Varun's AP English Blog

My entire family is vegetarian.  Well, almost.  My entire father's side is vegetarian and my mother's side is also fully vegetarian, but when it comes to my direct family, the only person who's a vegetarian is my mother.  I hadn't really thought of this much until this week where we talked about eating lobsters.  The part of this week that really stuck with me is the video that was shown of the conditions of these animals before they are killed.  Multiple chickens are kept in a single cage, many die of starvation, many have their beaks seared off by a hot rod.  It's "something like a Roman Circus or medieval torture-fest"  It made me so sad to see these animals getting treated like this.  So, I want to try to change my diet and buy "ethical meat items."  These items will be meats from animals that were treated right and properly.  Like the lobster being boiled alive, these animals are being kept in the most inhumane conditions possible....

      This week, when reading about how the trust of citizens was abused by the government, I kept thinking about how many kids today who use the internet are conned online.  Let's take one of the most basic examples of this.      The infamous Clash of Clans scam .  The way this scam works is the website lures in innocent kids through YouTube ads (which aren't monitored properly) into downloading offers that not only take their account information but also install malware:  Sub Seven , Beast Trojan , Bifrost , etc. The rhetoric in these websites is so convincing that some use chatboxes with bots where one will say "Is this legit" and another one will go "I just used, it works!" and will even respond to your questions that you ask in order to fool you so well that you might as well be seeing pink elephants.  It's  really sad to see kids get not only their account stolen, but their computer backdoored and used for all sor...

This entire week, when talking about boys against girls, all I could think of was my time in Avondale School District, mainly my 7th-grade year.  Avondale, unlike the Troy School District, isn't as fancy or have the same level of students.  Instead, students there (in my observation, at least) are more focused on more temporary circumstances, one of them is dating.  In middle school, everyone was convinced that you had to have a boyfriend/girlfriend in order to be socially acceptable.  The thing that really stood out to me about this concept was it was never the guys who tried to look good, it was always the girls.  The point of me writing this is that girls at Avondale Middle School followed the representation Tannen had said, wearing "tight or revealing" clothing while men's clothing selections were "incomparably narrower."  That's why moving to the Troy School District has made me really recognize what I have and be grateful for it.  In this distric...

When we read Staple's piece about a black man in a public space, we observed how people judged him based on his looks instead of who his true identity was.  People attributed "a lethality... to [him]."  I can't say that I've been in the exact position he has, but I have been in a similar situation where people immediately group you.  I go to India quite often, and in that time, I always have to speak with the locals in the city I'm visiting in Tamil (the local language), which is no problem because I'm fluent, but others are quick to judge that I'm not.  When I'm in India, I speak to my sister in English, so when overheard, it would lead someone to believe that I don't live in India.  The majority of the time I encounter someone, they will talk to me in English instead of Tamil, regardless of how fluent they can speak it, until I start talking in Tamil.  It's hard to explain, but whenever this happens, I feel like there's an unnecessary...