A Hope in the Unseen

In AP Lang I am reading A Hope in the Unseen. It is about a boy named Cedric who goes to Ballou High School. The school is in a “ghetto” neighborhood and most kids who go to the school couldn’t care less about school and getting an education, but Cedric is different. He strives to get good grades and wants to learn. Even though Cedric wants to be proud of his grades and appreciated for them, students at the school make fun of kids like Cedric who have good grades and Cedric is forced to try and hide the fact that he has good grades. There are a lot of similarities and differences between Ballou high school and the school I attend, Kennedy.

Ballou high school, Kennedy high school, and probably every high school around have students that don’t care about school. There are students that don’t mind failing and are happy when they pass a class, simply because they don’t have to retake the class next year. A lot of times these students make fun of straight A students, like how Phillip makes fun of Cedric in A Hope in the Unseen. Good students are called names and get made fun of by students who don’t try. Everywhere you go there will always be people who don’t care and don’t try hard and sometimes they make fun of the kids who do try hard.

There are underachieving kids in every school, but I think Ballou has a lot more of them than most schools. In Ballou the majority of kids don’t try and in Kennedy I think most of the kids do try. This makes Cedric and other straight A students try to hide the fact that they are good students, to avoid ridicule. They skip assemblies to avoid being called names and getting beat up later. I think this makes Kennedy and Ballou very different. Although there may be some name calling at Kennedy, people don’t hide from assemblies or go to such extremes to avoid being bullied about grades, because there are so many people who also get good grades.

There are kids at both Kennedy and Ballou that don’t try hard, but there is so many kids at Ballou that don’t try hard that kids at Ballou think that it is dangerous to be recognized for being a good student, so they try to hide from other students and the fact that they have good grades. Although there are similarities between Kennedy and Ballou, there are a lot differences that make it hard for students to be successful at Ballou.

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