Identity Crisis!! PLEASE HELP MAKE CHANGE!

Okay, you know how in high school the students, usually the senior class, votes on how they will remember certain people. There's : class clown, best dresses, most likely to succeed, etc. Do you know what Alabama is known as? One of the fattest, laziest states in America. Harsh? Yes. True? Also, yes. Is this really how we want to be remembered as? Diabetes is higher in the south than any region, and Alabama is right up there on the list of the most cases of diabetes, heart diseases, and obesity. Yes we don't get: Best this or best that, unless its "Best laziest state" or something like that, but who wants to be known like that?

I'm having an identity crisis here, because I know that I don't want to be known as this. I'm not saying my peers voted wrong, but I don't want to be what they say I am. I want change, but no one can do it alone. So if we want change....for awhile all we can really do is want.

The Project

The "Cast Your Bucket Down" project takes the basic idea in the 1895 Atlanta Exposition Speech by Booker T. Washington -- "Cast your bucket down where you are." -- and applies it to issues of food consumption and production in Alabama. (To read the speech, click here.)

The blog will be written by 34 creative writing magnet students at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School in Montgomery, Alabama, each of whom has chosen a food or farming related topic to explored from August to December 2010.

After that, the students will each produce a creative work based on their experiences and findings. More on that as the project goes on. The final product will be a short film.