You carry many things with you on a daily basis.  The items carry important memories and emotions with you wherever you go. You may not notice this until you actually sit down and think about it.

As I get ready to leave my house, I pull the charger out of my laptop. I stuff the laptop in my bag and leave my house. Where to? School. The place where you spend 7 dreaded hours on weekdays. As you walk into the extensive hallways, you see people loitering around lockers, people walking way too slow in the hallway and causing traffic, and large group of people in the lunchroom. You also smell the occasional person who wears too much cologne or perfume. Loud voices are heard as people holler across the hallway to get their friend’s attention. Lockers are sometimes heard being slammed as people rush to get to their class before the final bell. This is the place where I carry my chromebook around for 7 hours on weekdays.

Getting off the bus, I head towards the front door of the school. People funnel through the only open door, trying to escape the cold morning air. As I walk down the hall, I empty some of the contents in my backpack into my locker. I get up to walk down the hallway but I see one of my friends, John Jensen, appear around the corner. John is a tall guy, towering over me at 6 feet 3 inches. He has a dry yet sarcastic sense of humor, which is similar to mine. We have had several classes together so we were good friends. As I approach John, he asks: “Have you seen Joe today?”. As I say no to his question, we both say “Joe Mama” and pretend to laugh.

A Chromebook. Rough, black, and rectangular in shape, makes up a lot of what students do in a school day. You feel the irregular texture of the keys and the case as you pick it up. Instinctively, you start typing in your password, which is simply your name and your student id. Lended by the school district, every student at Bedford has one of these devices, not by choice, but because they were forced to. There are many pros and cons to these devices. Students either like them or they hate them. One of the reasons why is the loading speeds. They’re either decent or really slow. As the teacher tells the class to “fire up their chromebooks and go to schoology”, most of the students groan as they carelessly grab their chromebook from their backpack. Everyone sits in silence as the computer takes an eternity to load a single page. The teacher continues to drone on about how to navigate and get to the desired page, even though everyone is stuck on the same blank loading screen, impatiently waiting for the device to do its job.

Many classes are excruciatingly boring. Some classes have teachers that make you play Kahoot, Quizizz, or Quizlet Live. Sometimes, you are told to open one of those three sites and join the game. That is exactly what happened one day in class. Without knowing half the things that were taught in the past few days, I was quite nervous to play and miss several questions. One after another, I answered question after question, guessing each time and hoping to get it right. The next thing I know is that the game is over and I am one of the top players. I wonder how that could have happened!

You carry things with you every day, wherever you go. From things on your back or in your head, they may mean something to you. Take some time to sit down, relax, and think about what you carry, why you carry it, and what it means to you.