My Unique Profile

                          Unique Profile                                           Jake O’Brien

 My name is Jake and I am a freshman at John Carroll School.  I went to middle school and elementary at New Covenant Christian School.  Some of the things I like to do are play sports like Volleyball, Tennis and Basketball.  I love mostly all kinds of animals, and I own a beagle named Sally, and a corn-snake.  I also have two older sisters, one who’s a senior at my school, John Carroll and ones who’s a sophomore at Saint Vincent College. My favorite place to go is to Avalon NJ where I go to the beach.  I also love watching baseball, basketball and football and my favorite sport to watch is football and my favorite team is the Baltimore Ravens.  My goals throughout the year are to achieve all A’s or B’s on my report card. 

Summer Novel

Autobiography of my Dead Brother

My story Autobiography of my dead brother is about a nice teenage boy whose friends gets involved with gangs and drugs and he has to deal with either leaving his friends or helping them change.  One of his friends goes to jail for robbing a store and his best friend Rise got into dealing drugs.  Jesse tried to help Rise but he thought he wouldn’t be able to because he thought Rise had changed a lot.  Finally at the end of the story Jesse, who is the main character, changed the way of his best-friend Rise.  Rise was glad that he was out of drugs and gangs that he was going to move out of the city so he would never get involved with them again, but as he was saying goodbye to his friends, he got shot and he died.  Jesse was upset that Rise got shot and went through lots of grief.  But at the end of the book, Jesse got over the death of his friend and got his life back together.

The major issues this book dealt with were drugs, gangs and grief.  Jesses friends got into drugs and also gangs, so did Jesse almost. And Jesse had to deal with a lot of grief. I chose this book because it looked like a great book with a good story.  I did like this book because the story was good and interesting and also had characters that you can relate too.  Also because Jesse had to go through some tough times but eventually got over them all.  

Research Project Part1

  Preliminary Research on Gangs.

Book: Autobiography of my dead brother.

Topic: Gangs

Position:  Gangs are bad.

Additional Search Terms:

1.       Street Gang

2.       Prison Gang

Questions: 

1.       Where do we find street gangs?

2.       How do you identify gangs and their members?

3.       How is a street gang different from a prison gang?

Paragraph:

                One of the key issues in autobiography of my dead brother is gangs, which should be stopped.  According to http://www.helpinggangyouth.com/statistics.html  every city that has 250k people or more has gang activity.  Police officers have reported 664,908 of the youth are in gangs. http://www.ncvc.org/ncvc/main.aspx?dbName=DocumentViewer&DocumentID=32352

Also approximately 69 teens out of 100,000 are killed due to gang activity. http://www.wright-house.com/ac/papers97/Tsou-ac1.html.  Gangs are important because if they continue to go on the death rate would keep increasing in the youth like it has over that past 10 years.