1st Place Essay Winner: 9-14 Age Group

"Be Green to Save the World"

Joshua Mora
California School for the Deaf
Fremont, CA

School can be painful.

Yeah, everyone knows why-paper. All schools do is waste paper. The teachers give us class work, quizzes, tests, homework, and all sorts of projects. It's painful to think of all those trees being cut down just so we can do more work. But I do have an idea to help solve this issue

Let's use technology to save the trees. For example, e-mail, which we should use to communicate. Another example is to work online instead of typing and printing or writing on paper. These waste the papers, e-mail uses no paper. Well, I want to explain my idea about e-mail.

I think students should set up one e-mail account for school purposes only. The principal would have the right to look in their e-mail to make sure they are using e-mail for schoolwork only. Using e-mail for the school is special idea because we will be able to send our homework, such as essays, stories, or even projects directly to the teacher after we write it at home on our computers. We can also talk with the teacher to make sure everything is clear. This can also be a helpful way to talk with teacher in private about something serious such as bullying issues.

I think it really will help the Earth because we will use less paper. If we use less paper, we save more trees. Also, we will learn to not depend on the paper as much as we are depending them now. I have used e-mail myself to send in my work.

Of course, sometimes e-mail doesn't work out. This has also happened to me. For example, "What if I couldn't send the e-mail to the teacher?!" Be creative! You can always send yourself an e-mail of your works and when you arrive to the school, you will open your e-mail account and let teacher look at it and save on their computer, or use their USB to transfer the work into their files and they will save and grade it. If that didn't work out, go ahead and print. Just try finding a way to not use the paper. But e-mail is not the only way to avoid using paper. I also have other idea-on-line assignments.

We can do on-line assignments using the Internet and use one website that our school created for us for us to work at our homework. To use the website, we have to use the screen name that we created in the school. You won't be able to create the screen name at home, we will be using that website to do the homework. We will be able to save in the website under the teacher names. The website will order the homework under all classes, so the teacher will have an easy time to correct our homework, but how do we do our homework and make sure it's in the right class? Easy. Since you created the screen name, it will only give you all the homework under the teacher's name and you do it. When you are done, you will click "submit" which will save your work. Well, you also do have the right to go back to the homework after you saved. If you need to fix it, just go to "saved homework" and you should see the list of "unlocked" or "locked" homework. You will only be able to fix the "unlocked" homework since that means it is not past the day when the homework is due. If it's "locked, that means it's waiting to be graded and only the teacher of that homework has the right to change the "locked" homework to "unlocked" homework for you.

In my opinion, saving paper is one of the best ideas for saving the Earth, especially for kids because they know that it's us who have been saving the Earth. I'm planning to suggest this idea to my school and help the Earth. Also, now you can see how e-mail and on-line assignments and USBs can be useful for the school. We should start spreading the idea of using e-mail or USBs just before you are planning to use paper. Let's be green!