Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Draft for Angry Letter

Dear Hawaii State Department of Education,

Hawaii Public Schools have been filled with a variety of classes and filled with dedicated teachers.  Your decisions on education in Hawaii have driven graduates to success after high school.

However, currently you have boosted up the requirements for graduation.  We are required to take 4 years of English, 4 years of History, 3 years of Science, and 3 years of Math in order to graduate.  That leaves us with about 6 ½ electives since Physical Education and Health take 3 semester classes.  Then with the 6 ½ electives we need to take a 2 year classes of a foreign language, which then leaves us with 4 ½ electives.  I say that's not enough classes for electives in order to explore and find out what we want to do in the future.  High School is not only about academics and your core classes but it is about finding out what you want to do in life after college or high school.  When you keep increasing the amount of classes required for graduation, we don’t have the class periods to take classes like Business, or IET, or Graphics, or even Photography to find what we really want to do with our live.

As a sophomore at Moanalua High School, I only have one true elective class this years and it is Business Core.  I have my 4 core classes: English II, U.S. History, Basic Physics, and Algebra II.  Then one of my electives is for my foreign language, which is Japanese 1.  Junior Year, I only have one elective.  I will have my 4 core classes: English III, World History, Chemistry, and Trigonometry, then one elective for Japanese 2.  Since I only had one elective I decided to take Photography 1, however two other elective I wanted to take was an Accounting class and take IET Core.  I can’t take it since I only have one period for an elective class.  Then senior year, I will only have one elective again.  Since I am taking 4 years of core classes since it looks good on college applications and I am taking Japanese 3 for foreign language.  So it looks like I will only had 4 ½ elective classes open in my schedule.

The only way to open up my schedule and get more electives on my schedule is to go to summer school.  Going to summer school is difficult since I travel in the summer for volleyball so I am unable to go to summer school.  Decreasing the graduation requirements will allow students to have more elective classes in order for them to find themselves and find something they want to do in life.  Or you should have the schools give us more class periods and longer days in order to have more electives.

Sincerely,



Mikayla Domingo

3 comments:

  1. Hey Mikayla, Good job on your angry letter, You have a very great start. You did follow the structure of the Angry letter example given by Mrs. Sueoka so youre letter is well organized. Also you give specific information needed to support your thesis like the current graduation requirements and your plans for your future courses in high school. So your essay seems to be pretty strong at the moment. Some information you could use to strengthen your letter would be what the previous graduation requirements were so the change can be seen. and thats it.
    -Aldrin Osalvo

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  2. hey mikayla, you did a really good job on your angry letter. I like how u started your letter. I notice that you followed the structure of the sample that Mrs. Sueoka's gave us which is well organized. Your essay looks pretty strong and if you send this, you probably get a response back because you gave alot of specific details that supported your thesis and what you complaining about. Overall i think you essay was pretty good to me. - LaChae McColor

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  3. Hi Mikayla,
    I agree with your teammates that you've got a pretty strong letter. For your revision, I would suggest that you perhaps use an indented list to show your schedules for the various years and perhaps just focus on what you have to take versus your electives, rather than talking about the electives that are actually "required." LMK if this is confusing :)
    I would also recommend that you decide on what specific course of action you recommend and mention it earlier. Right now, you add in the "more classes" almost as an afterthought. Focus on either fewer requirements or more classes. And support these as well. If you say fewer requirements, explain why electives are more important for success than, say, three or four math courses or something like that.
    Great start!
    mrs s

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