I wrote an article about the school dress code, after interviewing the principle and several others around the school. We didn't run the article by them before publishing (like we usually have to if we dis the school in any way). We (the awesome Miss Baker and I) gave the principal a copy to read, but he was in a meeting so we left it on his desk. Twenty minutes later, he comes in with the VP upset that I "misrepresented the student body" and "The dress code problem is only an issue with a handful of students". . . . . and all that jazz. Although I see his point, its an issue that need more attention than its getting, so being the kind of girl I am, gave it some much needed attention. Here's the article (Now keep in mind, I know its not perfect, but I put it together kinda quick):

Dress Code : It’s More Than Just How You Look

By Audrey Miller

Do you remember when you were little and you misbehaved, your mom would threaten to send you to your room, and then she never did? From these empty threats, you learned how to push the rules without ever getting in trouble. Like a young child, PHS has pushed their boundaries to extreme limits when it comes to following the district dress code.

Going down any given PHS hall, you could expect not only to find kids hurrying to class, but also find short shorts, girls with their tops hanging out, plenty of hats and several face piercings. This kind of dress is okay for a mall or other social area, but not appropriate for a learning environment such as a high school. As of August 2009, the Nebo School Dress Code clearly states that “hair shall be neat… The coloring of hair with unnatural looking colors to include costume spray will not be tolerated…Modesty shall include covering shoulders, midriff and back. Short shorts, biking shorts, tank tops, halter or crop tops, extremely short skirts or dresses do not meet the modesty standards in our schools…Hats and caps shall not be worn during school hours.” It’s no secret that PHS isn’t doing their best in this area. In fact, as a student body, we’ve slacked off so much that it’s now a problem. As a kid I was once told “You only perform as well as you dress. If you show up looking like a slacker, than that’s how you will perform.” This statement holds true to our school as well.

The way we dress not only reflects upon our GPA’s but also on other areas in our school. When you come to school with blue hair and a nose ring it’s distracting to those around you, and it affects their attitudes toward having Payson pride. Really, who wants to have pride in a school that doesn’t have pride in itself? With pride in their school lacking, little by little, students loose the want to show up to class and begin to sluff more often, therefore also affecting our attendance policy. We all hate the bagging on us that we get from Salem kids about how their school is bigger and better or whatever, but if we don’t have enough pride to even show up to class, I pose the question, can we blame them? I In a recent interview with Mr. Peery he said, “Even if students are dressed against the dress code, at least they are here learning. By suspending them or something like that, you are defeating the purpose of learning and rewarding bad behavior.” While I agree that students need to be here learning, I purpose that the dress code problem is actually hurting our overall attendance.

PHS junior, Laura Wear had this to say about the dress code, “It’s like people don’t have confidence in the administration or the teachers because they often don’t enforce the policies, so when teachers do try to enforce policies the students don’t respect their authority. It’s not just a problem with the teachers, it’s the students who break the rules, but the dress code should definitely be more strictly enforced” To get the other side of this opinion, I questioned Mr. Peery about dress code enforcement. “We do try our best to enforce the dress code. Ms. Maria Zambrano helps us a lot by bring girls dressed inappropriately to the office and helping them either find something else to wear or arrange someone to bring them something else from home. Things like hats are a little harder to enforce, as an administration, if we see kids in the hall with hats on we ask them to take them off, and they usually do until we turn the corner and then they put them back on,” he said. This kind of behavior told by both Wear and Perry is absolutely unacceptable. Not only are students disrespecting themselves through the dress code violations, but are also robbing their superiors of the respect they rightfully deserve. Believe it or not, high schoolers aren’t as big and bad as they’d all like to think they are. When you are on school property, you are subject to the faculty. Come on Payson, show some respect!

To help this problem, Nebo School District recently modified the dress code to now include a clause about girls’ tops and cleavage, and all of the facial hair changes. Although Mr. Peery had hopes to enforce this policy more fully in the future, it’s going to take the individual effort of each student and faculty member to really get our school back to where it should be. I encourage you all to take more pride in yourselves and in our school, and to put in the extra effort to double check how you look before coming to school in the morning. With the help of everyone, Payson High will be back on top!

Okay so reading this again, I realize that there are some huge errors (I only had the RD on my flash drive), but hopefully you still get the point. In my opinion, a rule that isn't enforced shouldn't be a rule; therefore, ENFORCE THE STUPID DRESS CODE OR GET RID OF IT! Rules with no support teach teens that life doesn't have consequences, now is that the message principals really want to be sending??? hmmmmmm Anyways, things got straightened out with the Admin, and both the staff and the admin have learned somethings we will take into consideration in future publications.

Excuses, excuses. . .

So, I realize that I keep on saying that I'm going to post regularly, but I never do, well who knows. . . . maybe one day I'll become a blog-addict, and maybe I won't post for another three months after this. . . .
Anyways, some exciting things have been going on lately in my life,

1. I turned sixteen! Yup, announce it from the top of P-Mountain, I'm sixteen and loving it.
2. I've been on not one, but three dates since my birthday, including going to Prom :)
3. I wrote a flippin wicked opinion article for the school paper that ruffled feathers of some certain administrators. . .
   
4. *insert some more fun teenager activities*
5. And I can't wait till summer.
   

Now that I think of it, maybe the reason I haven't posted is cause I think no one reads this, and maybe people don't. I guess between catching up the journal and the blog, sometimes one's gotta give, usually the blog. Anyways, I recently did find out that I have at least one reader and possibly a few more in the future, what I'm getting around to is that I'm just gonna go public. It seems like every time someone mentions a desire to read the blog, its put on halt because either we don't have eachother's emails or whatever, so I figure: make it public. If people read it, great. If not that's cool too. So ya. C'ya later alligators.

It seems like I never know what to talk about when I hop on this wondrous website. I think to help with this lull I'm going to start posting some of the things I write for the school paper and maybe a english thing or two. I'll try to avoid all the boring stuff, but an opinion article or two might show up from time to time. I'll still post pictures and things, but it seems like I just don't know what to say to cyberspace. So, to the huge number of people who read this blog (like 2) I'm really gonna start up again!
Any ways, I recently read The Scarlett Letter for English and I really enjoyed it. The text was pretty verbose, but I really enjoyed having a challenging read. For class, I wrote a essay on how the last chapter relates to the rest of the book. That essay is going to be my first post. To those of you who may have read it, enjoy! To those of you who haven't, its a great read!

A Final Glance at The Scarlett Letter
The last chapter in The Scarlett Letter resolves many of the major conflicts between Hester and Roger and reinforces the theme that people grow from hard times. Through Roger’s death and apparent wealth, Pearl is able to make a life for herself, and Hester is able to move on with her life. The people of Boston learn to accept others no matter their pasts. Hester becomes a dear friend to many of the townswoman and is finally recognized as the strong woman she has been all along. With the predicaments at an end, and the truth let out, The Scarlett Letter ends in a very satisfying way.
The conflict between Hester and Roger Chillingworth is ended in the final chapter. After Arthur, Hester’s old lover, reveals himself as Pearl’s father, Roger Chillingworth loses the influence he had over Hester. Because Roger no longer has a victim to taunt, he loses the will to live and passes away within a year of Arthur’s passing. Soon after Roger’s death, Hester finds that Roger has left a great deal of money to Pearl and in doing so, Pearl is able to go to Europe where she marries into an aristocratic family. Hester travels with her daughter for a few years, but ends up going back to Boston, where she is welcomed with open arms. With Roger dead, both Pearl and Hester live happy lives free from the oppression of others.
In the final chapter, the theme that people grow stronger from hard times is emphasized. While in Europe, Hester is free to live without the harshness of her past. After a few years away, she grows to realize that home is back in Boston and she returns there. Again a resident of Boston, she wears her badge of shame as a badge of honor. She is now proud of the woman she has become and she accepts the badge as a part of her individuality. The citizens of Boston soon realize how harshly they have judged Hester and she is then looked up to as a wise, strong woman rather than a sinner. This all goes to show that people change because of their trials and in many cases like Hester’s and the townspeople, those hard times make you stronger.
I loved this book because it was easy to compare Hester’s situation to our time era. Throughout the book, Hester is wrongly judged and is blamed for a sin that is not entirely her own. With today’s “get it now” attitude, people often wrongly accuse others because they don’t want to take the time to open their minds and explore all possibilities. An example of this could be found in the James Bain situation where he was accused of a rape he didn’t commit, and then put in prison for a total of 35 years. Just as in the sixteen hundreds, today if you give people the chance to show who they really are they will shock you as they exceed all of your expectations. Hester wasn’t given this chance early enough. After giving birth to Pearl, she was forced into a life of cruel judgments and isolation. It wasn’t until after she had returned from Europe that she was given the chance to show her true colors. Once she was given that chance townspeople realized what a wise, strong woman Hester truly was. Like Arthur Dimmesdale, people are too often afraid that if they reveal their past or even their personality others will not accept them. All in all, many of the problems society has today were addressed in this book which made it more interesting and more meaningful to read.
Overall, the last chapter of this book tied together all of the loose ends that Arthur’s death left hanging. The conflicts between Roger and Hester were resolved in a beneficial way for Pearl. Hester was able to reach her full potential in the woman she had become and others accepted her. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, and I find it applicable to life now. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a new understanding of human nature.


I know, its just about the most exciting thing that you've ever read. Anyways, stay tuned... until next time.....

You know its been a long time when you start checking your own blog for updates...Life is great. I don't really feel like saying all that much or even updating my life on here... So I think I'll just add a few pics.

























You know its been a long time when you start checking your own blog for updates...Life is great. I don't really feel like saying all that much or even updating my life on here... So I think I'll just add a few pics.