Rock Island High School - Watchtower Yearbook (Rock Island, IL)

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Mr Herrera uses his free period to grade assign¬ ments. Laura Hudson needs a rest before she can continue her research paper. Vicki Thomas. Bonita Boyd, and Nawasa Combs know that coming in after class is a good way to catch up on work. Building muscles by exercising is similar to gain¬ ing knowledge by studying. Opening 21

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1500 Minutes a week Hanging upside down is an exhilerating way to study for Melissa Seward and Tracy Firlus. No one can learn it for you. How many times have your parents told you that when you ' ve asked to stay home from school because of a shocking development in your favorite soap? We all know they are right, but how much can you learn in school ? We spend 330 minutes during a school day in class. Subtract five minutes a hour for attendance and sitting down, then multiply that number by five to get the number of minutes in a school week. You come out with 1500 minutes or 90,000 seconds. Every second of every minute during that time you r brain is receiving information that is totally new to it. No one can hear, learn, understand, put together, and remember all of that data. That ' s what I ' ve been saying all along. So how come we are required to know everything a teacher says when the tests are handed out ? a student asks. Because no one can learn everything in an hour of class. No one is expected to. This is why studying was invented. The difference between the student who sits in front of you and gets straight A ' s and the one behind you who gets by with C ' s may not be intelligence, but hard work. A student who wants to succeed in school knows that he or she is not done with a lesson when the bell rings. They must start the lesson all over again that night and keep going over it until they understand it. Because we are not able to learn everything a teacher presents to us in class, we must go back over what we missed. In essence, everyone is a teacher. In the same way an athlete must train his body; a student must train his mind. The time spent learning a subject out of school is just as , if not more, important than the time spent learning in school. For in the end, it is important that you know the material, not the other person. And that knowledge comes only through hard work and desire. No one can learn it for you. 20 Opening Having a friend to study with helps the learning process run smoother, as Dave Slivken and Marji Murphy discover.

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Friends don’t always go to the same school. Becki Neff and Debbie Posateri enjoy the company of Erin Purcell, home from college. Some people had more unusual friends than others. This stuffed deer introduces us to his pal Tom Gibbons. Everyone has a friend. Who but a Friend would lend you his last dime? Phil Siegert begs from Shannon Keatley and Sonja Motz. Some people had cars, some people had pets, many people had jobs, but everyone had friends. They made your best times, they made your worst times, they helped you out and they got you grounded. A true friend was a most valuable asset. No one else could give you that useful constructive criticsm, and only a true friend would know enough to lie when you needed to hear something good about yourself. Your friends gave you the encouragement to ask out that new girl in Algebra, and your friends sat next to you while you waited for that cute guy to call. And when you came home with a D in Physics, who made you laugh about what happened when they failed ? Friends made us feel wanted, they were a safe spot in our insecure lives. They overlooked our faults because they had ones similar, they were the only people who would truly accept us, no matter what. But while they accepted us, we also had to accept them. When they called us at three a.m. crying, we had to listen. When they got accepted to that great college and we didn ' t, we had to be happy for them. When they got all the dates and all the lucky breaks, we had to forgive them. And when they drug us out until the wee hours, confident that their parents were asleep and didn ' t suspect we ' d snuck out, and their mother called ours and we get grounded for the entire summer while they got off scot free, we still had to be their friend. They were burdenous, true, but then, so were we. But thinking back to these four, short years, would you change a thing ? Because of our own special friends at Rocky, we have a lifetime of memories. 22 Opening