Kocher English Blog

For the survival unit, we started off with the book,  The Old Man and The Sea.  This was about a man who wanted to catch his prize fish, the marlin, just to avoid poverty. Just him, his boat, and his supplies, the old man heads out to sea facing the  ocean and the different hardships it throw at him. Then we  watched  three  Survivorman   episodes, where Les Stroud had to use his own techniques and survival skills to help him along in his  week-long   journeys . The first episode we watched was titled "Alaska" where Mr. Stroud   takes on the harsh yet beautiful wilderness of Alaska. Throughout his seven day time span, Les uses a variety of survival skills to help him along with many resources the Alaskan terrain has to offer.   In the  episode of Survivor Man, "Lost at Sea", Les Stroud endures the harsh environment of the bottomless ocean. Some of his biggest fears; drifting so far that his safety boat can't find him, starvation, heat stroke, and of course shark

For the Speak Truth to Power project, I was partnered with Cookie  Al tieri  and our Human Rights Defender was Jamie  Nabozny . For this project, we were assigned a human rights defender and  had to identify how our person tried to fix the issue they were defending and how it was connected to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Also, we had to teach the rest of our class about the  status  of the human rights issue our person is  defending as  well as  what, in this case Jaime's, life can teach us. Jamie  Nabozny  grew up in the small town of Ashland, Wisconsin. Growing up, he ran into some bullying issues as soon as he reached middle school. The physical violence got worse as his schooling went on, so he went to the school for help. When he told the school authority, he was told to expect the abuse because of his sexuality and stop "acting so gay". After this, Jamie  conti nued  to be bullied, but when he became older, he took legal actions to stand up for himself

The Veteran's History project was a new and interesting experience for me. When Veteran's Day came around, we were assigned a  veteran that was  attending the assembly at the school. I was  partnered  with my fellow classmates, Aubrey T ennant  and Ethan Brown. Our veteran was Timothy E. Stanley and he was in the United States Air Force.  His enlisted career in the air force lasted four years and one year in the international guard .  He wanted to be in the military but he felt the air force was the safest place to be where he could work on planes and get a career and not get out and not have a job that he wasn’t going to keep doing. He currently still works in the  air- line  industry.   Training was difficult he described.  He went to  Blacklan  Air Force Base in San Antonio Texas, that’s where basic training was . Basic training in air force from what he has heard is a lot easier than other types of basic training. By the time basic training was done they had to do 15 push-u

At the beginning of the school year, I set academic, personal, and athletic goals for myself. On an academic level, I wanted to be on honor roll and be a scholar-athlete for each season I was eligible for. My goals as an athlete are pretty similar to my academic goals because I wanted to be a scholar-athlete. Also, I wanted to be nominated or picked as Athlete of The Week for two out of the three seasons. A personal goal I set for myself at the beginning of the year was to improve my communication skills as well as know what I want to do when I attend to Canisius College in the fall. By this time of the year, I've basically met all of my goals. I received the scholar-athlete honor for every season with an honorable mention in the Buffalo News in basketball and volleyball. I also achieved the other part of my academic goal because I made honor roll every semester by two or three points. My personal goals have been reached on the fact that I know what I want to study when I attend Ca

So freshman orientation came around, I felt lost and knew no one. The, my sister introduced me to  Cookie Altieri. Yeah, Cookie was one of my  first friends at Alden.  On my first day of freshman year, I had to come in early with my sister for the senior breakfast. So, imagine me, in an ugly outfit, that I probably thought was great, surrounded by the graduating senior class. I can still feel the awkwardness to this day. The, when the bell rang, I had to go to Mrs. Nelson's algebra class. Basically, I had a traumatizing first day of freshman year. Since I was coming from St. John's, I really didn't know anyone besides my classmates that  gradua ted  with me at St. John's. As my high school years continued on, it quickly came to my senior year. MY favorite memory was in volleyball when my team won the sectional title against East Aurora and got the chance to compete in the regional championship in Syracuse. Then, back to my sophomore year, my softball season was my fav

In my sixth through  eighth  grade years, I was at St. John's. I was one out of twenty-one in my   class and my class was considered one of the biggest classes to go through the school. The most I can remember from St. John's was from my  eighth  grade year. My basketball team was league champs three years in a row. If you go in the St. John's gym, there will be three blue  banners from those years and one of them even has the names of all of the girls on it. People may think private schools are very strict, but my classmates and I actually had a lot of fun. We played games in lunch like spoons and of course it got heated every single time we played. Then, when Christmas came, so did the dreadful  Ch ristmas  plays. We participated in one every year from Kindergarten until our eighth grade year, but I remember despising these the most in my middle school years. They were absolutely terrible,. The only good thing about them was, that we got out of class for rehearsal at leas