As a high school student I am constantly learning and still have much to learn. This week I was lucky enough or unlucky enough to learn the valuable lesson that if you want things to work out well- the way you want things to happen- you must be present and make sure that you get your points across. I always have been an advocate of learning through real world and life experiences so I guess in part I sort of got what I wanted.

I am the secretary/ really the one in charge because the presidents are suffering from bad cases of senioritis. Anyways the meetings are on Thursdays but I wasn't there because I was at youth day, so the treasurer was in charge of the meeting. We had just come back from Berkeley- which was so much fun. It was my first time and the clubs first time doing such a big travel conference. I organized the trip, and made review sheets for the club members to fill out and rate the trip and to help me organize a better trip for next year. One club member took it upon themselves to tell to the club that I had made these sheets to just boost my ego and made sure that no one filled out a review sheet. I found this to be extremely rude to me and this person does not have good manners or have any respect for the club leadership.

There are two things I got out of this experience. One, if you want something to run smoothly and work the way you want it to , then you need to be there to make sure things go as planned. And two no one should be pushed around or have false messages spread about them. It seemed to me that this member may be jealous or wants to be in charge, my prayers go out to them to help them learn about manners and respect. Once I found out about this I made sure to tell this member that they were completely wrong in thinking that my intent was to "boost my ego and show everyone who is 'really' in charge". One key part of being a good leader is making sure that the people you are leading are having a positive experience and feel included. A good leader tries their best. I know that I could have done things differently for a better trip and I wanted the club to be apart of the process of making a better trip. The person had disrespected me so I talked to them to make sure that they understood that what they did was unacceptable and that should not go around telling things that are not true and that actually hurt the advancement of the club. No man, women, or child should be disrespected, if you feel that you are stand up for yourself or find some people you trust to help you stand up to those who disrespect you. Every person deserves to be treated with respect.

The second thing that I learned about this week that taught me about making sure your ideas and presence is known happened with another club at my school. My friends younger brother is in my club adviser class. The club has about 50 or so t-shirts sitting in the back of his class in a box. He apparently has been giving out the t-shirts for free and using them as towels when things spilled in his class. This is not right for the club property to be treated this way, but I think what this really comes from is that he thinks that we don't care about the t-shirts anymore. I need to make sure that he understands that those shirts are club property that we are trying to sell as a fundraiser. I'm going to put the shirts in a nicer box so they don't get thrown around and wasted. I think that when I get my point across and make sure that everyone is on board that everything will be fine.

It was a stressful week. I was running on very little sleep, had tons of homework, and the normal problems of life. Sorry for the rant but I had to get it out somewhere, besides my dad.

Julia