SAP 10 Ivy Chun 
 

Night was a word that made me relax by making me think about tranquility or my own cozy bed. That was until I read the book by same title. Elie Wiesel, the author of the book ‘Night’ took me into the era of the Holocaust to show another meaning of night, a miserable fate. By reading the book, I could indirectly experience the life during the Holocaust and learn two big lessons: silence is not the answer and living a normal life is a very grateful thing. 

The story begins with the warning from a character named Moishe, who stated that he escaped from the cruel concentration camp. Even though he claimed people need to leave their homes right away to be safe, people did not listen to him. Soon after, Nazis herded out the Jews along with Elie, the main character, and the nightmarish journey ensues. People including Elie arrived at Auschwitz and they eventually arrived in Buna, a work camp. There, anyone who was weakened were put to death. Anyone who resisted were put to death. Anyone who had failed to survive with only one piece of bread a day were put to death. All in one, most of the Jews became inhuman to avoid their inevitable death and the main character, Elie has to suffer all of the crisis to survive.

After reading this book, the first biggest message I learned was that silence can bring harm to many. Elie Wiesel stated, “What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.” Even though silence is something that should not be kept, unfortunately, in the story, silence was chosen among the people and it further exacerbated more people’s life. To be specific, with the increase of Anti-Semitism there was a pervasive decimation of the Jews with impermissible defamation of character. Surprisingly, what the whole society chose to do was remain silent about it all. While there was no action to fix the problem, a countless people faced a deep dark night which was an unprecedented terrible pain caused by silence. By reading this book, I now know that there is always a possibility of this great night or even smaller injustices in the future unless people desire the right things by raising their voice and breaking the silence. 

Furthermore, the forgotten gratitude in my fast-paced semester could be unearthed after reading this book. “When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity,” the author states, “a person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.” I absolutely agree that attitude toward gratitude can define a person as it is really important. However, I also admit that so far, I have complained a lot. In retrospect, the Jews during the Holocaust period had literally nothing. They had no house, no family, no freedom and no foods. These to me are too basic to make me grateful. However, because of the lack of these fundamental things, people in Auschwitz deserted their morality and even discarded their parents to have one more piece of bread. The inhuman circumstances resulted in inhuman behaviors. In light of this story, when I looked upon my own life it was full of not only the fundamental things but also love. A piece of bread is not important in my life because there are enough food for me to eat. Instead I was also blessed with the comfort of dealing with a flow of thoughts on morality due to the endless perseverance, guidance and care of the teachers, not to mention the freedom I have to experience diverse opportunities. Nevertheless, I sought for more things for my own growing greed. For most of the time, I was in the midst of complaints, trying to get the things that were not provided to me. When in fact, I already possessed numerous things that satisfied all of the criteria for happiness. 

Night. The word that used to mean tranquility now is a word that reminds me of the attitude to seek for the right thing and gratitude. Although it is a word that expresses a miserable history in the past rather than stopping there, I wish to use it to remember the lessons that I learned from the long, nightmarish journey so I can help create a better influence for our future. 

"Make It Start"

I hated myself the most.
But I was the only one I have.
Cold nights covered me with dust.
I don’t even know am I brave.
 

But you make me move.
To me, you are the sun.
Because of you, I can love.
To you, I’m just a moon.

On a dark night when the sun and moon were hard, 
The tingling of my heart, 
On a dark night still, you are the only one in the world, 
Maybe it is a new start.

If someone said
You’re covered in scars.
Then answer
It's all my sign of stars.

Michael Joo (11th grade)

When I first opened this book, I perceived this book as a typical novel, which doesn’t require contemplation, yet after finishing the book, it left me with numerous values and inquiries. Great Expectations is a novel written by Charles Dickens. Pip, the main character of this novel, is an ambitious person and encounters countless obstacles in his life. He has several life stages - innocence, failure and maturity. When he was innocent, he didn’t understand the distinct social hierarchy. However, after Miss Havisham’s rejection to marrying Estella, his innocence is lost, and his ambition begins to grow. In the second step of his life, his determination towards a higher social status climaxes. A stranger gives Pip a great expectation, and Pip spends all of his money to pursue it, without considering the repercussions. Lastly in the third step of his life, Pip realizes his mistakes and reflects upon himself, already corrupted and with astronomical debt. I confess that I have many similarities with Pip. Like Pip, I know that I am ambitious. Reflecting on it, I think ambition always starts with the same reason as Pip.

“…as Joe and Biddy became more at their cheerful ease again, I become quite gloomy. Dissatisfied with my fortune, of course, I could not be, but it is possible that I may have been, without quite knowing dissatisfied with myself.” 

This is one of the quotes that stimulated Pip’s ambition: his abhorrence of himself and the desire of reputation.

My ambition also started similarly. My family or friends who were talking about my shortcomings have always stimulated me to achieve more, gain recognition and no longer hear these words again. I wanted to show them my potential and aptness. I’m sure everyone has ambitions, which can be both an impulse towards success, but also a driving force to failure. As for myself, I regard my ambition as a diving force to failure. I regard it as an ardent desire for rank, fame or power. For instance, I always have to get a reward in any extracurricular activities that I participate in. Whenever I register for an activity, I start only with the feelings of great excitement and anticipation. However, as the competition approaches, my ambition to get a reward and to do better than others, which is settled deep inside my heart, starts to grow. And after competitions where I failed to get a reward, my conflicting emotions start to flush out of my mouth. This kind of ambition not only impeded my growth but also gave a negative influence on my surroundings. For example, Pip’s life completely collapsed. But with me perceiving this issue earlier than Pip, I know that if I don’t solve this egocentric problem now, it can and will only get worse. Thus, in order to diminish this problem, I began contemplating my perception of extracurricular activities and also stopped having the mindset of wanting to be better than others. I began reconsidering the reason why I attend competitions.

Is it for brightening my resume, or is it for my personal growth? After reflecting, I realized that every time I attend a competition, no matter what the result, I always have learned something precious through it. The result of the competitions gave just a momentary happiness, but the process and experiences were lifelong lessons. Some examples of how I grew are seen in the progress in my English proficiency, the significance of teamwork to me and a trivial but a closer step towards achieving my vision. And this is now the reason why I participate in competitions. I want to develop myself through it. I would not let my ambition outweigh my reasons for participating in competitions, since it just drives me away from my original purpose of participating. Once my ambition takes over my reason for participating, I won’t have the opportunity to learn through it but be overwhelmed with greed.

While reading this book, I learned that people shouldn’t live base on their ambition. When we think that ambition is controlling us, we should struggle to escape from it or seek support from others to break away from it. Because excessive ambition will eventually lead to an irreversible tragedy. As closure, I would like to share a quote that captures my lesson from this book with everyone.

“Ambition is not itself an evil: nor is he to be condemned whose spirit prompts him to seek fame by worthy and honorable ways”

– Francesco Guicciardini. 

Please remember that we all could have ambition, but we should never let ambition have authority over us.

The Right Mirror
11th grade

We are now Juniors, but we were all once in CSL like you guys. In the process of training in Wanbang, we were able to see our true selves through many mirrors. 

The Mirror of Responsibility
CSL was the time we were introduced to new mirrors we had never seen before when we were in Korea. The most important mirror we learned to appreciate was the mirror of responsibility. 
Everyone has a responsibility to be a servant leader in our community. At first, we were really shocked to see students clean the classroom, only because they loved their peers and felt the responsibility to provide them a clean environment to study. These acts of students became the mirror of responsibility that everybody in the class soon could see their reflections on. One by one, students began carrying out their responsibility and soon we were all one step closer to being servant leaders in our classroom.

The Mirror of Study 
There were many times that we thought we had studied really hard, but our scores remained the same or our passion to study didn’t last really long. Do you know why? It is because we were pretending to study, in other words, we were studying for high scores - even studying just to score higher than a certain person. However, through PBL, campaign fairs, and Solomon Project, we were able to look into another mirror, the mirror of study, to help us realize that we should study not for college or comparisons but to improve ourselves and to complete our duty as students. Through studies, we also acquired new knowledge and was able to expand our understandings about our own passion or dream. 

Mirror in Relationship
For young teenagers, there are so many times that we choose to use how others view us as the mirror that defines ourselves. However, in that mirror, our flaws are always badly exaggerated. Focusing on the mirror of others, we even started to deny our positive qualities and lost confidence in our daily lives. Finally, with the help of caring teachers, friends and genuine room leaders, we realized that we had been looking into the wrong mirror. In the end, we learned that the true mirror we need to see ourselves in is through the mirror of the perfect love. People’s words are worth considering, but they are not everything.
We can see that the training we are completing here at Wanbang all strengthens this “mirror of the perfect love”. Our dear friends and dorm family, we hope that you will explore many more different kinds of mirrors like the mirror of responsibility and the mirror of study, but most of all the mirror of the perfect love. 

True Happiness in an Unlucky Life
 

We can’t avoid slumps in our lives. However, for some people, the difficulties can be more frequent than others, and usually we call them ‘unlucky people’. The book Holes is a story about an unlucky boy—Stanley Yelnats, who was innocent but falsely charged for stealing sneakers and forced to join Green Lake camp— a detention center where they made the delinquents dig holes in a desert. Because of Stanley’s bad luck, many poor and unfair situations happen at the camp, but at the end of the story Stanley finds happiness. 

Many things happen in this book and most of the situations Stanley faces are unfair, but they are also critical. The scene that left the deepest impression on me was when Stanley taught Zero, his illiterate friend at Green Lake Camp, how to write the alphabet and when Zero helped Stanley dig a hole. At first, Zero was a boy who only knew how to speak, but one day when Stanley was reading his mother’s letter, Zero approached Stanley and asked if he could teach him to read. Stanley refused at first since he was so tired and the time Stanley would have to teach Zero was his only break time to recover and recharge his energy to dig holes the next day. Zero’s request was too heavy for him. When Stanley tried to refuse Zero’s request, Zero came out with a new suggestion: Zero would help Stanley dig holes and Stanley would teach Zero the alphabet. Stanley accepted Zero’s deal. Despite receiving resentment from others, they continued to help and comfort each other. From this moment, I found that helping each other and having cooperation can help us overcome “unluckiness”. This life lesson can be applied to my life. For example, we have study groups in Wanbang which are small groups where students gather together and share what they learn. We not only can learn what we’ve lost during the class but we also share our knowledge. We understand that this is a way to overcome the limitation of knowledge by a single person. Therefore, cooperating habits can make us both proud and pleased and help us overcome “unluckiness” or other negative factors.

I was also deeply impressed when Stanley was finally freed from Green Lake camp. In my view, he was able to be freed because of his justice. Throughout the whole story, Stanley always did the right thing no matter how risky it was for him. He was a boy who risked himself to help others and finally received the reward of his actions. Justice brought good luck to the unlucky Stanley. We can find many moments in the story that show Stanley’s justice. He risked himself to find lost Zero, he always said the truth and patiently waited until others realized the truth, even when they teased him. If I was in his situation, it would be really hard for me to be truthful and just, especially if I had to risk something. However, the honest and kind Stanley was able to boldly dedicate himself to his values and cope with his difficulties. He is a consistent boy and his kindness brought everyone happiness and gave a positive influence. I decided to be honest and just consistently like Stanley, even when it has a risk.  

Overall, I enjoyed this book very much. This book was my first English book that I completed in middle school, and it captivated my attention with many interesting and fun scenes. Not only was the book interesting, but it also taught me an important life lesson. I am often pessimistic about my life, especially when I’m unjustly misunderstood by other people, or unluckily fail to do something I really put an effort on doing. However, after I read Holes, I found that a mindset like Stanley can help us find true happiness even in an unlucky life through cooperation and being just. These kinds of happiness aren’t easy to find, but as long as we find them and remember them, we can be positive and happy.