The Paw Print

By Luna Randall and Venye Zhao, Staff Writers

As the school year commences, new faces are coming together for the first time. Freshmen like us have a lot to balance now. From classes, to homework, to navigating the halls, to what clubs we want to participate in, it’s easy to get lost in the storm of responsibilities. 

One thing we should all try to make time for, though, is connection. For millenia, humans have bonded through storytelling. So, we asked different freshmen for some of their most hilarious hijinks!

Sometimes we didn’t have the best ideas and made mistakes. However, it’s from these mistakes that we learn the most. For example, Venye Zhao once bombed a very important test. “In 7th grade, my English teacher gave us a final exam about a poem called ‘This is Just to Say’ by William Carlos Williams. For context, the poem is about plums in a refrigerator,” he said. “Because the poem was deceptively simple, I completely misinterpreted the poem and bombed the test.”

“I didn’t get a single question correct, but my teacher gave me a few pity points, and I got a 4% on the exam. Somehow, I still managed to pull through with an A!” Venye added.

Outside of academics, we also go to school to work on our social skills, which help us throughout our entire lives. Kids always seem to be saying random things at the wrong times. 

Luna Randall learned an important lesson in 7th grade: think about what someone else is saying before blurting out the first thing that comes to mind.“In seventh grade, I was eating a fig bar in the lay time of my History class. The sun was shining, painting the room with a warm hue,” Luna told the Paw Print. “My bar was sweet and crumbly. So, my friend, upon eyeing it, asked if I had another one to give her, saying, ‘Can I have a bar?’”

“Back then, I had been watching a lot of rap analysis videos, so the topic of hip hop was on my mind. I replied with out-loud lyrical poetry, thinking she meant rap bars instead of granola bars,” she said.

However, every now and then we also make correct decisions. It’s surprising to think that, even at such a young age, we can decide who we like and who we don’t. One freshman, Deepti Koduru, told us about how she instinctively knew who she should be friends with.

“When I was in kindergarten, I was really good friends with one of a pair of twins. One time, the twin that I was friends with didn’t come to school for 3 days in a row. When she finally came back she had a cast on her arm. It was rumored that the twins got pulled out of their aftercare because their mom thought one of the workers had pushed her down the stairs. Once we were at recess, she suddenly started crying and told me that in their aftercare her twin pushed her down the stairs and broke her arm. As you see, I had very good judgement and was only friends with the nice twin,” she told the Paw Print.

We usually can’t make smart decisions like Deepti on our own, so we need teachers to show us what we should do. Teachers are some of our earliest role models. They’re some of the first adults we see on a regular basis outside of the home. We like some of them and we dislike others, but at the end of the year, we still remember them, especially when they do funny things.

“In 3rd grade, for some reason I was really stupid, so my teacher called me up to her desk,” Sen Gracia said. “She told me to turn to the side. She looked in my ear and remarked, ‘just checking if there’s still a brain in there.’”

Teachers can also get tired of everything we throw their way. Kids do all sorts of crazy stuff and teachers have to deal with all of it. One of the things that was really popular in elementary school was getting married. Another freshman, Adrian Gonzalez, said, “We had a class hamster in 5th grade. As I was feeding it one day, I said that I thought it was really cute! I was petting it and having so much fun feeding it. Someone else saw how interested I was in the hamster, so they told me, ‘If you think it’s so cute, why don’t you marry it?’ So, of course I married the hamster. 

“Unfortunately, my wife did not think so highly of our relationship. The next year, on a day like any other, the grade below us was very irresponsible and left the cage open. My hamster wife ran away and somehow got outside. The next morning, we found a crushed hamster on the road. I was suddenly the youngest widower at my elementary school,” Adrian said.

Can you imagine if your spouse ran away from you and got run over by a car? Wouldn’t that be just tragic? Looking back on it, we wonder what the teachers must have been thinking when they saw this stuff. It’s not hard to imagine that sometimes teachers got fed up with everything that we put them through. Victoria Sasieta told us about one of these teachers.

“In 6th grade, I had a teacher who was really lazy. She made us watch a horror movie instead of teaching us anything. She enjoyed spraying Febreze at kids. She also had a megaphone that she never used, but she kept saying that the batteries were coming soon. Her contract did not get renewed,” Victoria said.

“My Spanish teacher in 5th grade gave up because my class was so bad, so halfway through the year he put up a fake presentation and told us to play video games and watch YouTube in class,” said Etta, another freshman. “In middle school I had a different Spanish teacher who said that he was going to quit and go back to being a flight attendant because of us, and that he didn’t like us as people and wouldn’t want to be our friend.”

Still, most of our teachers put in the effort to teach us every day, so we should put in the same effort as students. Everybody has tons of past experiences that help guide us in our choices, so to everybody reading this (but especially freshmen), good luck and stay locked in!