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Hannah Agnew

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Speak Up

We all have dreams.

It's a fact.

As you may already know, my dream is to be a writer. It's something I love; my passion.

I'm still not sure if I'd like to be a journalist or a fiction writer yet; all I know is writing as a career is my main dream.

Every year, high schools across Canada offer their Grade 9 students a "Bring Your Kid to Work Day." This day is specifically made to allow us all to go out and actually try a job that we're interested in instead of sitting in a classroom learning about this career.

You don't actually have to go with a parent or guardian to their workplace.

The funny thing about this Career Day is that only a few people I know are actually going to work somewhere we know we'd like to work when we are grown up.

A lot of my friends are going back to Edith Cavell, my elementary and middle school, to spend the day with their favourite teachers.

Some of my friends are actually going with their parents for Bring Your Kid to Work Day, but not because they want to work in the same field as there parents do.

In fact, I don't think I know anyone who wants to follow in their parents footsteps.

One of my friends is only going to work with her dad because her dad works from home, so she gets to stay home all day.

Another one of my friends is going to work at a book store with his mom, not because of the books but because of the free coffee and hot chocolate.

For my career day job I am, in fact, going to work with my dad, I just won't be with him for the whole day. I'm going to work at the Times & Transcript on career day. I'm not sure how my day will play out, all I know is I'll be working with a few different journalists.

There's at least two other students I know who are going to be at the Times & Transcript with me, so I definitely won't be alone.

During the past couple of weeks, the school has been organizing assemblies to teach us everything we should know before they send us out for the day. The last assembly we had was a safety assembly in which they showed us five videos about safety in the workplace.

The only problem I had with these videos was they were really graphic.

The videos were used to show us safety hazards in common workplaces.

For example, they showed us a video where a girl working at a shoe store went out back to get a pair of shoes for a customer, climbed a wobbly ladder to get a shoe box from the top shelf, the ladder collapsed, the worker flew and so did the shoe box.

The shoebox hit the light fixture above, breaking the light bulb and sending glass down into her face. She landed in a pile of glass.

That wasn't the worst of the videos, though. It got to the point where I had to close my eyes and block off all sound.

Other than being graphic I think these videos really did give us all a reality check. We need to be careful, although not very many of us will likely work with a chainsaw when we go to work with our parents this week.

* Hannah Agnew is a Grade 9 student at Moncton High School.