BTS: Senior Speeches
By Lori Li
Everyone settles into the auditorium and the music stops playing. The room runs silent. It’s your senior year. You make your way to the podium as the audience below claps and cheers. The stage lights shine in your eyes, blinding your view of those watching from the seats, making you feel a little bit more at ease. Hardly making out the dark faces that gaze up at the stage, you adjust the pages and begin your speech.
So what’s your speech about? Director of Senior Speeches Aaron Shulow “notices trends within grades, and sometimes they carry over to the next year,” he said. “I also think that each class is unique and they address things that are meaningful to them but they also change the focus.”
Speaking order is drawn at Junior Retreat, so students have a lot of time to plan. A great deal of editing and revising comes along with drafting senior speeches but Shulow has many things he loves about it: “I really like when there’s an idea in a student that the student is struggling to get out and I’m able to help that person express themselves,” he said.
On the other hand, the process also comes with challenges. Shulow said that “getting seniors to do their work on time—and that’s the big one because we’re all busy—but attending to your work in a timely manner is important if you don’t want to make more work for others,” Shulow said.
Seniors eventually end up with a speech that they’re content with, a speech met with applause.
ART COURSES: REDEFINED
By Lori Li
Less is more. When the US Fine Arts teachers discussed what future art courses should look like, they decided that what they “wanted to offer was a whole new series of classes that address an intermediate level,” US Photo / Video teacher Stefanie Motta said. The model... “provides more of a logical bridge between a beginning class and when a student shows up in senior art seminar.”
Instead of having students work on completely different projects, they have the same assignments, but that work is differentiated for evolving artistic knowledge and skill level.
Senior Abdelrahman Mokbel takes a drawing class and has experienced the shift in the course. “Everyone’s sort of doing the same thing doing the same projects,” he said.
While a lot of art students have different levels of experience, the elimination of leveled classes has had benefits. Because of the shared topic or medium focus, first year art students have the opportunity work with the more advanced students to can gain more insight on how to improve their own techniques.
KICKING WHEN IT COUNTS:
TEAM FINDS COMMUNITY ON LAFFY TAFFY WRAPPERS
By Lori Li
Why is a bad joke like a bad pencil? Because it has no point.
Like most sports, girls’ soccer requires an intensity and focus during each practice, which is important to have when preparing for big game days. Whether it rains or even snows, players are expected to be on their A-game. Finding team chemistry and rhythm throughout the season wasn’t easy with so many new teammates; however, it wasn’t something they couldn’t overcome.
With a few people due to injury, the girls’ team had to make up for their loss of teammates with new forms of encouragement and motivation to get hyped up for their season. But, what made the team unique was not only the traditions that they passed down, but the new ones they created. The girls’ team read Laffy Taffy jokes on the bus ride for good luck and to relax for the big game ahead of them. While they stick to many of their old traditions, their jokes and laughs will be passed down to the future players in the next few years.
VIRTUAL CONNECTIONS:
Students and Faculty adapt to the new distance learning plan
By Lori Li
Students left the building for spring break with instructions to bring everything home with them that they might need for a temporary move to online. That short-term move evolved from a maybe to a four weeks (to start) of a new learning format. A virtual format.
Welcomed back to distance learning school with a bombard of emails and Google Meet notifications from Principal Max Delgado, Dean of Students Chantal Thornberry, and US faculty, students felt overwhelmed and disoriented at first.
With most students having spent their entire spring break social distancing and not seeing their friends, the expected yet unpleasant news of attending school through a screen left classmates anxious.
Administration and staff worked from the end of Q3 to the soft start Apr. 1 organize the best setup. Teachers adapted coursework and curriculum, paring down to essential learning and 30 minute synchronous classes.
The schedule moved to a 4-day rotation, with classes on M/T and Th/F with Wednesdays serving as a community day. Senior speeches continued, but were moved to Livestreams on Mondays, and class meetings took place on Fridays. Clubs, groups and advisories met Wednesdays, even though there were no classes.
It didn’t take long for students to settle in and adapt to the new schedule as faculty worked to reduce the number of e-mails and streamline class meet calendars, tutorial, and ways to support students.
Despite not having the final period of the school year to turn out how everyone expected, the faculty was able to build a program the held on to community connection. Students were able to learn the same material but in the comfort of their own home, having more time to do many activities that they wouldn’t have been able to do if they were at school.
PAY UP FOR THE LAY-UP:
Girls team maintains culture through coaching changes
By Lori Li
The ball dribbles from one hand to the other as your teammate runs across the court with the rest of the team in tow. All eyes are locked on the ball as she quickly passes it to you. You hear the squeaks of tennis shoes filling the gymnasium and players cheering you on, then it all comes to a fade. You dribble, widen your stance, bend your wrist and shoot right before the buzzer sounds.
The intense season this year has provided the girls basketball team a new look at their mindset and attitudes. With a new coach, the team has encountered a fresh approach to training and warm-ups. “We get to choose how they play and have more input when making decisions,’’ Ayla Straub said.
Building a stronger team doesn’t only require better communication between players, but with coaches as well. A new coach may be less familiar with the team’s dynamics, traditions and preparations before games, so the players find ways to communicate with each other to help her understand their stance and approach to each obstacle they face. “The new coaching staff hasn’t impacted our attitudes towards each other too radically, [but] they do seem to have impacted our attitude in terms of positivity no matter the outcome,’’ Pilar Saavedra-Weis said.
Although the players had just adjusted to their new coach this season, they’re expecting more change. Due to personal reasons, varsity coach McElligott will be leaving at the end of the season, which requires further effort for the players to persist and maintain a positive spirit through the rest of the year and the seasons to come.