Our A+ winner this week is 7th grader, Alex LaSalla from Avon Middle School. He won the seventh-grade competition of the 2021, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Art, essay, and multimedia contest.
The Ohio Civil Rights Commission held the competition for all Ohio 6th through 12th graders. And only one winner was selected from each grade. Now students could write an essay or create a multimedia project or a piece of art.
The students were to ask themselves: "When you were faced with a challenge or a setback, what did you do? How did you keep moving forward?"
Alex wrote an essay about finding 7th grade a lot harder than 6th grade. He plays a lot of sports and has had to balance his extracurriculars with more complicated schoolwork.
In the essay Alex wrote, "Now my honors math homework takes so many steps to finish one problem, which used to take me only a few seconds to finish a problem. This is totally different for me, And it scares me. I have never been challenged like this before."
As part of his project Alex also made some great artwork that displayed him as a student with a packed schedule. Alex comes from a family of artists. His grandmother is an artist and his mom Megan is a graphic designer. She says Alex has watched her do graphic design work on a computer, all of his life. So he took some of that knowledge and his love for computers to move his drawings onto the computer and turn them into creative PDF files.
Now Alex says now that he's further into the school year, he feels better about seventh grade. It was a challenge at first, but Alex has adapted to the changes and is used to more demanding schoolwork.
One more note, Alex only participated in the competition because he'd get extra credit points in one of his classes, and his mom convinced him it was worth it. So well done Alex LaSalla. We're excited to award you this week's NewsDepth A+ for doing that extra credit assignment and for facing the challenges of doing something new. I think that's something we can all relate to. Great job!
Submit your ideas for our NewsDepth A+ segment to newsdepth@ideastream.org for consideration.
