English 9 Celebration Essay

English 9 Celebration Essay                                         Seth
   

My grandpa, Virgil Schoolmeester, is a hard-working, diligent man. He is gentle and calm, but can get firm when he needs to. He and Grandma spoil the whole family on special holidays like Christmas.  He is a major role model in my life.

My grandpa has always been there for me; when I’m glad and when I’m sad. He always has a smile on his face; always greeting me with a hug and a smile. You can go talk with him about anything and he will help you in any way shape or form that he can; whether it’s about spiritual matters, or lifetime struggles and hardships.

He is a very busy person, but yet will take the time to talk with you and spend time with you. He is incredibly patient, but can get firm when he really needs to.  He is a very strong Christian and is the spiritual leader in our whole family. He is a very hard worker and has been farming his whole life. He is a very skilled farmer and knows everything about farming. He never went to college, but he is probably the one in the family with the most knowledge of us all. He is also very tough. He has gone through cancer and didn’t complain about the pain of radiation or therapy once. He also has diabetes, which I can imagine is a pain to have, but he never lets it get him down. He is always extremely thankful, even when the crops aren’t doing well from lack of rain or any other problems.

I remember him when I was young, he always let me ride in the combine during harvesting, and I would bring a sandwich and a pop out in a cooler for him and a second one for me. After a while we would both take a break and eat our snacks. He would also take me on fourwheeler and tractor rides just for fun. He took notice on how much I loved to drive his full size fourwheeler at an extremely young age, so for one Christmas, he bought a little youth fourwheeler just for me pretty much. I still ride that little fourhweeler at times just for fun, doing wheelies and a bunch of other silly things I probably shouldn’t do with it. I also remember staying over at their house for up to a week at a time during summer vacation and going along to the parts store with him.

We went on fourwheeler rides together with myself  driving the little fourwheeler with him on the big fourwheeler into the pasture where we would spray thistles. His pasture is huge and used to have cows in it and the whole family would ride in the back of pickups and on fourwheelers out to the pasture and walk around and wade in the creek and talk. I also loved going fishing with him and still do to this day, even though I was little and didn’t understand that throwing rocks into the pond would scare the fish away from where they were fishing! He still had enough patience to fish probably a good half hour longer to catch a single fish with me throwing rocks around than with calm waters. Back then we didn’t have a boat, so when I got a little bigger, this was one of my main times I really got to fish, because there aren’t very many good fishing spots in Iowa.
    Every Christmas my grandma and grandpa spoils the family. They spend tons of money buying several presents for each child and adult. Once and awhile they will spoil each family with a game console or handheld games. One year they bought each family a Nintendo Wii when it first came out. I found out early when I discovered a Wii in my parent’s closet and found out they were helping her buy them off Amazon and other places before Christmas so my parents could bring them over to their house to quickly wrap them up. Two years later, they bought each child a Nintendo DS. This was very fun to chat with 10 other cousins of mine on the DS’s.

Overall, he has made a major positive impact on my life and has shown his love for me and the rest of the family over the many amazing years that I am getting to spend time with him. I can’t wait until harvest season this year, so I can go sit in the combine, bring a sandwich and pop out for him, and talk for a couple hours.

English 9 Memoir

English 9 Memoir

Seth Vander Pol

    During December of 2010, my dad got a call from his friend Mr. Van Der Puy. They would call each other from time to time, and we’d visit them or they’d visit us. But this call was different. He was asking if my dad wanted the job as a fourth grade teacher. At first my parents weren’t sure, we just got done remodeling our house, had little pets, and lived in a pretty nice area.
    A couple nights after the call my dad and mom both called me to the living room after my siblings were sleeping.  My dad said, “Hey Seth, there’s something very important we need to ask you. What would you think of us moving up to Prinsburg, Minnesota?” We thought about it for a while, visited the school in December, then about a month later we made our final decision. We were going to move up to Prinsburg, Minnesota in late May and early June. I was going to go to Central Minnesota Christian School, instead of Unity or Western Christian down in Iowa.  We didn’t tell my siblings or the people in school for a while; we kept it a secret until about four weeks after school got out. Everyone was awestruck and for the next few weeks they were constantly asking many questions about the big move- what was going to happen and where we would live. Even though I didn’t really have any clue what my classmates were like and where we were going to live. So after school got out and we graduated from 8th grade, we had a class of sixteen in a pre-school through 8th grade school with the big graduation ceremony. More than three hundred and fifty people showed up for our graduation.

About three or four days later, we got everything all packed up in boxes. We called  the relatives and we rented the biggest U-Haul that you can get, about four relatives with pickups, one with a trailer for hauling our lawnmower, dirtbike, and fourwheeler and all of our lawn equipment, and loaded all of the boxes up into the giant U-Haul. We stacked everything inside front to back with some things that still wouldn’t fit, even though we stacked everything neatly and very compact. We had to put our valuables into a relative’s SUV to make sure they wouldn’t break on the bumpy ride.

We put our cat, Puddles into a cat carrier, loaded the fourwheeler, dirt-bike, and lawn equipment up on my grandpa’s trailer, and headed out. I rode in the U-haul truck with my dad, Spencer, and the cat. My uncle accidentally stacked a lot of the heavy boxes toward the ceiling of the truck, so corners were crazy, it felt like the truck could roll any second. And as for giant bumps, they were pretty awful too. The shocks on the back of the truck would spring up really high, (the rear tires felt like they were practically off the ground) then the back would thump down really hard, with the shocks bottoming out, with a big thud.

    After the long journey North to Minnesota, we rented a house by Bunde. This happened to be Ryan Brouwer’s old house. I loved living at this house. However, it was just one bedroom short and a little small for our family. Staying at the Bunde house all day was getting pretty boring without much to do so I rode my dirtbike about every day because there was no television, no wi-fi, and no fast internet. We just had slow broadband internet that we had limited use on. I could barely log onto Facebook because of the super slow internet!

I picked rock for Jeff Ruschen for a couple weeks to pass the time, which was okay because I had something to do and was able to make some good money instead of sitting around the house or riding dirt-bike all day. I also went to a party or two to get to know people beforehand. After about a month of all of this we finally found a pretty nice house on the edge of Clara City.

My dad talked to the police working around Clara City and asked if I could ride the dirt-bike to and from my house to out in the country. Then school started and I met many more people, but yet I still knew a few people from going to Kye Jouwstra’s party and going to the Fourth of July festival at school. I made a bunch of friends up here in so little time. Everyone is very nice and generous up here. Coming to Minnesota was one of the best things I could easily say I have ever done.

English 9 Motorcycle Essay (any topic essay)

English 9 Essay                                        Seth

    Ever since the motorcycle has been invented, people from all over the globe have been riding. There are motorcycles everywhere, they and are extremely fun, yet small, fast, and able to travel long distances without using very much gasoline.
    Motorcycles can pretty much ride in the majority of weather conditions. They can ride in the cool wet spring (as long as it’s not too cold), the hot summer sun, and the dry fall. They are fun to ride in all these conditions, but the main season that is pretty much impossible is during the winter. They are rear-wheel driven, and there are only two wheels, so it is really easy to spin out, and also easy to have the wheels slip out from underneath you.
    Motorcycles are generally very fast. Most of the street-legal motorcycles have at least a 125cc engine. There are two types of engines that there are in motorcycles, two stroke or four stroke engine. The two strokes have twice the power than four strokes, and I could explain why and how, but it would take way too long. Two stroke engines have more power, but need to have the engine rebuilt more often than a four stroke engine.
    There are many types of motorcycles. There are streetbikes, dirtbikes, enduro bikes, dual sport bikes, supermoto bikes, and leisure bikes like a Harley. Streetbikes are extremely fast  and light and can take corners with ease, but you are very vulnerable because an average streetbike can go over 140 miles per hour. Some can go around 185 to over 200 miles per hour! Some streetbikes have over 180 horsepower, with such little weight they can accelerate incredibly fast. I say dirtbikes are one of the most fun type of motorcycle (partly because I have one) because they can go about anywhere. There are all different sizes of engines you can get with dirtbikes, two stroke and four stroke engines too. The two stroke engines in dirtbikes range from 50cc youth bikes to 500cc monsters. In the four stroke categories they range from 50cc youth bikes to 450cc Bikes. They don’t really make two stroke motorcycles anymore, especially 500cc two strokes, because they were so fast and dangerous, so now one of the biggest two stroke dirtbike is a 250cc, which has about the same as a 450cc professional motocross racer uses. I have a 150cc dirtbike and it is plenty fast, and hits the rev limiter at around 55-60mph in 5th gear., which keeps the engine from running at too high of an RPM and keeps it from blowing up. Now imagine a high performance 450cc dirtbike and how fast it goes, now think about how fast a 1000cc streetbike is. They are making motorcycles faster and faster as time goes on! Usually older people ride leisure bikes like Harleys, which are big heavy motorcycles with a decent sized four stroke v-twin engine, which is an engine with two cylinders in a V shape. They are faster than the average car, but are slow compared to a sports car like a Corvette, or an average streetbike. A supermoto bike
is pretty much a dirtbike with street tires on it, so there's not much to talk about with them. An enduro bike and a dual-sport bike are pretty much the same, and both can go on-road and off-road with ease, but enduro bikes are usually made more for off-road use, while dual-sport bikes are more for on-road usage.
    If you are looking for a vehicle that can get you to point a to point b with ease without spending tons of money for the vehicle itself or lots of money for gasoline, a motorcycle would be a great summer vehicle.