ELCT

This year for our English Language classes, we were introduced to new writing styles. In essays, we had to morph our essay writing styles to become more realistic. We would include facts, personal experiences and information from news articles in our essay. We focused solely on youth issues, discovering different answering techniques while learning about youth issues and their causes.

ELCT Creative Representation:

This creative representation project gave the students opportunities to include their art forms in their regular academic studies. It allowed the students to stretch their creativity and have access to different ways of finishing a project. Students were able to choose different artforms to describe their assigned youth issue.

Creative Response and Explanation:

Hi! So the youth issue I chose for this artwork is self-esteem. I wanted to showcase one of the main factors contributing to low self-esteem, social media. In my artwork, I included commonly used social media apps and represented them as humans. I chose the humans to be double layered, for example, the Instagram app is black on one side, but bright pink on the other. I used this effect to show the duality of social media and how it seems nice, bright and harmless, it is also a dark place that can harm users. In a nutshell, I think that social media has unrealistic beauty standards that cause users to feel ashamed of their own appearance. This affects them psychologically, gnawing at their self-esteem. The hands reaching out from the bottom are to represent the number of people that have low self-esteem due to the effects of social media. I hope you like it!

-Tiara Siregar

Youth and Stress By Ernest Goh

Stronger
The darkness surrounds me,
Shrouding me in tight embrace.
No matter what I do,
It will not let me go.
It will not loosen its grip on me,
How can I break free?
I am no Houdini,
I wish I am him
The suffocating darkness, the remoteness of sight,
The stillness of night, the absence of light.
Countless nights, elusive bright,
Waiting for day, for the blinding light.
Longing to step into the new light,
Holding onto the bight.
The moon eclipsing the sun from height,
I cannot hold my head up high.
Books flying everywhere,
Have you done this and that?
“I hear Ernest, I feel like running away”
Nine over twenty, fourteen over thirty,
Pages in red,
“Hold this above your head”
Boy holding fire extinguisher above his head,
Sinking under its weight.
Like a ship caught in a storm,
My mind is tossed about by my tumultuous thoughts.
A towering wave is all it takes,
For me to come crashing down.
No matter how much cargo I throw overboard,
In the end, I still sink.
Into a bottomless abyss,
Wallowing in sadness, fear and trepidation.
Then, when I open up,
I see the sun rising over the horizon.
Beams of sunlight and hope,
They pierce through the darkness,
The bottomless abyss,
And I finally see the light of day again.
Every faded white line,
A reminder of what I have overcome.

Explanation of Ernest's Poem

The purpose of my creative representation is to use written prose to highlight the causes, consequences and solutions of stress in youth. It is written in a first person account, based on my personal experience and to share with others my experience of stress. I have chosen this medium because I am able to put pen to paper to express my struggle with stress. I can put into practice what I have learnt in class by utilising various literary devices such as rhyme, repetition, imagery and personification to showcase and help readers to better understand and visualise how stress affects youths who are suffering psychological “tumultuous thoughts”. Stress impacts on the victim’s learning and academic performance when there is a loss of interest and focus, resulting in poor grades and “pages in red”.

-Ernest

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