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Connection to my SSR book. My book is called Here to Stay by Sara Farizan. This book connects to my theme because Bijan’s life quickly turns into a complicated series of events when he is chosen to play on the varsity basketball team. He starts out enjoying his quiet life in high school where he’s not super popular, but he has a fair number of good friends. When he’s asked to join the varsity team, he at first is happy and enjoying all of the extra attention. However when someone at school posts a photo of him on social media that makes him look like a terrorist, everything changes. Bijan then has to learn how to deal with his “new life” as a star basketball play AND all of the negative attention. Another way the book connects to the theme is when another complication happens: Bijan suspects it is one of his friends who posted the photo.

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young adult fiction / romance / contemporary

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young adult fiction / social themes / bullying

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young adult fiction / social themes / prejudice & racism

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young adult fiction / sports & recreation / basketball

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young adult fiction/romance - contemporary

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young adult fiction/social themes - bullying

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young adult fiction/social themes - prejudice & racism

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young adult fiction/sports & recreation - basketball

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basketball; bullying; cyberbullying; islamophobia; racism; lqtbq; we need diverse books; diverse books; diverse readers; #ownvoices; own voices; ownvoices; celtics; high school; high school romance; protests; social justice; varsity team; playoffs; play offs; mascot; student leadership; comics; pop culture; nerd; jock; private school; coming of age; terrorists; books about bullying; books about standing up for yourself

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young adult fiction / romance / contemporary

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young adult fiction / social themes / bullying

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young adult fiction / social themes / prejudice & racism

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young adult fiction / sports & recreation / basketball

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young adult fiction/romance - contemporary

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young adult fiction/social themes - bullying

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young adult fiction/social themes - prejudice & racism

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young adult fiction/sports & recreation - basketball

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Amazon.com: Here to Stay (9781616207007): Farizan, Sara: Books

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I think The Odyssey is worth reading because even though it was written thousands of years ago, many authors today still reference it. Many current books,  movies,  and tv shows recreate the classic stories. It is also a story that has a universal theme topic that anyone, anywhere can understand and relate to: what it means to go on a journey.  It's also worth reading because it's a story that has just about anything you could possibly want in it:
murder, romance, mystery, weaponry and fighting, comedy, fantasy creatures, adventure, magic, sorcery, disguises (spies), and MORE!

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Many times in life, things do not go according to plan, but somehow everything ends up as it should be. This quote relates to the theme because it helps to show that we learn and grow from our experiences, even the ones that may be negative or unexpected.

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This commercial for this company relates to the theme because it shows that people today are interested in recognizing  that your life doesn't just consist of your decisions and your actions. Your life is also partly predetermined on those who came before you when you research genetic make up and ancestry.

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In this movie, a teenager makes many mistakes and takes risks in his journey to tell his family and friends he is gay.

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Love, Simon | Official Trailer 2 [HD] | 20th Century FOX

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Though this song is about saying goodbye, it captures what you want to understand as you look back at your life: the memories, the happy times, the sad times, and the times you were unsure about the future.
Life certainly is "unpredictable, but in the end is right" because no matter where your life's journey takes you, most things seem to work out when you look back on everything that happened.

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Green Day - Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) [Official Music Video] [4K UPGRADE]

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Odysseus is the main character in The Odyssey. Readers follow his journey to get home after the trojan war.

Odysseus represents the theme because the entire story revolves around his journey to get home. He faces most the of the obstacles and it is he who returns home.

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Here is where Ms. Starmann would discuss a very specific example from the story to explain how Odysseus develops the theme using the quote below. Specifics aren't mentioned here now to avoid spoilers!

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When students are making decisions about what to do after high school, it is often referred to as a journey.

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Every episode of this television show involves the characters embarking on an epic journey full of strange quests and creatures.

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This movie is a modern story where the main character goes on a long journey to accomplish a goal.

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This ad talks about making discoveries as part of life's adventure.

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Robin Williams Apple iPad Air Commercial

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In this movie a boy is lost at sea. He is trying to make the difficult trip home home while while taking making friends with a tiger.

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This picture is a nice representation of what a life journey looks like. You are always ready for the next step and the events of the future unclear.

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"For never, never, wicked man was wise" (Homer 1132).

Here is where Ms. Starmann would discuss a very specific example from the story to explain how Odysseus develops the theme using the quote below. Specifics aren't mentioned here now to avoid spoilers!

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Odysseus chooses not to tell his men about how the bag of wind works. (Homer 1125)

Here is where Ms. Starmann would discuss a very specific example from the story to explain how Odysseus develops the theme using the quote below. Specifics aren't mentioned here now to avoid spoilers!

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This article represents a modern-day odyssey a man took trying to find his brother.

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Don Schroeder sped his Jeep along a roller coaster country road, made a quick turn into a gravel lane and surveyed a tidy house that could hold the answer he'd been seeking for nearly 20 years.

Nobody was home.

He penned two brief notes on lined paper in the neatest handwriting he could muster in the cold and affixed them on a door and in a mailbox. Then he left.

"My name is Don Schroeder. I am looking for James White. We may be related."

It was mid-December, just weeks after the Post-Dispatch wrote a story about Schroeder's 18-year search for his birth father: a man with the generic name of James White who dated his birth mother just twice after meeting her at a drive-in, Wild's Palace of Poison on Lemay Ferry Road. Then he joined the Army and dropped out of sight.

Missouri's law regarding the release of adoption records remains one of the more restrictive in the nation, causing adoptees or birth parents to become amateur detectives to find their blood relatives.

Schroeder had little to go on beyond his birth father's name - plus the help of researcher Mary Helen Allen, a volunteer "angel" with Adoption Triad Connection of Mid-Missouri.

He had an approximate age and knew his birth father had entered the Army at Fort Leonard Wood several months before Schroeder was born in May 1956. So Schroeder and Allen had resorted to scanning reels of microfilm listing thousands of fading names on intake records for Fort Leonard Wood in 1955.

They found seven James Whites in all, but none was a match, and their hopes waned.

Schroeder said he had been given a good life by his adoptive parents, who have since died. But he has always felt slightly adrift.

He found his birth mother easily in 1996 but wanted to find his birth father so his adult children and grandchildren would know their full lineage.

"I wanted my children to know where I came from," he said.

Not long after the newspaper story, Schroeder gained the help of Niels Zussblatt, an analyst at the National Personnel Records Center with a reputation for finding relatives of babies conceived while U.S. soldiers served overseas.

Zussblatt found record of a James Carl White with a July 18, 1935, birth date, making him 20 when Schroeder was born - a little younger than they thought, but still a potential match. More promising, his Army enlistment was about 10 months prior to Schroeder's birth.

Records showed White had died of a heart attack in Littleton, Colo., in 1989 at the age of 54.

With that bit of information, Allen used the website findagrave.com to turn up the gravestone of James Carl White. Engraved on the stone was the name of a wife, Nola Coriell, who died in 2002.

Allen quickly tracked down a Paul Coriell who was alive and also residing in Littleton. Schroeder called him and learned Nola had married him after James Carl died.

Indeed, Coriell said he and James Carl had been close friends. Even better, he said one of White's surviving sons lived somewhere south of St. Louis.

His name was James Guy White and he lived in the tidy house on a gravel road 15 minutes outside of Washington, Mo. - about 80 miles from Schroeder's home near Jefferson City.

Within days of finding the address, Schroeder went speeding off in his Jeep to the house.
'A DEAD GIVEAWAY'
White and his wife, Christy, were away in Branson on the day Schroeder appeared at their house. When they returned, Schroeder's mysterious message sparked different reactions.

Christy joked, "Do you have more children out there that I don't know about?"

But James Guy was sanguine. It stirred up emotional stuff. James Carl and his mother divorced. James Carl then left him and his younger brother, Eddie, to first go to California with another woman and later settle down in Colorado, where he married Nola. James Guy didn't really know his father until he was 21.

James Guy knew enough about his father's past to suspect that he could have more half-siblings with different mothers. He only half-joked that James Carl had fled to Colorado to hide.

So he called Schroeder and invited him back over.

As soon as he walked in the door, Christy said, she knew they were brothers.

"The eyes were a dead giveaway."

Don is bald on top and wears a baseball cap to hide it. And James Guy has short hair. But their build is the same. They have barrel chests, square chins and square, flat noses. They each excelled at sports, mostly because of their strong left arms that gave one an ace hockey shot and the other a big baseball arm. Both were football fullbacks. And as Christy White pointed out, they both have the gift of gab.

In January a DNA test proved the bond within 99-percent certainty.

For Don, the results were a relief after years of searching.

He now knows his grandfather Lexy White was a musician. He knows he has four half-brothers, including one named Timmy with another mother who lives somewhere in California. There is the possibility that there is also a half-sister.
MIXED EMOTIONS
For James Guy, meeting his half-brother has been very confusing.

Though happy to have been found by Don, James Guy said he wasn't prepared to fully talk about the sometimes painful past he'd put behind him. But he's turning 60 soon. And the two of them share that gift for talking, so that helps.

"When I first met Donald and he spent the day, I was exhausted. I mean just mentally exhausted," James Guy said. "Afterward, I said, 'Christy, this is stirring up so many memories and feelings.' So I'm just slowly taking it in."

Growing up in St. Louis, James Guy said, he had no contact with his father until 1976, when his grandmother offered to drive him, his wife and their young son anywhere in the country as a graduation present for finishing automotive repair school. White wanted to go to Florida, but his grandmother swayed them toward Colorado. After riding through the night, White woke up in the car somewhere in the suburbs of Denver. His grandmother turned the car into a subdivision, and White knew immediately where she was taking him.

"We pulled up in the driveway and he and Nola came out. He said, 'Hey, I'm your dad.' I said, 'I know.' "

White and his family settled in Aurora, Colo., not far from his father, Nola and their son Vance. They were social, but he did not call James Carl "Dad" until a few years before his death. James Guy and his first wife raised three children in Colorado, but not without great losses. Their son, Jimmy, died at 27 in an accident while repairing an elevator. Vance died at 19 in an accidental shooting. And Eddie died at 42 after struggling with a drug addiction.

After his marriage in Colorado broke up, he moved back to Missouri in 2009 for a new love and a fresh start.

Schroeder has also been through a painful divorce. Both concede their paths weren't easy. Both laughed, saying they had kicked up a bit of trouble in their lives. They plan to go to Colorado together in May so Don can meet James Guy's family and visit the family burial plot.

And on a cold day in February, in the house on the gravel road, both peered into a plastic tote filled with photo albums chronicling James Guy's family. Don had bought his own albums. Their eyes settled on a photo of Jimmy, James Guy's deceased son. Jimmy was a ringer for their father. Jimmy also had the same build and dark features as one of Don's sons.

"Look at this," Schroeder said pointing intently to the young man's eyes and hair.

James Guy nodded quietly.

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After 18-year search, Missouri man finds half-brother 80 miles away

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Don Schroeder sped his Jeep along a roller coaster country road, made a quick turn into a gravel lane and surveyed a tidy house that could hold the answer he'd been seeking for nearly 20 years. Nobody was home.

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Young Sheldon is a prequel of sorts to The Big Bang Theory. The show features "older" Sheldon narrating as he looks back on events in his childhood that made him the person he is today.

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Young Sheldon (CBS) "Boy Genius" Promo HD - The Big Bang Theory Prequel Spinoff

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Prisoners connect "The Odyssey" to their own lives. 

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Prisoners connect "The Odyssey" to their own lives. 

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In this article prisoners read "The Odyssey" and learn their crimes are just part of life's journey.

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Their points of resonance with Odysseus were many. When Odysseus learns that in order to return home, he must first journey to the underworld, they nodded. They are held in their own Hades, and they hang on by believing that if they survive the hell of prison, they will return home.

Plotting against the suitors occupying his palace, Odysseus lies awake in doubt, reminding himself, "Bear up, old heart." Inmates, too, worry about what's going on at home, and one admitted, "I lie awake like that, too. I give myself pep talks."

They recognized the undisciplined ego from which Odysseus proclaims his identity to the Cyclopes, thus inviting the wrath of Poseidon. For their own hubris, they have paid dearly. At other times, Odysseus survives through self-control, and the lesson is not lost on them. When Odysseus wins help from the young princess Nausikaa through humility and finesse, they see that softness can be a source of power.

Homer never tires of reminding us that when Agamemnon returned home, his wife had betrayed him and conspired in his murder, the better for the reader to appreciate the loyalty of Penelope. Penelope's fidelity was not lost on my students. "She's a down broad," one said admiringly. I needed a translation. "You know," he said. "She stands by him, even when he ain't there." The others nodded.

Early in book one, Zeus complains that men blame the gods for their afflictions. Though these inmates have plenty of material to mine for excuses - guns and drugs, gangs, abusive parents, violent neighborhoods, poverty and failing schools - I never once heard an excuse. They claim the bad choices and terrible actions as their own. They are men in repentance.

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Their points of resonance with Odysseus were many. When Odysseus learns that in order to return home, he must first journey to the underworld, they nodded. They are held in their own Hades, and they hang on by believing that if they survive the hell of prison, they will return home.

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I like this quote because in your own life, you are responsible for making decisions about how that journey will progress.