Local Teen Learns a Life Lesson

Jan 28, 2013

Azure Eller is a student in KVNF's youth internship program. He produced the following short feature as part of an innovative collaboration in journalism between KVNF and Paonia High School.

I'm 15 years old, and school takes up a huge part of my life. In fact, during the school year, I spend almost half of my time IN school. Unfortunately, right now school's not my favorite thing. I wondered what some of my friends thought, so I decided to ask them.

Here's the way most of them answered, "Ummm... not really. It's not my favorite thing. It's hard. It gets old. I'm lazy."

So, I asked some adults. They answered almost the same way, saying, "nah, high school, it was not my favorite time."

So maybe school has always sucked. I asked my friends if they could think of ways to make it better. They answered, "Doing experiments in biology... that's fun", and "I'd like to see the fruits of my labor sooner, rather than later" and then, "...Yeah. If they gave you some sort of reward for doing amazing!"

It sounded like these kids have some great ideas. If these kids have such great ideas, I wonder why don't the schools ask the kids what they would want changed about school?

But, no matter what we may think the right solution is, it's not an easy fix. When I asked my friends about things that would make school better, I noticed that they had a hard time coming up with ideas to fix school. Even I had a hard time coming up with ideas to make school better, and from that I learned something.

School will never be perfect, and neither will life. This doesn't mean that there aren't ways to fix school, it simply means that I need to spend more time looking on the bright side of school, and life.

Reporting for KVNF, this is Azure Eller.