Students start Movements

For the first time ever, North High’s students are starting a movement. In David Beck’s English 2 class, students have been assigned the task of creating movements in school to see how well they can promote them. Whether it is done by word of mouth, Twitter, or just posters, the students have seen that it is not as easy at is seems to get the whole school involved in a movement.

“I told my students to create a movement of their choice, and then get the school involved,” said Beck. “I wanted them to see the challenges in creating a movement, and to have limitations and then work around them. I wanted to see what they were capable of.”

The students were divided into groups and each had to come up with their own movement, and then advertise it and get the school involved. The idea to create the movements was based off of the main character in Parable of the Sower who tried to create her own movement. Students who read other books created movements based on the ideas in those books.

“My group and I created a movement to have High-Five Day and try to bring people together that they have never talked to before,” said sophomore Brandon Etz. “A lot of people did not know about it because put up the signs in the school the day before. We had to get permission to put up the sign in front of the school, and I think that helped a lot.”

Getting an entire school of about 1450 students involved is not an easy task. Students tried to get others involved, but communication was not easy.

“My group had a hard time getting the word around about High-Five Day. We put up our posters last minute and we changed the sign out in front of the school,” said sophomore Michael Ebert. “We hoped we could bring people happiness with our movement, and I think we accomplished that.”

One group of students including Zach Mazzoni, Tim Pulliam and Matt Mertz created a movement to try and get people to bring their lunch to school on one day. Not only did these students have to advertise their movement to the school, but they had to approve their movement with the lunch staff to make sure they did not buy food that would not be eaten on that day.

“We got our idea from the book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close because we wanted to try and make a difference like Henry,” said sophomore Zach Mazzoni. “Our movement didn’t have as good of an outcome as we had hoped, but it sparked an interest. My group and I were still happy to have been part of this project.”

Even though not all of the student movements had as big of a success as they had hoped, the idea of the project and the effort put forth is worthy of acknowledgment. When students try and make a difference in school, they make a change in people’s lives.

by Taylor Weiss