Local Story- A boy in Omaha

I remember the days when I attended Westside Middle School. The kids were fun, teachers were nice, history class was long, and math class was even longer. There were times of course when I would fly through a math class and be so happy for once that I understood exactly what was going on. Then those days would come where I would sit in my desk and hope to hear one word coming out of the teacher’s mouth that I actually understood. Westside Middle School eighth grader Aaron Calderon never has days like that.

Aaron is an eighth grader who goes to honors pre-calculus class at Westside High School every other day. He has always been so advanced in his schoolwork that this really isn’t that big of a deal to him. He took the ACT last year and scored a 32 out of 36. When he was 4 years old he could read and understand negative numbers. That is some gift.

In my opinion, Aaron has the greatest gift of all. Intelligence. He truly can do anything he sets his mind to. No one in his life will ever doubt if he is smart enough to do something. The countless hours most students spend on homework and stressing out about tests is probably barely anything for him.

In the article it says that Aaron is still a normal kid and doesn’t get bullied at all. He still has his normal friends and loves to do normal kid stuff like going out to eat and playing video games on the weekend. It still is a very different life he has though and I cant help but wondering how this does effect him. Is he a different person because of this? If he weren’t so brilliant would he have the same friends? Would he still posses the same personality or same ambitions and motivation? Even though his intelligence is a blessing, could it sometimes be a small curse in disguise? I’m sure in the future Aaron would say no to that question when he is graduating from a prestigious college, landing a great job right away, and living the good life.

Free Write

I always thought I was relatively easygoing. There wasn’t ever much that would bother me. There are things people would say or things people would do that I wouldn’t like, but they still never managed to get under my skin. Even if there was anything that ever truly bothered me, I have always been too reserved to do anything about it. People could generally borrow my things and I wouldn’t mind at all. The choices they made and things they did with their time was their business so why would I let it bother me? That was before I came to college.

Now that I have a roommate things are completely different. I still feel like I am the same extremely tolerant person as before, but it just seems like now a days my patients run really short. There really isn’t a distinct reason as to why I should feel this way. There is nothing extremely bothering that my roommate has done or does that would make me feel this way, but I still do.

I know I am not the only person who feels this way either. Sure there are those people who come to college, get assigned their random roommate and on a great coincidence end up being best friends. There still is something though, about having your space drastically reduced and not having a place that is all your own. It made me realize how much I took for granted when I lived at home. Now I get mad or annoyed when she leaves her shoes by my bed, or eats some of my food, or turns on a movie that I don’t really want to watch. These trivial things get under my skin when they really shouldn’t. I worry that this experience is in some ways changing the way I am, but I am really having a hard time helping it.