Week 2- New Year's Resolutions

“May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year”

Naomi-

           For us Jews, it's already the new year.  The Jewish New Year is known as Rosh Hashanah; or you might know it as the day when all the Jewish kids are absent.  “Rosh”, in Hebrew means head, and “Hashanah” means of the year.  On this holiday, we eat apples dipped in honey, to symbolize a sweet new year.  Anyways, enough background of the actual holiday.

            Just like new year’s, we also make resolutions.  I think we can all agree we are human and aren’t perfect. We all have our little flaws that make us who we are.  But as well as those flaws, there are also probably things that you have done that you may regret, or feel the need to apologize & ask forgiveness.  I have some things that I’d like to start fresh with at this opportunity given. 

            Procrastinating, something we are all guilty of doing at one point or another.  Always having been the high energy, easily-distracted child, I tend to do this quite a bit. Starting high school this year, it’s already like a fresh start but I’d like to keep my good habit of coming home and doing my homework before anything else.  So instead of coming home and watching one episode of Futurama and 7854365984230 episodes later, realizing it’s 10:00 at night & I haven’t even started my homework, do it first before everything else. A hope I have for the new year is that I maintain my social life so that school doesn’t totally take over. 

            Being more outgoing and a better friend has been a resolution every year for the past 3 years, and each year I have been slowly getting closer to my goal.  I’d like to just be a nicer person in general.  Making plenty of new friends this year won't be too hard now that I’m at Berkeley High. I’d like to work towards being easier to approach and not judging people before getting to know them.  Having a more optimistic outlook on life would be nice too.  Accepting that what I can accomplish while trying my best is enough. 

Mari-

The Jewish new year has passed, and I have been thinking of what I want for myself and others in this upcoming year. I just recently started high school at Berkeley, so most of what I have to say has something to do with that change. The transition from a smaller, closed campus school, to a huge 3,000 student campus has been an eventful one. Although I have not experienced much in terms of the high school social scene, I think that I have a pretty good idea that it is quite different. I mean for example, in 8th grade, the cliques at school had been already formed from sixth grade, so it would have been hard to try to make new friends after the community had already made tight bonds with each other. In high school, there are so many different locations that feed into the school, that it is very easy to make new friends and relationships while everything is so new.

So, as you might have guessed, one of my new years resolutions, is to branch out to other people to make new friends as well as my previous ones from middle school. Another new years resolution/ goal is that I want to have more freedom now that I’m in high school. Previously, my parents would have to cart me around everywhere, but i have now had experience with the public transportation system and I can get almost everywhere and am much more familiar with the town.