Katelyn Cornett

     This year's festival was a true blessing. The singers were phenomenal and the variety of songs performed was interesting. I really enjoyed the group that sang the song about Elijah. The dynamics, energy, and creativity of the composition was entertaining and revitalizing.      The judges were super helpful too with their criticism. Our judge aided us on how to make Indodana more impactful and how to create a more mature tone with our voices. It has been a struggle to conceptualize a way to achieve the tone, but our judge gave us a way to visually gauge our tonality.

“If you've got troubles, I've got 'em too There isn't anything I wouldn't do for you” -Randy Newman “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from Toy Story is an iconic song for any children who grew up in the late ’90s or early 2000s. The song frames the meaning of friendship with a catchy little tune that is unforgettable. The term friendship is one that today sometimes gets misused. People mistake having friends for followers and when they get in a bind they discover they did not have as many friends as they believed they had. However, that is not the case for all people because some people do form true relationships with people who would do anything to help get them out of a rut. In the Goblin Market, Rossetti argues through Lizzie’s actions to save her sister that people need others who love them to help them be redeemed from their temptations.  Relationships are a key part of life. Lizzie and Laura are two sisters who love each other dearly. However, they are ver...

           Pose! Click! Post! Instagram and Facebook have become two of the largest and most successful social media websites today. They allow people to post stories and updates about their lives and how great things are in the concept of their worlds. However, a majority of the time it is all a façade put on for the world to see because all people are aware of is that behind the filters and the inspirational captions, situations are not always what they seem. Though Instagram and Facebook are relatively new to the world, the issue of hiding one’s reality behind a front is not. Voltaire addresses the fact that people put on a facade of happiness through Candide’s interaction with the young happy couple to demonstrate that true happiness is an unobtainable virtue on earth since no one on earth is truly happy.               In Candide’s particular case, he sought for happiness by pursui...

     Until Mr. Maibach came and spoke to us concerning the Electoral College, I did not understand how it worked or the real purpose of it. He explained it this way, the Electoral college is a group of 538 electors. The electors represent two senators for every state which mean there are 100 electors to equal 100 senators for the states. The last 438 electors are divided among the states based on how many representatives each state has. The purpose of the Electoral College is to even out the voting across the nation to prevent a candidate from winning by popular vote of the nation versus congressional popular vote. There is not a law that says a state’s electors have to vote the same as their state popular vote, but the majority of the time they vote how the popularity of their state votes. To give a better illustration take California and Wyoming, the largest and smallest populated states in the country, if the first candidate won the popularity in California but d...

The heart is a crucial organ for the survival of all human beings. It supplies the body with fresh blood as the old blood flows back into the heart and is refined and distributed back out of several capillaries which carry nutrients to the other organs and the extremities of the body. Similarly, reasoning is an important aspect of life because it guides one and aids one in determining true and false knowledge and Descartes utilizes the analogy of the heart to prove this point.   Not all reasoning is sound. There is good and bad reasoning. Good reasoning according to Descartes is having “the power of judging correctly and of distinguishing the true from the false” (Descartes, 5). The opposite of good reasoning could be defined as the inability to make true judgments and determine what is true from what is false. Thus, people need to be able to reason for themselves, rather than accepting all things that are being presented to them because the presenter could lack the means t...

Today’s society has innumerable issues and debatable topics that have been around for centuries that probably will never be resolved until Christ comes again at the end of time, but in the meantime, philosophers like Plato and More have attempted to resolve the controversial problems. Utopia by Thomas More focuses mainly on how society is run. He speaks on many issues including “stupid pleasures” that people dwell much of their time doing. He writes to demonstrate to society that they are actually harming themselves, but there is a reasonable explanation for how they are hindering society. The Utopians are people who enjoy many pleasures within their country. However, they disagree with many practices that their surrounding countries label as pleasurable. They consider “gambling – a / form of idiocy that they’ve heard about but never practiced – / but also hunting and hawking” (75). It must be taken into consideration that More’s composition is satirical. Once one realize...

We all have friends where we get to see their true colors. Some of the colors are beautiful like an early sunrise over the ocean, while others are more ominous like the view of an approaching storm. Whatever the case may be, there are colors evident that help us to predict what the outcome will be. Dante’s Purgatory speaks of three specific colors, red, green, and white. Each of the colors written about play a significant role in understanding the purpose of the book and Dante’s travels through Purgatory.     As Dante begins his journey through Purgatory, he starts at the bottom of the mountain where all he can see above him is more rocks and paths to travers. His goal, however, is to meet Beatrice. He does not know what to expect at the top of the mountain, but as he nears the top, he comes across a group of three ladies one is white, another, green and the last red. The text states, “Now it appeared the white one led them…” (29.127). According to Esol...