Gasping for Some Real School

The following is a guest blog written by Cherry Creek High School Junior Kerry Martin.  It is his original, unedited submission to the Denver Post that was published as “Breathing Life Back into Education”  Click on the link to see the Denver Post Article.  We intend to include other “Teen Voices” on this blog in the future.  Well done Kerry!  Thanks for being the first contributor!

With his proud, cereal-box stature and determined countenance crafted with a few colored pencils, Lung Man was mighty. I gave him life, like my own Frankenstein monster for a fifth grade science project: students were to go home; chow down on all the Apple Jacks they could handle until the box was vacant; cut open the front of the box to expose what would be the complex inter-working of the human respiratory system; add all necessary appendages to make the box much more than just a box; and finally…the lungs. I could breathe in and out of a tube that connected to Lung Man’s lungs from behind his paper head to expand and contract those paper sacks of life. Lung Man not only clarified and glorified the art of breathing, but probably influenced my choice years later to not try inhaling paint thinner as a hallucinogen.