Every few weeks, our family would pack up and get in the car to visit my great grandparents and their 110 acre farm in a small town called Eureka. 110 acres is a lot of farmland to cover, especially for a man and a woman who are both over 80 years …show more content…
The farm was isolated in solitude from the neighboring houses and was about 80% field. In Chicago, our neighborhood was very compact and there were about five feet in between each house. In Eureka, there is about a mile or two in between my family and our neighbors.
Quite frankly, my house in Eureka and my house in Chicago aren’t that different from each other. Both houses have a basement, a ground floor, and an upstairs floor. The Chicago had a small backyard and an even smaller lawn. The only key difference was the surrounding houses and the fact that there is no spot to park your vehicle. The house is Eureka looked archaic as it had fading white paint and a antique building structure. In the weeks following, my grandfather told me that the house is over 100 years old!
Not only were the neighborhoods different, but the education systems were even more contrasted. Chicago had many schools to choose from, so each school only had about 300 kids that range from kindergarten to first grade. The CPS schools, also known as Chicago Public Schools, were very underfunded and my old school, Kozminski Community Academy, had to cut art class, Spanish class, and even cut the school’s football team to save money. On the contrary, Eureka had one school for three different towns. Eureka Middle School had 500 kids in grades fifth through eighth, was a very wealthy school, and has …show more content…
Kozminski hosted flag football games because the schools didn’t want to risk a lawsuit for a student being injured in the course of a football game. When I arrived in Eureka, I soon learned that the kids here had been playing tackle football since the time that they occupied the third grade! “No way!”, I remembered saying in utter disbelief. The sports in Eureka were literally funded more than my entire school in Chicago. My old basketball team at Kozminski had hand-me-down-jerseys that were double sided, (one side was blue for home games and the other was gold for away games), and no types of “warm-ups” or t-shirts. My basketball team in Eureka had home and away jerseys, basketball warm-ups for the beginning of the game, and about three different t-shirts that broadcasted our last names on the back of