How much time do we spend doing nothing?

What are our priorities while planning our time everyday and what is ‘free time’?

Paisley K.

Everyday ACI students go home after busy school days filled with lessons, projects, and activities. Each one has a different way to spend their time, after we finish our priorities like doing homework and eating dinner we have some time left to us. This time is what we call free time, it is the time we have to do whatever we want to.

Since free time is usually used as a time to relax all we do is watch TV, browse the web, or text our friends. This can be considered as doing ‘nothing’ since there is no active usage of our brain or a complicated process involved.

Another relaxing activity with no complex process involved in our part is sleep, we spend hours every day sleeping or lying in bed. It’s everyone’s dream to sleep throughout school vacations and get some rest, it is usually believed that sleep can also be counted as doing nothing.

But sleeping is an important part of our day, if we exclude sleeping from our priorities list and put it in free time instead, we will also have to think of eating or breathing as doing nothing. Even time spent cooking, which is a way to feed ourselves, should be counted as time wasted if this theory was true.

How much time you spend doing nothing is entirely up to what you define as ‘nothing’. Actually you are never not doing something, everything you do affects your life in some way, so doing ‘nothing’ is impossible.

And going to school, has anyone ever thought of that as doing nothing? Learning is one of the only activities that most people can agree is doing something important, but again, it is entirely up to you what you learn and where you learn it, just know that learning can never be a waste of time.

Theater production cancelled because ‘audience will not take it seriously’

Recently ISTA club members called off their performance by the director’s decisions

“Can you be a little quiet? I can’t hear what my friend is saying,” “Hey, if you are not eating, can we take this chair?” “Sorry, we didn’t mean to interrupt your practice…” These are all example reactions that this year’s ISTA club members thought the students would have if they were to do Guerrilla Theater around the campus.

Guerrilla Theater is a spontaneous performance that can take place in any public space, it was first used as a form of political protest but now it continues to surprise audiences in trains and cafes.

When the ISTA crew understood that they could not be ready in time for the original performance date, their teacher Mr.Lenderking suggested to have a Guerrilla Theater Week around the campus during lunch breaks. But the actors thought this idea would not interest the students and they even might be bothered or annoyed by the performances.

As this idea was being discussed some students stated that they were sad that the original performance in the Auditorium was cancelled, but not devastated, and that if they did it around the campus it would not be watched. Others argued that announcing a Guerrilla Theater Week during the ceremony would solve this problem and at least none of their hard work would go to waste.

At the end of the day the play directors voted for the cancellation of the scenes and the rest of the year’s practices were called off as well. This was a failure after the success of the School Play that took place in the first half of the year where club members screened a performance of ‘Picasso at the Lapin Agile’ for the school.

This is my project proposal for my school

ProjectProposal-NazKaraismailoglu

   I knocked on his door.

   It took him a while to walk to the door and before unlocking, “Who are you?” he said.

   “I thought you would remember me.” I answered, still tapping on the door with my fingers. “You have something that belongs to me and I want it back.”

   “Come on man,” he said anxiously, “you got to give me some more time–”

   “Your time is over.”

   “No, no man, please, I need time…”

   “I’m sick of you trying to steal my stuff. After all you’ve stolen from me, now you’re trying to steal my time?” I chuckled sarcastically. “You’ve made your joke a long time ago. This ain’t funny anymore.”

   “Look… I know I’ve made you wait for so long but… Look, I don’t need it anymore, but my sister, my sister–”

   “I don’t care about your sister or anything.” I interrupted. “Give me what I want.”

   He paused and didn’t make a sound.

   “Open the door.” I ordered with a cold voice.

   I heard his steps, going inside the house. It wasn’t long before I heard the noise of a window opening.

   “Get back here you horder!” I screamed and I ran to his window.

   “I’m sorry man…” he shouted. “I’m sorry to see you become such a selfish monster!”

   “Then you shouldn’t have made me become one!” I screamed and I grabbed his collar.

   “Give it to me.” I said with hate in my voice.

   “Man, you’ve gone crazy…”

   “I know you have it on you. Give it to me now, or I’ll do anything to take it from you. I’ll beat the hell out of you if you don’t stop acting like a dishonest horder!”

   He freed himself from my hands and took a deep breath. “Curse you man! Curse you! What kind of a friend are you?”

   “I’M THE KIND OF A FRIEND WHO WANTS HIS LORD OF THE RINGS BOOK BACK AFTER SEVEN MONTHS!”

   “Geez.” He grabbed the book from his jacket and gave it to me–almost threw it to me. “Here you go you sick brat. Do you think it is easy to read this book in such a short while?”

   “First of all, seven months is not a short while and everyone who is literate and with an IQ higher than 40 should be able to read this book in less than seven months.” I sighed madly. “And that ‘my sister needs it’ excuse was really lame. And running out of the window? What’s wrong with–”

   “JUST SHUT UP!” he shouted. “You ruined everything! I was trying to prepare you a birthday surprise by making a game based on your favorite novel and you were to be the main character! I needed the book to make sure everything was going on track but now you’ve ruined everything!”

   I looked at him and I felt guilty for being mad at him.

   “You planned that all for me bro?”

   “Of course bro! You’re my best bro! I love you more than I love Shrek!”

   “Well, I don’t know what to feel about that last sentence but thanks, man. I love you too.”

   We bro fisted and I went back to the house, while his mother chastised him about the window he broke by forcing it too much.

This is the short story wrote at the end of our unit on January.

Pause

This is the presentation I made for my SAT words, it may seem a bit incomplete though.

SAT Words

Since the start of the year, we have created and presented many projects, made many speeches and wrote many journals and stories, and I am proud of all, no, most of them. Recently we finished writing our short stories which were not always very short, and I enjoyed reading them a lot. Of course I love my story and I created a world I never thought I could explain to anyone else, yet managed to write it down and make a sociogram about it. This was one of my most recent achievements but it didn’t really change me or who I am, it just made me realize one more tiny detail about myself, and that happens in everyday life.

As for the biggest accomplishment of this year for me, even though it is definitely not complete and never will be, was getting people to understand me a little.

This unit has been very enjoyable, reading stories from other writers, analysing them, and learning from them the small details that would change our stories.  These stories are all stories that hold life lessons, plot twists and foreshadowings of the events that would come next, and we used these in our stories as well. Reading what my friends wrote and sharing my story with someone else was also nice, maybe we got ideas from each other. I am really happy that we could write whatever we want, and everyone wrote all kinds of different ideas, each one a new world representing the person writing it. Reading some was like reading a book, I wanted to continue and learn the end of their stories. I wish this unit would have lasted longer and we could keep writing and thinking and doing different activities about our stories and others’ stories. As for myself, I learned that I could turn the different confusing ideas into a story, and this makes it a little easier to analyse what’s inside my brain and show what I’m feeling. I also learned that I shouldn’t even try to write action based stories, I am horrible at it, and instead focus on more creative and original ideas.

This link contains an analysis of the poems ‘The Fog’ by Carl Sandburg and ‘Fire and Ice’ by Robert Frost I wrote for my writing class.

Fog, Fire and Ice