June 5, 2013 • Estd. 1892 • Vol. 121 #5 • Published Monthly • www.ihstattler.com Ithaca High School, 1401 N. Cayuga St, Ithaca, NY 14850 • FREE
The Common Core PHOTO/NAOMI POWERS
Under the Common Core initiative, courses such as Ms. Snowman’s physics course may see a change in curriculum.
By REX LEI
In the past, businesses and colleges have remarked that too many students are not “college and career ready.” Originally, different states had different ranges of standards and rigor, leading to great differences in the educational opportunities available to students in different regions. Too often, students were learning assorted facts instead of having a basis of knowledge. To combat this, the Department of Education drafted and passed the Common Core Initiative, a set of national standards
designed to provide a framework for instruction. The Common Core stresses the integration of skills and ideas between classes. In the past, a student may have written an essay in English, done calculations in Mathematics, memorized vocabulary for a foreign language, and made an oral presentation in Science. Under the Common Core, the student would be making presentations in all classes for a few weeks, or writing essays for a few weeks, etc. Classes focus on one skill at a time, regardless of the subject. This way, students learn to apply the same skills in varying contexts,
improving their knowledge base and versatility. Classes will be employing different instructional methods, some of which may be completely new. For example, music and technology classes may be required to write essays. To analyze student progress, additional testing will be administered. These tests are not replacements for tests in class or the Regents examinations. While developing appropriate test score usage is extremely difficult, the scores will most certainly be used to measure Annual Yearly Progress (AYP). Continued on Page 8.
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OPINION
Editorial This is a public service announcement for the students of IHS. Its purpose is to inform the student body of a certain law that goes unspoken and unexplained. It is likely that this is the first time many readers will have heard of this law, and therein lies half of its danger. This is a law that connects what we do outside of school to punishment within school in ways that are inexplicable and more than a little troubling. The student body has never been informed of this law, so while it has not been put into effect at IHS, its potential to hurt uninformed students is very real. According to New York State law, school officials are permitted to punish students for any action taken that “materially and substantially disrupts school functions.” So you can’t disrupt school. You are liable to be punished if your actions disrupt the school day. Now you might say, “Well that’s fair, I’ll make sure my actions in school don’t disrupt what’s going on.” However, according to New York State law, anything you do anywhere that disrupts school is punishable. Wait—Anything? Anywhere? Yes, inquisitive reader: those words. That’s what this law essentially boils down to. For example, let’s start with the extreme: a fight, which any school official will point out to you in defending the law. You fight someone on The Commons, and though it has nothing to do with school, people see the fight and word gets around. Now it becomes a hot issue and students begin taking sides. Once it reaches the point at which students are disrupting school because of how invested they are in their sides of the fight, you can be suspended. We can all agree that this is understandable, that if you are fighting, there is a reasonable expectation that your actions will cause a disturbance. Of course there are two sides to this law, and where it gets troubling is the range of applications that it allows. This range comes from the lack of clarity in the language of the law, and the room for interpretation that is left: “Material and substantial disturbance” is truly in the eyes of the beholder, and the question of whether a person could actually have expected his or her actions to cause such a disruption is greatly ignored. How about an example of what could occur with this law as it stands? Let’s say you don’t like a teacher—let’s call him Mr. X—and because of how upset you are with him, you go for what seemed at the The Tattler is the student-run newspaper of time to be a little harmless venting: you Ithaca High School. It was founded in 1892 post on Facebook “Mr. X is the worst and is published monthly. teacher at our school.” So as it turns out, Mr. X is actually a pretty polarizing inAs an open forum, The Tattler individual, and all of a sudden, through vites opinion piece submissions and no real fault of your own, you find your letters to the editor from all comlittle stress activity becoming the subject munity members. Drop off submisof a heated debate. Is Mr. X good or bad? sions in E25 or e-mail them to: Well, this debate spills over into school editor@ihstattler.com hours, and is especially contested during Mr. X’s classes. So now there’s a problem. School officials have noticed that Mail letters to: Mr. X is unable to get any work done in The IHS Tattler his classes. So what do they do? Well, 1401 N. Cayuga St. someone has to be punished, right? Is it Ithaca, NY 14850 the kids who were talking in class? They might receive detentions, but there are The Tattler reserves the right to edit all submisso many of them, and you can’t reasonsions. Submissions do not necessarily reflect ably punish an entire class of students. the views of editorial staff. This is coming back to you. Continued on Page 5.
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June 5, 2013
2013–2014 Editor-in-Chief
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OPINION
Opinion
Cheating Yourself Out of an Education
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By NED LAUBER
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Imagine this: last night, you arrived home late from a track meet. Despite how tired you were, you filled your body with caffeine and forced yourself to study for your math final. After finally reviewing all your notes, you remembered that you also had an essay due the next day. Digging deep into your energy reserves, you managed to churn out a quick draft, which would have to do. Finally, at about two in the morning, you collapsed into your bed and fell into a blissful sleep. You had completely forgotten about your chemistry test. When the test began, your eyes were already starting to close, but you forced yourself to look at the first question. “Carbon is double-bonded to an . . . elephant? Wait, oxygen, not elephant!” You glanced around, seeing how other people were doing, when you suddenly realized how easy it would be to copy David’s test. You gave the question one last try, but your head only filled with static, so, glancing around to make sure you were out of the teacher’s sight, you hastily began scribbling down David’s answer. . . . This is just one example of how cheating is becoming more and more prevalent in today’s schools. Cheating ranges from simply copying a test to printing a free essay off the Internet and turning it in as your own. Students as young as sixth graders and as old as graduate students are learning just how easy it is to cheat, and cheating is becoming increasingly commonplace in almost all academic environments. Why is this the case? While there are a number of factors, the first and most commonly cited one is simple: the internet. With access to thousands of like-minded people online, cheating is becoming easier than ever before. Online resources such as Spar-
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kNotes allow students to discuss literature without reading a given story or novel. Web sites such as 123HelpMe and StudyMode provide students with essays and research papers from a simple topic search. If a teacher ever gives out an assignment from a lesson plan he or she found online, a student can easily track down the same assignment and uncover the answer key. Social networking is also making it easier to cheat. If a student finds the answers to a test online, he or she can distribute these answers to all of his or her friends in a matter of seconds. However, despite how easy technology makes cheating, there is a bigger reason that dishonesty is expanding in schools. In wealthy societies such as ours, education is perceived by many as a mandate rather than a privilege. Most students do not go to school because they want to learn: they go because they have to. They’ve lost sight of the huge privilege that school is. Students either think of school as a worthless stepping stone to college or a career, or as a complete and utter waste of time. If school is simply a game that a kid is forced to play, what’s wrong with cheating? There are many reasons why dishonesty is a terrible thing to mix with education. Cheating reduces the accomplishments of those who do their own work honestly. More importantly, it has been shown that deceitfulness early in life tends to lead to deception later in life. “Cheating” in adult life, like thievery and fraud, has much larger consequences than an “F” in a class. Additionally, nothing is gained from dishonesty. Any potential learning that could have happened because of a reading, worksheet, or test is gone, wiped out by completing that assignment dishonestly. Continued on Page 4.
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Continued from Page 3. But cheating is not just a problem that students must address. Educators, everyone from teaching assistants to superintendents, must work to make sure that students are taught the value of education. If students could see the benefit of each and every homework assignment and test, cheating would be reduced drastically. The problem is that many students see no value in high school work; they simply need to
OPINION get a good grade so that they can succeed later in life. Educators must work to ensure that they are designing curriculums that result in actual learning by students. Additionally, they must ensure that students actually see and understand the gains they are making and the value of learning. As students continue becoming more disenchanted with high school, cheating will only become more frequent. Educators must work to com-
municate the value of education to their students, and students must work to understand this value and do their work for the sake of learning. High school should not simply be a stepping stone that students try to cross as quickly as possible; high school should provide valuable knowledge and skills that students will use later in life. It is essential that both students and teachers understand this in order to reduce dishonesty in school.
Meryl Streep: The Best Actress Ever PHOTO/PROVIDED
By CONOR COUTTS
Meryl Streep is not only an actress; she is the best actress of all time. In a society where ditsy actresses are the new norm, some may forget the mother of acting: with seventeen Academy Award nominations and three Academy Award wins, Meryl Streep is talent. Presumably everyone has a favorite actress. For whatever reason, that person just gets the “dramatic job” done, whether it be for a comedic, physical, contemporary, or an arbitrary reason. However, it is the case that unless Meryl Streep is your favorite actress, you are incorrect in your choice. For example, just after her second movie, The Deer Hunter, in which she plays Linda, a ravishing small-town girl waiting around for her man to return from Vietnam, Streep scored an Oscar nomination. Yes, you read that correctly—on her second film ever, she received a nomination for the highest award given to American performers (that is something Jennifer Lawrence can not say). Unparalleled achievement is far from being the only mentionable talent Streep possesses: her ability to conquer a variety of accents and dialects makes her shine brighter than any other performer. In contemporary film, a performer who can change his or her voice and model it after someone else’s is rare, and some performers don’t even try (see Emma Watson in Perks of Being a Wallflower). This is of course not the case for Meryl Streep. Italian, Danish, Australian, English, Southern American, Bronx, Irish, Polish, and Midwestern American are
Streep early in her career.
all accents and dialects Streep has perfected in film. Speaking like the role one is portraying really makes a positive difference in a part, and to quote Streep directly: “How could I play that part and talk like me?” Streep’s copious successes most certainly do not halt at the accents—the casting is of great importance. She has won seventeen Oscar, twenty-seven Golden Globe, and three Emmy nominations; one must see her work to believe it. Her fame escalated with Kramer vs. Kramer, a film involving a dramatic custody battle for which she won an Oscar, beating the much-older Jane Alexander and Barbara Barrie. Streep went on dominating the acting spectrum. Following her captivating role in the film adaption of William Styron’s 1979 novel, Sophie’s Choice, Roger Ebert remarked
of her performance: “This is one of the most astonishing and yet one of the most unaffected and natural performances I can imagine.” Streep’s fame continued the following year with one of my favorite movies of all time, Silkwood, in which Streep plays the lovable Oklahoma nuclear fuel production plant worker–turned–labor activist, Karen Silkwood. Streep shines with her performance of this laid-back woman of strength and humor. Critics thought so too, as Silkwood earned her yet another nomination for Best Actress. Streep stole the hearts of millions with performances in Out of Africa, A Cry in the Dark, Postcards from the Edge, and The Hours. She then started playing the protagonist in a series of biographical films. In one such film, The Devil Wears Prada, Streep fully conquers something that had been slightly lacking in her other films: a strong woman. As the sassy fashion editor Miranda Priestly (believed to be based on fashion editor Anna Wintour), Streep yet again delivers an all-around phenomenal performance capturing her character’s true “evil” spirit in clothes that are “to die for,” if you will. Streep’s biographical roles continued in Julie and Julia—in which she plays the lovable six-foot two-inch television chef, Julia Child—and of course in The Iron Lady, in which Streep effortlessly captures the strong persona of the late Margaret Thatcher (this performance won her her third Oscar). So, with her early success, elegance, ability to model accents, and plain talent, Meryl Streep is the best actress ever.
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Continued from Page 2. Because you expressed your opinion in a closed forum completely separate from school, you are now punished with measures potentially as severe as suspension. Now that we’ve come full circle and seen the full progression of this law, it’s possible to begin digesting its implications. It’s understood that certain rights are forfeited when a student enters school, and we overlook the fact that students are legally required to go to school until they are sixteen; therefore, it is legally mandated that a child gives up those rights, because hey, kids don’t benefit from every right afforded to adults. This law, however, makes the condition that students must censor themselves outside of school, not based on how their words or actions may affect the people to whom they are directed, but whether they will be too interesting—whether what they say will trigger a response from classmates. You can be punished for talking about Mr. X in a fully removed setting not because it’s libelous or slanderous, but because it might just be too interesting. Of course it’s important that school runs properly, but to maintain such a wide and expansive basis for punishment is alarming and ridiculous. You can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater, but can’t you talk about the movie outside of the theater, even if it makes people upset once they get inside? It gets tricky when we try to fix this law, because we know that there are actions taken by students that truly cause issues within school and should be punishable, such as our fight at The Commons. At the same time, however, circumstances exist, like that of our poor Mr. X, in which a student can be blamed for something truly unpredictable. Then what do we do? Fear not, friend who definitely exists and isn’t a tool for transitions, there is a fix. As it stands now, the law allows school administrators to decide whether or not an action materially and substantially disrupted the school day, but not whether or not the disruption could have been foreseen. When you post about Mr. X, all an administrator can think about as he or she is choosing whether to punish you, is if you disrupted class. At no point will he or she be required to stop and ask, “Hey, could this Facebook poster have seen this coming?” If the administrator did, he or she would notice the hundreds of Facebook posts that go by every day without a second glance. This would, hopefully, prompt the administrator into recognizing that, though your actions may be the ultimate cause of a disruption, they were wholly unpredictable and indirect. Where this law stands to improve is its region of interpretation: it must change to a law built on the principle that if an action can not be reasonably expected to result in a material and substantial disruption of the school day, it certainly should not be punishable. This concludes this public safety announcement. Be safe and (for now) shhh. . . .
OPINION
Shut Up and Play: The Value of Gym By ELIE KIRSHNER
Throughout public school history, students have found Gym to be both obsolete and aggravating. Few classes take as much abuse as Gym, which seems to be viewed at best as just a plain waste of time. But in reality, Gym is of great value to our social and educational lives. From a social standpoint, Gym is of value to us as one of the few classes at IHS that is not divided into Regents, Honors, and AP levels. It is certainly the most interactive of those few. The class is a rare opportunity for many students to interact with each other who otherwise never would. And if you happen to be in a class with people you already see elsewhere, Gym remains a platform for teamwork and community that is often lost in the competitive high school atmosphere. Even if you don’t always find Gym to be the most enjoyable activity, it is undeniably one of the few things that unites us in high school. Gym is also important to us as students from a health and education standpoint. Even if you are in great physical shape and play three sports, a little cross training with friends and some experience with different sports won’t hurt. And on the opposite end of the fitness spectrum, just because the exercise is more important for some than others does not mean that those people should have to go through the class alone. Complaints about our physical education classes seem to arise from two places: laziness and superiority. Sadly, these valuable Gym classes, for which I have such a love, may soon be an endangered species at IHS, threatened by Gym exams (really, who came up with that?) and student ideas to make Gym classes separated by effort level or fitness. Testing in Gym is ridiculous. Its increasing presence makes Gym seem more like a review of the fitness unit of Health rather than a class with the values discussed above. Turning Gym into yet another area that we are judged on in high school is nearly as pointless as it is frustrating. Other possible threats to the benefits of Gym can be found in student ideas to stratify the classes. Many students believe that we need to have standard and honors Gym classes, or in effect, non-effort and effort classes. This idea would not only bring Gym even further into the competitive and separated world of the rest of our classes, but it would also be utterly ineffective. Giving students an invitation not to take Gym seriously would only serve to vindicate the behavior of those who already do so. To summarize, Gym is of great value to IHS. The class is a rare place in high school without division, and is a platform for teamwork and the building of a stronger school community. And of course, no matter who you are, exercise and exposure to sports is nothing to whine about. Unfortunately, the value of Gym may be fading with increased testing and student apathy, so while we still have some of these fleeting benefits I have mentioned, shut up and play.
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OPINION
Editorial No Rich Private Company Left Behind PHOTO/SUSAN WATTS
Pearson PLC is a British-based education giant and the number one book publisher in the world. It controls many of the big names in publishing, including Addison-Wesley, the Financial Times, and Prentice Hall, and generated a total revenue of about $10 billion in 2011. But Pearson is not interesting for its vast but otherwise unremarkable operations and its associated profits; it is interesting because, in recent years, it has attained a virtual death grip on the American public education system, becoming deeply and inappropriately ingrained as a textbook supplier, test writer, and teacher evaluator in ways that epitomize all that is wrong with the American education system. One of the many alarming pieces of this situation is that, again and again, Pearson has shown itself to be an incompetent standardized test designer. Due to concerns that New York State standardized tests were too easy, Pearson was given a five-year, $32 million contract to overhaul the system in 2010. (Pearson has similar arrangements with seventeen other states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, including a $500 million deal with Texas.) It performed swimmingly—the 2012 tests featured dozens of errors, including a fourth grade math question with more than one correct answer; a fifth grade question that required students to know the Pythagorean theorem, which they do not learn until middle school; and an infamous reading comprehension question on the eighth grade English Language Arts (ELA) test that’s been nicknamed “Pineapplegate.” The story features a talking pineapple who challenges a hare to a race; the animals of the forest decide that the normally immobile pineapple must have something clever planned to beat the hare. The race starts, the hare runs off, and the pineapple remains motionless. When it loses, the animals get angry and eat it. The end. Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings aptly concluded that “[t]he plot details are so oddly chosen that the story seems to
Parents and teachers protest outside of Pearson’s New York headquarters.
have been written during a peyote trip.” Eighth graders were asked, among other things, which of four suspicious animals spoke the wisest words, whatever that means. Most of them weren’t sure. That’s not all: complaints have surfaced over simple grading and mathematical errors, as well as Pearson’s failure to provide efficient, timely grading in more than half of the years in the past decade. But when Pearson executives aren’t bumbling about writing standardized test questions while apparently on acid trips, they’re actively and malevolently trying to undercut their competitors. This spring, several sixth and eighth grade essay questions appeared to have been directly lifted from Pearson’s textbooks, meaning school districts were unfairly rewarded for having purchased Pearson’s books and were incentivized to do so in the future. And, as reported in the New York Times, Pearson has a nonprofit foundation that sends high-ranking education officials on lavish overseas trips to education conferences proudly featuring—surprise, surprise—Pearson products and Pearson executives. Pearson has also moved into the
realm of licensing teachers. Partnered with Stanford University, Pearson created a test, the Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA), now the edTPA, designed to test teacher aptitude. The test includes a brief, highly compressed teaching video and forty to fifty pages of responses to canned questions. The test has been roundly criticized for being a systematized, assembly-line grading process that lacks an open-ended, holistic, human component. “[The essay portion] not only leads [prospective teachers] to answer only the specific questions determined by external forces to be relevant to their student-teaching experience, but narrows the possible ‘good’ answers through the limitations of a rubric,” said Barbara Madeloni, University of Massachusetts Amherst–coordinator of the Secondary Teacher Education Program to the New York Times. “In a high-stakes environment, where the score on this ‘assessment’ determines a student’s ability to graduate [college] and/or receive a teaching license, the production of the right answer dominates the experience.” Continued on Page 7.
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OPINION
Continued from Page 6. Madeloni was personally attacked and later did not have her post renewed due to these comments. In response, students, staff, and parents founded Can’t Be Neutral, an education activist group. They demand that Madeloni be reinstated and that dealings with Pearson and other for-profit companies become more transparent. “We here at Can’t Be Neutral understand that what happened to Barbara can happen to any of us,” declares Can’t Be Neutral’s website. “We understand that the public good, and public education in particular, is under attack by forces looking to exploit education for profit, to privatize and commodify all public spaces. We understand that the incursion of the for-profit company Pearson into teacher education through the TPA is one more example of this attack. . . . We are disturbed by both the willingness of the School of Education to collaborate with these privatizing and dehumanizing forces and their silencing of voices of critique and opposition.” (Madeloni eventually reached a generous settlement with the University of Massachusetts.) Public education shouldn’t be about which companies can most effectively scam taxpayers into paying for their textbooks—it should be about providing children the best education they can get. This is not accomplished by handing over the reins of education to money-grubbing private companies more interested in marketing their own textbooks than providing fair, unbiased, or even sane standardized tests. Companies like Pearson shouldn’t be deciding who can and can’t teach, especially when they’ve shown themselves to be as incompetent as they are; Pearson in particular should not be trusted with such substantial control of eighteen states’ education programs. Pearson is not the first and will certainly not be the last company to abuse its power, cut corners on efficiency, or use stories about talking pineapples if the current system persists. This is ultimately a manifestation of a more fundamental problem in American education. Realistically, writing exams that properly test an eighth grader’s abilities to read, write, and do math shouldn’t be that hard, and yet the United States continues to struggle with that problem with no end in sight; No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal act, has left America with a legacy of heavy reliance on easily graded multiple-choice tests that get less informative by the year, and our weak education system leaves us behind most other countries in the developed world. Any fix to our dangerously diseased system will necessarily be a great overhaul, and while this may be an uncomfortable reality to face, the consequences of inaction are much harsher. Reform must unquestionably involve fewer corporations, fewer bubbled-in responses, and more professionals in education making decisions, putting us closer in line with successful education systems around the world. Improving and properly incentivizing public education is a goal that we—as American citizens, concerned siblings, future parents, and politicians—should all work towards.
Thank Jew Very Much By RUBIN DANBERG-BIGGS
Hold onto your yarmulkes, fellow Jews, it’s time to celebrate! Beginning in September of 2013, school will not start until Tuesday, September 10, about a week later than it usually does. Why the change? Us! The stated reason for the change is the High Holy Day of Rosh Hashanah, for which observant Jews are usually required to miss school. In the middle of the year, missing a day here and there isn’t a big deal, but at the very beginning it becomes a major hurdle to overcome, as students have difficulty attempting to keep up with their quickly starting classes. Although we would never ask for it, it sure does feel good. It’s not fair to request a full school day off for the entire student body on the behalf of a very small minority; however, the change shows a certain awareness of one of the more marginally represented groups at IHS that, in the past, has been lacking in school policies. Still in the rough are Muslims at IHS, who have yet to receive any support from school policy when it comes to holidays such as Eid al-Fitr, which celebrates the conclusion of Ramadan, and remains on a “miss it if you want” basis. With Christmas recognized with a week and a half, and Rosh Hashanah recognized (it still feels weird to say), it seems as though Muslims are now in the dark for no remaining reason, but that is a topic for another day. Don’t get it twisted, the conversation ought to be had, but today feels like a time for celebrating something that, as most Jews will tell you, is completely unexpected. The addition of a day off for Rosh Hashanah is a lot like HCourtyard’s iPads; in no way necessary, but greatly appreciated nonetheless. This is certainly not just a big day for Jews. Take it from a group that knows: getting a day off for someone else’s holiday is as good as getting one off for one’s own. No gifts, no travel, no cleaning—just a quiet day off for absolutely no reason. We Jews will celebrate this good news as only we can: through bitter herbs, intensive prayer, and maybe a little fasting. Mazel Tov!
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PHOTO/PROVIDED
Continued from Page 1. “[The common core is] an alignment of skills necessary for students to be successful in all subject areas and college and career ready,” said Jason Trumble, Chief Secondary Officer of ICSD. Trumble is responsible for the implementation of the common core in ICSD. With such a wide variety of the quality of education throughout the country, implementing a common curriculum is very difficult. To accommodate these differences, the initiative includes “shifts.” Instead of completely remaking the educational system, curriculums are shifted to the approximate grade levels depicted by the common core. In general, for Ithaca’s schools, these shifts have students attempt material learned in higher grades. This year marks the first year of the common core in elementary and middle schools. Many have anticipated a drop in scores, due to the higher level of rigor, and the possibility that students have not seen the content before. While community members seldom argue with the principles behind the common core, many have raised concerns about the amount of testing added with this change. “The challenge with any change is understanding the change,” Trumble remarked. ICSD is working its hardest to make a clean and successful transition, but there is still much to accomplish. The current focus is on mathematics and the English Language Arts (ELA). In future years, science and other subjects will receive changes in curriculum. Next year, the common core will come to IHS. While it may not be a graduation requirement, it will certainly be mandatory for all students. Hopefully, at the end of this transition period, our educational system will be greatly improved. We’ll have an education system that provides equal opportunity for success and challenges us with new ways of thinking.
NEWS
Cornell has installed solar panels on buildings such as Day Hall.
Solar Panels in Tompkins County By DEANNA DEYHIM
Solar panels have been leased to the Tompkins County Legislature for installation on seven county-owned buildings. Solar Liberty, a private American company, agreed to the lease a year ago. Installation began last November and will finish in Spring 2014. The fifteen-year lease, which covers the installation and maintenance of the solar panels, costs $14,000 per year. According to the Tompkins County Commissioner of Planning and Community Sustainability, Ed Marx, Tompkins County is projected to save $195,000 in deferred energy costs by the end of the agreement. The installations have been completed on the county’s Emergency Response Center, the Public Works Facility, the Human Services Building, and the Board of Elections Building. The Health Department and Human Services Annex will receive their panels in the coming months, according to the plans laid out by county leaders.
Carol Chock, a member of the Tompkins County Legislature, outlined the two major goals of the project: First, the demonstration to county residents of the application and benefits of solar energy, and second, the financial payoff of the project. “Ideally, Tompkins County would install their own panels,” Ms. Chock said when discussing why Solar Liberty was chosen for the project. She explained that the cost of manufacturing and maintaining the solar panels as a county was not practical, and referred to the deal with Solar Liberty as “win-win.” Residents of Caroline, Dryden, and Danby have the option of joining the group Solarize Tompkins Southeast to bring solar power to their homes. This group focuses on buying solar panels collectively, with the goal that members pay less than the value of electricity used. The enrollment deadline is June 15. For more information on the project, visit tinyurl.com/aeok43k. For more information on Solarize Tompkins Southeast, visit solarizetompkinsse.org.
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NEWS
2013 Streets Alive By ANNA KUCHER
Last month, the second annual Streets Alive Ithaca took place downtown. On May 5, parts of Cayuga Street and Court Street were closed off to cars and opened to the community for the afternoon. Over the past five years, New York City, San Francisco, Portland, and sixty-five other cities have successfully launched events to encourage alternative forms of transportation. Inspired by the growing movement to promote sustainable transportation in urban areas, Ithaca organizers launched Streets Alive. Ithaca’s initiative took place during National Bike Month, strengthening its connection to the promotion of clean transportation. A mapped-out route led participants from GIAC on Court Street to IHS. Throughout the route, there were hubs located at GIAC, Thompson Park, and IHS with water and bike repair stations. There were roller derby demos, live music, great food, tai chi, and dance. Activities such as a bike rodeo, “practice putting your bike on
a TCAT bus,” hula hooping, and chalk drawing also took place in the streets. “Streets Alive is about reclaiming our streets!” noted volunteer Ren Ostry, “We should be doing this more often—Streets Alive provides a safe space to explore our community in new ways.” The first Streets Alive Ithaca occurred in September 2012 when the normally busy Cayuga Street was closed off to cars for an afternoon, during which the community—pedestrians, bikers, scooters, and rollers—could come to have fun. Streets Alive isn’t just for alternative transportation advocates—it’s an opportunity for the community to come together and socialize. It promotes sustainability, improved health, and community safety, as well as tourism and economic development. Vikki Armstrong, one of the co-organizers of the event, shared, “It’s a green way to get around, it’s a healthy way to get around, and it builds community.” PHOTO/PROVIDED
Ithaca promotes alternative transportation.
Tompkins County Public Library’s “Tail-Waggin’ Tutor” Program By SARAH SKROVAN
Tompkins County Public Library (TCPL) now offers an amazing program for young readers. Children now have the opportunity to practice reading aloud to a truly non-judgmental listener: a dog. On Mondays from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. in the Thaler/Howell Programming Room, either Sam the Hound or DJ the Terrier is available to listen to hesitant new readers practicing reading aloud. According to Kate Devoe, a Youth Services Librarian at TCPL, the idea for the program stemmed from the thought that new readers can be hesitant to practice reading outloud in front of parents or other children. “We wanted to give them the opportunity to practice reading aloud to a completely non-judgmental listener who wouldn’t notice or care if they stumbled over words,” said Devoe. The reaction to the program has been very positive. The library receives many calls about the program and has gotten positive feedback from parents and children alike. “The kids really seem to enjoy it, especially since they get a chance to play with the dog afterwards,” commented Devoe. The program is co-sponsored by Cornell Companions, a pet visitation program sponsored by the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. Cornell Companions is dedicated to the development of the Human-Animal Bond, and sees TCPL’s new program as an opportunity to further develop relations between young children and their canine companions. The program has been a success and the library hopes that the children who take advantage of its “Tail Waggin’ Tutor” program become a step closer to being confident with and developing a love for reading.
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Board of Education: Things Slow Down at the End of the Year, and Plans for a Quebec Trip By ARYEH ZAX
The Board of Education (BoE) held its monthly meeting on May 14. At IHS, the Cascadilla Boat Club Girls’ Junior A 8+ team won the Gold in the Club division and second place overall in the state at a competition in Saratoga Falls. In Kulp Auditorium, the band concert was held on May 15, the choir concert on May 22, and the orchestra concert on May 29. It was the last concert for choir director Arthur Loomis, who is retiring at the end of this year. The Senior Prom was held Saturday, May 11, at the Ithaca Farmers’ Market and was very successful, despite concerns about Ithaca’s chaotic weather, which turned out not to be an issue. Principal Jarett Powers has opened the Bookmark Café, which provides healthy snacks (including fruits and muffins) in the IHS library for students who do not have a chance to eat breakfast at home. At LACS, the search for beloved
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principal Joe Greenberg’s replacement continues. In early May, the entire school gathered to discuss what qualities they wanted in a new principal; in spite of the search, normal activities continue. Later in the month, LACS held a trips week that excited many students as well as a community feedback night to hear what parents and others had to say about the school. Some students feel underrepresented; there is a significant movement in the student body to increase its participation in the process, by measures such as increasing the number of student interviews and influencing interview questions for the higher-ups. Superintendent Luvelle Brown gave an unusually brief Superintendent’s Report, mainly focusing on his own responsibilities in the LACS principal search. Rebecca Stevenson, a French and Spanish teacher from Dewitt Middle School, proposed a Quebec City trip for middle school students. The trip would be akin to the one run by Janet Bowman for high school students to Paris, an every-other-year
event, but would be a little closer to home, and thus easier for students to manage compared to traveling across the Atlantic. The details are yet to be worked out, but the trip would ideally be next year so it could alternate with Bowman’s trip, which happened this April. The BoE encouraged Stevenson and awaits a further report. The BoE voted on Policy 1900, which concerns parents’ involvement in their children’s ICSD activities, and Policy 5140, which concerns kindergarten entrance ages. It also gave first readings to several policies governing its own functions, including Policy 2000, which concerns its own goals, responsibilities, and priorities; Policy 2100, a concise description of the BoE’s structure; Policy 2140, which concerns the potential removal of BoE members; and Policy 2150, which concerns filling BoE vacancies. It also affirmed the 2009 guidelines that the district negotiated with the then-Tattler editorial board as one of the closing pieces in the 2005 lawsuit between the newspaper and the district.
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June 5, 2013
Teacher Feature: Ms. Maddren PHOTO/NAOMI POWERS
By CONOR COUTTS
Jodi Maddren is no stranger to IHS: she can be heard almost every day, singing loudly through the halls of D-building and the athletics areas. Her sarcasm and excitement are memorable, to say the least. What makes this woman want to teach. What drives her to be so excited? What is her connection with athletics? Under her boisterous and extroverted personality there is a story, and I wanted to know it, so I sat down with her to try to get into the mind of Maddren. Conor Coutts ’15: Where are you originally from? Jodi Maddren: Originally from Glens Falls, NY. CC: Describe your childhood in one word, and then elaborate. JM: Basic. I was mostly an only child (I did have a sibling who passed away at a very young age). I had very very very loving parents. They gave me a very good upbringing. I am very proud of my upbringing, but it was a very plain Jane. CC: Why do you teach gym? JM: I love it. I love my job and I get up every single day and am excited for what I do. I love the energy and connections I have with students and staff—it’s a new experience every day. CC: Do you think gym teachers get bad reps? A lot of people characterize them as not having a lot of responsibility. They say that requirements for becoming a gym teacher are easy, and some think that gym teachers are not really teachers. How do you respond to that? JM: It’s a yes and no answer. We are misunderstood in that a lot of people do not understand all that is involved in becoming a PE teacher. We have to know every single function and science that has to do with the human body, inside and out. On the other hand, I think PE teachers can go a long way to help how they are perceived. Are they serious about what they do? Are they teaching and not just throwing a ball and saying “go exercise”? I think
JM: Probably because I act like I’m four. Ha—just guessing. I do my best to go through the school campus and connect with people, and maintain those connections once I make them. It is important to me to have connections and to maintain them at work.
CC: Describe your life as an athlete. JM: I was a pretty good athlete. I played sports year round in middle school and high school. I played soccer, softball, and Maddren striking a signature pose. basketball. When I went on to college, I it can go either way. played soccer. In my adult life, I continued playing soccer and after my third CC: You no longer coach. Is that correct? knee surgery, I finally got smart and said JM: Yes, I no longer coach. “Jodi, hang up the cleats!” CC: Do you think, as a gym teacher, you should coach? Most of the other IHS gym teachers do. JM: I don’t think it should be a requirement. I don’t necessarily think PE teachers should be viewed differently if they do or don’t. To me, they are two separate things. I enjoyed coaching, but I also enjoy the time I have off when I don’t coach. CC: You are very boisterous and loud. Does this ever go “too far” and disrupt the learning process? JM: I don’t know. I can’t answer that, because no one has ever come up to me and said “I’m not learning because you’re too loud, Ms. Maddren.” I have been told all my life that I am loud, and there have been times that I have been too loud. I have things to say and I like to say them loudly. CC: You are one of the most adored faculty members. Why do you think that is?
CC: What is your favorite thing to do outside of school? JM: I actually like solitude. I love to read and spend time with my dog. I live in a private wooded area and like to spend time in my yard. CC: What is one thing that makes you the saddest? JM: When people don’t treat each other nicely. When people are too quick to judge others. It makes me so sad. CC: What is one event that has affected you the most in your life and why was it so “big”? JM: Probably the death of my twin brother: he passed when I was five. It impacted me a lot. At five, it didn’t impact me at the time, but I think it played a part in shaping who I am today. CC: What is one piece of advice you would give to graduating seniors? JM: Do what you love, love what you do.
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TSA Comes Out on Top By SOPHIA SHI
On April 27, at approximately 4:45 a.m., seventeen IHS students—along with their catapults, dragsters, and basswood structures—headed to Buffalo State College for the 2013 New York State Technology Student Association (TSA) Conference. Along with community service and educational programs, competitions complete the trifecta of TSA programs. At the state conference, IHSTSA members participated in sixteen events ranging from Junior Solar Sprint to Digital Video Production to Extemporaneous Speech. All in all, TSA returned home eleven first place, six second place, and four third place trophies richer. Liz Rosen ’16 won trophies in four events, making her the NYSTSA High School Student of the Year. The team also earned the award of High School Chapter of the Year. The state competition serves to prepare members for the
National TSA Conference, where over 4,000 students from around the world meet and compete in over sixty events. At the end of June, six IHSTSA members will be attending the conference, held this year in Orlando, Florida. Besides occupying the fourth quarter with event preparation, TSA is also preparing for some exciting community activities. On June 6, it will be participating in the first annual Tech-xpo (pronounced “texpo”), an exposition highlighting technology education from the entire Ithaca City School District. TSA will also be featured in the June 2 Sciencenter Showcase, in partnership with Cornell University’s X-Raise program, presenting science exhibits built by TSA members. These include a vortex cannon, a homemade metal melter, and more! To learn more about these events or just find out what TSA has been up to, check TSA out on Facebook at facebook.com/ IHSTSA or follow TSA on Twitter at @IHSTSA.
Restaurant Review: Taste of Thai Express By SIENA SCHICKEL
Unlike most towns, Ithaca is blessed with a wide range of cultural restaurants, especially when it comes to Thai food. Taste of Thai Express, owned by Ying Balakula and Akhin Pancharoen, used to occupy a tiny space on West State Street, where it was known for its good food and convenient location. Just recently, it moved down to South Meadow Street, gaining a lot more attention in its larger stand-alone building surrounded by traffic and other eateries such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Ithaca Bakery. The building, designed by Schickel Architecture, greets customers with its friendly red tones and culturally Thai peaks in the roof, then settles into shades of yellow on the inside. Customers can eat by windows, in the middle of all the action, in quiet booths, or even outside when the weather is friendly. The noise level can vary depending on the day and time, but even the loudest of days can bring a pleasant sense of festivity to each bamboo table. As for the menu, Taste of Thai Express offers a wide range of delicious meals. If you want to be adventurous, you can start out with a Thai Iced Tea, and don’t worry; it is definitely supposed to be that shade of orange! If you’re not in the mood for something spicy and herbal, the fresh lime soda is equally as refreshing and has much more of a zing. It’s so fresh, the lime is still all at the bottom, so don’t take a sip until you’ve stirred it up! On colder days, there are hot teas available from Organic Sweet Leaf. Moving onto appetizers, my personal favorite is the Goong Saloong. Taste of Thai makes other restaurants’ jumbo shrimp look like krill when it wraps up each one with a
chaotic mess of crunchy Thai noodles. The combination of the textures balances each other out, and eating these with the sauce it comes with is an absolute necessity. For the main dish, I have many favorites. The Massaman Curry, which ironically is not originally Thai, but Indian, is smooth, sweet, and spicy, with a healthy mix of veggies and a constant flavor of peanuts and potatoes. This dish was originally an occasional special until it became so popular that it moved onto the regular curry section of the menu. One other dish is the Rad Nah, a heaping portion of slippery broad rice noodles with an assortment of greener vegetables in a sweet sauce, spicy or not. If this is your first time with Thai food, there’s always the classic Pad Thai for those who may not be ready for the more adventurous dishes, but rest assured you will be full by the time you are finished with your meal. If you’ve got a hollow leg and are feeling up for some dessert, there are still plenty of options. For a more American choice, fried ice cream is a classic, with a serving of a sphere the size of a softball topped with a tart fruit sauce. It doesn’t take much of an adventurous spirit to try the coconut custard though, and you get to keep the miniature ceramic bowls it comes in too! No matter what you try, Taste of Thai Express always satisfies. The prices are more than reasonable for the portion sizes and quality of food, and the staff are smart, quick, and friendly. There are only a few more facts you need to learn before you go and visit this restaurant: the take-out service is fast and convenient, for all of you of-age readers out there, you can bring your own alcoholic beverages to enjoy with the meal since it does not sell them within the restaurant, and the orchids, which are on almost every plate, are edible.
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Bell works on a project in her AP art class.
Going to Art School: Rhiannon Bell By EMILY SCARPULLA
Emily Scarpulla ’14: What inspired you to go to art school? Rhiannon Bell ’13: I wanted to go to art school simply because I’m interested in art. People go to school to pursue their interests and art is what keeps me busy day and night and it’s what I hope to do for the rest of my life. ES: Who are your favorite artists and why? RB: I don’t have nearly enough knowledge of art history to answer this accurately, but some of my favorite older artists would have to be Rembrandt, John William Waterhouse, and Caravaggio. Some of my favorite living artists include Alan Lee, Hayao Miyazaki, Mike Wilks, and Ai Weiwei. ES: What do you want to do with your art career? RB: No one ever knows what kind of art career they’re going to end up
with. The entire industry is composed of niche markets so you could go in with a number of developed skills and wind up painting murals on the sides of silos. I’m hoping to have a profession that pays reasonably well and that allows me to have creative license. Beyond that I’m not making any assumptions of where I’m going to end up. ES: What school are you going to and why did you pick it? RB: Tyler School of Art at Temple University. I chose it because it is one of the only well-established art schools in America that is connected with an accredited university. I knew it was the best place to go if I wanted to receive a really strong art education as well as a decent academic one. ES: What advice would you give to younger students about working their way to art school? RB: I’m actually working on a whole essay for my English portfolio based on this question. The most impor-
tant advice I can give is work on your portfolio. All decent art schools and art programs require you to submit a portfolio with fifteen to twenty pieces that represent your highest quality of work. This is not only the primary factor in determining your admittance, but also in awarding scholarships. My advice would be to do a lot of work outside of class and to start planning early. (I started working on my portfolio the summer before my junior year.) A good idea would be to do at least fifty decent pieces and then choose your best twenty. Don’t procrastinate! We all procrastinate on our supplementary college essays, but if you procrastinate on your portfolio it’s going to be painfully obvious. Besides this I would just say that you should do a wide variety of work, draw from observation, and if there’s a particular medium or practice that you’re interested in you should find the resources to do it. And never draw anime or fan art! Art schools hate that. No offense to anime and fan art.
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Iron Man 3: A Review Note: contains spoilers. With the success of Iron Man five years ago, Marvel launched its cinematic universe, an interconnected series of movies based on its comics. After Iron Man came the stories of other heroes— Captain America, Thor, The Hulk, and a sequel to Iron Man, all leading to The Avengers. The Avengers was the first movie of its kind, combining seemingly independent characters into an epic story that seamlessly wove their stories into one. These movies comprised Marvel’s Phase One, and upon the success of The Avengers last May, Marvel began planning Phase Two. Iron Man 3 was the first of the Phase Two movies, and easily managed to jump-start the next wave of comic book movies. Robert Downey, Jr. captured the witty dialogue and cocky flair possessed by Tony Stark in the Iron Man comics from the very first time he showed up on the silver screen as the armored industrialist. Iron Man 3 was no different. Downey kept up the quips throughout the film, and was joined in his witticisms by the entire cast, even the faceless artificial intelligence, JARVIS. Every character in the movie managed to be funny and entertaining in his or her own way—even two nameless henchmen who interrogate Tony at one point managed to get a few laughs from the audience. Arguably the sidekick character, Don Cheadle as Colonel James Rhodes, served as the perfect straight man to Tony’s charm, and the two played off each other marvelously (pun intended). But not all of the dialogue was so light. Much of the story revolves around Tony’s psychological response to the events of The Avengers, and the script captures this issue fairly well, without turning it into a joke or throw-away detail. Of course, central to any comic book movie are the fight sequences, a department in which Iron Man 3 did not disappoint at all. Since the first movie,
the Iron Man suits have only gotten crazier and more complex. From the bulky Mark 1, to the suitcase-suit Mark 4, to the pod-launched Mark 7 in The Avengers, Iron Man 3 tops them all with a suit that can launch in pieces to assemble on Tony at Tony’s command. In addition, it turns out that, in the wake of The Avengers, Tony got busy making suits, and is working on his forty-second when the movie opens. The main bad guy in the movie has developed a super-soldier type injection, and the climactic action sequence (which lasted around thirty minutes) pits the mostly remotely controlled Iron Man suits against a small army of the Extremis super soldiers. Now, you may be thinking to yourself that thirty minutes is a long time to show a robot beatdown, but there are a couple of reasons why you might be wrong. First of all, robot beatdowns of literally red hot super soldiers is awesome, and Iron Man 3’s animation team rendered them pretty awesomely in the movie. Secondly, the final battle wasn’t just fighting. Rhodey had to save the president, Tony had to save Pepper, Pepper had to save Tony, and a huge Iron Man suit had to save the entire building from collapse. In addition, the one-liners and witty comebacks continued throughout the fight scene, providing a very layered and fluid scene that was probably the best in the film. As with any other film adaptation of a paper work, the quality of the adaptation plays a huge part in determining the enjoyability of the movie. (Here’s where the spoilers really start.) As a comic book fan, getting to see a relatively obscure group like Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM) in Iron Man 3 was huge, despite it not being portrayed incredibly accurately. AIM in the comics is a semi-terrorist organi-
PHOTO/PROVIDED
By CHRIS SKAWSKI
zation dedicated to scientific advancement at any cost. Iron Man 3 portrays AIM as really just Aldrich Killian, who ends up being pretty crazy. Very little of AIM’s science fervor carries over into the movie, and the same goes for its usually nerdy, clandestine nature. AIM served as a fine villainous organization for the purposes of the movie, but its essence in the comics was not captured well. In addition, the Extremis in the movie, an injection that gives heat powers and strength, isn’t the same as Extremis was originally written, with the Extremis system actually being a nanomachine armor that Tony can call at any time. Those two were the only things that weren’t accurately adapted, so overall, the movie was quite faithful to its comic book source. Iron Man 3 was a rather good movie, and certainly a good movie by action film standards. It combined compelling storytelling with witty dialogue and fast-paced action, with no single element either out-shining or letting down the others. It was certainly a better movie than Iron Man 2, and even rivals the original Iron Man. All in all, Iron Man 3 is the second-best Marvel movie so far, and was a very successful start to the next phase of Avengers-related movies.
June 5, 2013
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The Great Gatsby: A Review By RENA BRAND
music did help enhance some scenes, but it mainly detracted from the historical accuracy of the movie. One of the standout scenes was the party at Gatsby’s house. The costumes and the scenery of Gatsby’s mansion mixed to create a scene which left me thinking one thing: “I want to party with Jay Gatsby.” Character-wise, I really can’t say I liked any of the characters. Of course, some of them were meant to be unlikeable, but even I found myself feeling utterly nonchalant towards characters I thought I should sympathize with. Admittedly, I did not read the book before seeing the movie (an action I sincerely regret). One character I thought should have been a bigger part of the story was Nick Carraway. He did narrate the whole movie, but his narration was just that: a narration. There wasn’t enough development behind his character, and since one of the main themes involved with the story is his growing discontent toward society, that element was missing. He went from virtually loving the world to hating it quickly, as opposed to gradually revealing the discord hiding underneath the glamour that was the time period. I also found myself hating Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) for simply existing. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby was amazing, as per usual. He was charismatic and emoted perfectly. Overall, he had a great performance, and he clearly understood the character he was playing. The movie could be summed up as an experience. The atmosphere surrounding the movie transported me back to the 1920s, but there were some aspects that wrenched me back into the present. The movie was a work of art, based on a purposely infuriating storyline that left me a little frustrated with the world, in the best way possible. If I have one piece of advice for a viewer though, it would be to read the book first, because I didn’t and will be kicking myself for it for the foreseeable future. On a scale from one to ten, I would give this movie a seven, because I liked most of it, but also found that its flaws were a bit glaring.
Nanoinstruments: The Future of Music By MEDEEA POPESCU
We’ve featured many strange and esoteric instruments in the Wacky Instrument column, but I’ve discovered, over the course of random Google searches, quite possibly the wackiest of them all: nanoinstruments. The trend of creating tiny useless musical instruments began in 1997 at Cornell, with the nano guitar that couldn’t actually be heard. It was carved out of a piece of crystalline silicon the size of a red blood cell, with six strings each fifty billionths of a meter wide. It could only be plucked by an atomic force microscope, and the sound waves it created were inaudible. In 2003, a second nano guitar was created, plucked by a miniature laser beam. Because its sound range was higher than even the most sensitive microphones, its acoustic trace was measured by a computer detecting the reflections of the laser light used to “strum” the strings. The second major breakthrough came in 2010, with the creation of a nanoinstrument that could be heard by the human ear. A group from Twente University in the Netherlands engineered the world’s tiniest violin, called a micronium, with strings a micrometer thick and a millimeter long. The structure is actually a chip, with several strings running across it. Several twelve microgram weights hang from each string, which are then put into motion by nano interlocking combs that shift in relation to each other. The masses vibrate and create specific tones, which can be changed by tuning the chips. The sounds of the vibrations can be amplified, and the nanoinstrument’s debut concert was at a micromechanics conference, where the researchers played the specially created piece “Impromptu #1 for Micronium” by Arvid Jense.
One micron (μm) equals 0.0001 cm.
PHOTO/CORNELL UNI.
The Great Gatsby centers around the life of Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), a mysterious man living during the 1920s, as seen from the perspective of Nick Carraway (Toby Maguire). Directed by Baz Luhrmann and filmed by Simon Duggan, the movie is visually spectacular, with vibrant colors and great special effects. Although at times the camera’s constant switching between characters got a bit dizzying, overall the movie (as far as visuals go) was phenomenal. Musically, the movie was a tad confusing. The score (written by Craig Armstrong) was really good, and meshed with the movie perfectly. The soundtrack, on the other hand, was a bit confusing. Although the soundtrack (featuring Jay-Z, Florence and the Machine, and Lana Del Rey) was good music, it was a bit off-putting in the movie. The ’20s are known as the Jazz Age, so why rap music (which was developed during the 1970s) was in the movie makes no sense to me. Sure, the
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Studying Playlist By NAOMI POWERS
This June is an awkward time to be a high school student who loves music. Every week marks the debut of a new album that will probably be your summer soundtrack: Phoenix’s Bankrupt and Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampire of the City stand as evidence of this. In the meantime you’ve got Regents and finals to cram for, and from my experience, trying to figure out how to solve for the ambiguous case while listening to “Diane Young” usually ends in impromptu dance parties. Hopefully this lower-key playlist will become a useful backbone to your late-night study sessions. 1. “Pillow Talk”: Wild Child This sweet, folky track by Austin, Texas’s favorite flower children has the perfect spring sound for when you’re trapped in your room with your math notes. The general vibe? Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeroes, post-festival. 2. “Fear & Trembling”: Cold War Kids With its new album, Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, Cold War Kids shows just how far it’s come from its Santa Ana winds days. The 2013 reboot is notably more conceptual, the album being based off Nathaniel West’s 1933 novel, Miss Lonelyhearts. “Fear & Trembling” carries an urgent intent, less spontaneous than previous songs, but more mature. 3. “Pity Love”: Adam Green and Binki Shapiro There’s a right way to do a sixties feel, and then there’s a very wrong way. Beatles-cover bands, we’re looking at you. Green and Shapiro, on the other hand, hit the perfect folkpop note with this song off their recent album. Self-conscious lyrics (Oh I was out for what you’ve never shown / just ’cause I expect it doesn’t make it so) blend with coffee house harmonies to create a track that references the “Summer of Love,” yet isn’t dated. 4. “Ten Cent Pistol”: The Black Keys There are three constants in life: death, taxes, and the fact that The Black Keys will always be cool. They’re like leather jackets and aviator sunglasses. Just don’t question it. 5. “Old Pine”: Ben Howard Ben Howard is decidedly the best car music, especially in the rain. Unfortunately, you’re not in a car driving to California right now. But even though you’re stuck studying at your desk, you have to remember that you’re still going places with your life. Aww. 6. “Oscillate Wildly”: The Smiths So you want to be that kid who listens to The Smiths, but
you can’t stand Morrissey’s three-and-a-half note range? Well firstly, there is now a limit to how close of friends you and I can become, as I might awkwardly cry whenever we’re together. Secondly, there’s always this song. “Oscillate Wildly” has all of the catchy riffs and lugubrious (SAT words!) vibes of any other Smiths song, but in an instrumental format. No, I’m fine, I’m just tired. Can I be alone for a while? 7. “Counting”: Autre Ne Veut This track by Brooklyn’s bedroom lo-fi gem is a practical ocean of layering and density: “Counting” draws from 80s and 90s R&B and slathers on the synth like you wouldn’t imagine. With just the perfect amount of uncomfortable dissonance, this song can serve as either jam-worthy or white noise as Arthur Ashin layers his delicate falsetto over a grooving bassline. It takes skill to push so close to overediting and still come out clean. 8. “The Only Living Boy in New York”: Simon and Garfunkel Simon and Garfunkel are the masters of calm and catchy acoustic. Let’s make sure they never fade away. 9. “In a Sense”: Young Man You’ve got to love a good foggy, open-question track like this. Electric guitars glide over smooth indie-rock vocals and a modern percussion line, backed by subtle electronics. “In a Sense” manages to be moody and contemplative without feeling overbearing or confrontational. 10. “I Had it Coming”: White Rabbits White Rabbits is mainly known for its more rock-conscious songs (e.g., “Percussion Gun”), making this song that much more of a standout. With its Wilco-esque bass and flowing lyrics, “I Had it Coming” keeps a sweeter pop tone while gradually layering on the lo-fi vibes that make it so interesting. 11. “This Year”: The Mountain Goats A substantial-enough number of fans to make this band slightly less obscure and John Green can’t be wrong. This is your victory song, your end of school party rock anthem. Remember this song when you’re stressing big-time, because even when you doubt yourself, you have to realize that “I am gonna make it through this year / if it kills me.” The playlist will be available for streaming on Spotify the day of the June issue distribution, titled “IHS Tattler Study Playlist 2013.”
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Spring Breakers: A Review By LEO WINTERS
Note: contains spoilers. Starting sometime in late 2012, images of Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens prancing around in bikinis and wielding firearms began pervading the airwaves of Thirty Mile Zone (TMZ) and the covers of gossip magazines everywhere. It was soon discovered that the starlets had abandoned their innocent Disney careers for roles in a racy upcoming film, Spring Breakers. For some time I was able to brush off the movie as simply an opportunity for Hollywood big wigs to make some cash off of people who would pay to see Selena Gomez in a two-piece, but my initial impression changed when I heard that the movie was the brainchild of Harmony Korine. Korine is an indie filmmaker notorious among film buffs for his bizarre and disturbing movies (Gummo and Trash Humpers, to name a couple). None of his work has ever been particularly well received by critics, but nonetheless the man has gained a devoted fanbase whose members I’m sure were as shocked as I was when they heard his next project featured Disney icons and bona-fide actor James Franco (for Gummo, he plucked actors off the street). My curiosity was further piqued when I overheard a classmate talking about how terrible the film was. This gave me hope that Korine hadn’t thrown away his love of testing and alienating his audiences. I assumed that this person had been sucked into the “ambush” scenario that Korine most likely was hoping for, walking into the theatre expecting some kind of Project X–party movie. To be fair, the beginning of the film would support this belief, opening with a beach party montage that could almost be straight out of Girls Gone Wild—but there is something off. Shots of beer-guzzling maws and bikini-clad women suggestively eating popsicles linger just too long for comfort. Angles are a tad skewed. After what seems like forever, the film’s actual plot begins. We are introduced to four girls: Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and
Cotty (Rachel Korine, the director’s wife— odd one out). They are attending some kind of community college and are visibly bored with it. Candy, Brit, and Cotty all seem relatively disaffected and are excited by the idea of guns and violence. The aptly named Faith is given a little more depth as the religious one who is hesitant to participate in the debauchery that seems to be the driving force of the other girls. The girls desperately want to go to Florida for spring break so that they can spend their vacation partying on the beach, but they don’t have enough money to do so. Seems ordinary enough so far. So, how do they end up funding their trip? Do they have a bake sale? Do they throw a huge party for their schoolmates and charge admission to it? Or do they don ski masks and rob the patrons of The Chicken Shack with sledgehammers? The answer is the third scenario, and the movie just gets more off-the-wall from there. After the successful robbery, the girls catch a bus to St. Petersburg, Florida, which is painted as a Dantean hell of hedonism. The girls party a little too hardly and end up standing before a judge in a courtroom wearing bikinis, flip flops, and handcuffs. Enter James Franco, who makes up for any lack of acting prowess the girls may have with his tour-de-force performance as Alien, a self-proclaimed “hustler” who bails the girls out of prison. Franco manages to make every line that slides out from between his gold-plated teeth simultaneously hilarious and awe-inspiring in its ignominious ridiculousness. Alien takes the girls under his wing and together they cause trouble, doing drugs and robbing spring-breakers at gunpoint to the soundtrack of Britney Spears. Soon, the movie’s “villain” is introduced: Alien’s long-time rival in doing gangster sh . . . stuff, Archie (Gucci Mane). Archie is what I have to assume is an unintentionally hilarious performance (if not, the man is a comedic genius), as he lets out unintelligible grunts and mumbles half his lines. A humorously cliché back story about the rivals being former best friends and “hustling” together as kids develops, and their feud eventually leads to the film’s climax and conclusion.
A good deal of the movie’s story and dialogue is, in a way, cliché. But, the film seems to be self-conscious of this. The goofy dialogue is embraced as it adds to the comical absurdity of the film. Any character’s attempts at sincerity or meaning—either Franco’s insight that, “I was born bad—I got kicked out of school and I thought that was great,” or Gomez’s nonstop declarations of, “This is where I belong,”—come off just as ironic as the pseudo-philosophical Facebook statuses that us lucky few with some critical distance have grown tired of rolling our eyes at. Admittedly, none of the starlets who made the movie such a big deal in the first place prove to be particularly good actresses, but they don’t need to be; their characters are more archetypes, and they really needn’t do more than stand there. Korine chose them not for their acting ability but for who they are outside of the film. He is skewing our perception of these “American Girl” pop music sweethearts. At times the plot does seem relatively thin and feels in general secondary to the film’s visuals. Korine himself has said the film was structured to be more like a ninety-minute long music video than a feature film. Pounding neons and bright candywrapper colors fill every shot. This can be attributed to cinematographer Benoit Debie, who is known for his work with Gaspar Noé, a French indie-film auteur with films as (if not more) off-putting as Korine’s. Adding to the film’s music video qualities are its repeated lines of dialogue, which, when paired with the electronic music–heavy soundtrack, start to sound like lyrics from some repetitive club song. Overall, Spring Breakers is more of an experience than a coherent narrative film. It’s Harmony Korine’s newest experiment in audience testing, and with it he has pulled off what every artist wishes he or she could do: break into the mainstream without betraying his or her artistic roots. If you enter the theatre expecting some kind of plot-driven, Oscar-bait drama, or conversely, some brainless teen party film, you will leave disappointed. If you’re looking for a wholly original, thoughtful, and entertaining movie, spend the nine bucks and go see Spring Breakers.
Team Feature: Track and Field PHOTO/PAUL WALDROP
One last huddle between IHS Track and Field seniors.
By AVEN ANDEMARIAM
After spending the winter and offseason working hard and preparing for the season, the IHS Track Team stepped out into the track in March ready to run its competition into the ground. The IHS Track Team is mostly known for the wide range of events that its athletes are able to participate in. The team splits itself up into smaller groups that participate in event-specific workouts. “We’re always a team no matter what people think,” said Mande Semon ’14, “Even though we may seem like individuals, we’re a team.” The groups are comprised of sprinters, long-distance runners, jumpers,
throwers, mid-distance runners, and hurdlers. Each group is coached by spectacular coaching staff: Gary Hunter, Drew Hilkner, Billy Way, John Baker, to whom the credit goes for most of the Track Team’s success. Track is by far the largest school sport, with members that come not only from IHS, but also from LACS. Unlike most varsity sports, in which athletes participate mostly as juniors and seniors, the IHS Track Team contains athletes from grades nine through twelve as well as the occasional middle schooler. This is the third year for current head coach Eric Parker, who has finally procured his first team trophy at the
Red, White, Blue, and Gold Invitational. When asked about the team’s current state this season, Parker said, “Overall, it’s been a successful season. In all our meets, the boys have consistently been finishing top-three during invites while winning two of them, while the girls’ team have been finishing top-five all season long during invites; we have also had multiple standout individual performances.” When asked about what he expects for the next season, Parker said, “First, we need to keep kids interested during the offseason, and then getting [sic] them to continue their offseason workouts. Another thing we need to do by next year is recruit more athletes, especially on the girls’ side. We have about twenty-five girls on the team, which is a low number compared to other years.” Some of the standout performances Parker mentioned include IHS’s 4 × 100 team (Mande Semon ’14, Bruce Greene ’13, Jordan Hackworth ’14, Tevin Smith ’13, Roosevelt Lee ’13, and Wess Rodriguez ’13) who ran a best overall time of 43.26 seconds, which is on pace to break the school record for the event (43.00 seconds). Jordan Hackworth ’14 jumped a personal record (PR) for the long jump this season of 22 feet and 4¾ inches, is also on pace to break the school record (22 feet, 6 inches) for his event. Dan Dracup ’15 is also on his way to breaking a school record after running a PR in the 800 m (or half-mile) of 1:57:66; the school record is 1:57:00 flat. Lauren Trumble ’15 ran spectacularly in the 800 m with a PR of 2:20:57. In the upcoming meet, Class A Sectionals, David Franck ’13 is seeded #1 for Pole Vault. On the girls’ side, Ihotu Onah ’14 and Emma Preston ’13 will beparticipating in the shotput and discus events in the Class A Sectional meet and have a good chance of doing well. Continued on Page 19.
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SPORTS
Continued from Page 18. Both the girls’ and boys’ 4 × 400 teams have been doing very well this season, and will be competing for a spot in the state meet. The girls’ 4 × 400 team includes Lauren Trumble, Sylvia Franck ’16, Jackie Cornell ’13, and Emma Denman ’13, while the boys’ team includes Roosevelt Lee, David Franck, Sidney Herman ’14, and Dan Dracup. On May 16, the IHS Varsity Track Team began its Championship Season, kicking it off with the Southern Tier Athletic Conference (STAC) meet. This season consists of four very important meets: STACs, Class A Sectionals, Class A State Qualifiers, and, most importantly, the Class A States meet. The expectations for this postseason are very high. Mande Semon, one of the top athletes on the team, was asked the same question as Coach Parker. “We are doing pretty well so far but we are not where we expect to be,” he said. He was also asked what hindered us this season. Mande said, “We have been running with injuries all season and we have not performed to our top ability. The cause of that is that athletes are not taking proper care of themselves before,
during, and after practice.” On his goals for the postseason, Mande said he is expecting to win the 100 m in State Qualifiers, place top eight in States, Jump 46 feet in triple jump, and break the 100 m record (10.64 Seconds); his current time is 10.9. Oseoba Airewele ’14 is a junior who has jumped and sprinted for five years. When asked what the best parts of track are, he said that it’s either the workouts or how much fun they have as a together as a team. One of the things he thinks should be improved for next season is the attention of the coaches. “I know we have fast people that the coaches have to pay attention to, but some of the other athletes who don’t perform as well need the attention to develop their full potential, which could be very beneficial to the team,” he said. “I mean, I was an under-the-radar triple jumper on the team last year but this year I’m one of the best on the team.” Even though track can be considered an individual sport it is also a team sport in the sense that the team is representing IHS in meets, and as a group we always push our teammates to work harder and get better at what we do.
The Win Column By HIPDAWG MCJIVE (a.k.a. PETER FREY)
The New England Patriots franchise is similar to Scooby Doo and the gang in that both rarely lose football games. This is due in no small to the fact that Bill Belichick thrives in the offseason. Consistently setting records for least prisoners taken, the Patriots replenish their ranks with potential all stars each year. Here’s a look at who to watch out for next year. QB: Ryan Mallett: The Patriots and Jets are the only two teams in the league who would improve if their starting quarterbacks sustained injury. Ryan Mallett’s status as a bench player is a travesty, and in the short time he has spent on the turf, he has proven that he has the skill and intensity to surpass any player to ever previously play the game. There’s been some talk that I don’t back up my articles with stats, so here they are: the 5.2 QBR speaks for itself. It’s no small feat that this up-and-comer already has Geno Smith topped in nearly every stat. RB: Quentin “$ Spentin’” Hines: Scooped up in the late hours of the draft, Hines is already on the IR. This
is a lucky break for defenses everywhere, because this guy is just dumb fast. Watch for him in upcoming years. Legarette “Let Me Be” Blount: It’s understandable that now that Tampa is packing the illest back in the game they decided to jettison this potential Hall-of-Famer. Known for his full head of steam and huge hits, Blount is a force to be reckoned with on any offense. With the highest peoplehopped-over/play ratio in the league, Blount will almost certainly emerge as a star. Also, he punched a guy once, which is pretty cool. Brandon “Last Man Standing” Bolden: After a suspension for doing steroids on-season, expect this unlikely prospect from last year to return significantly stronger than before. Leon “The Mickey Mouse Hustle” Washington: Jeff Demps sucked. Devon McCourty sucked at returning kicks. Good thing Leon Washington has the mean hustle to take over. Too bad for Leon, though. He stepped out of Lynch’s shadow and right into Shane Vereen’s. WR: Daniel “The Big Maniel On Campus” Amendola: Picked up to replace Welker, this can be seen as nothing but a step up. In his twilight
years Welker caught a bad case of the drops, and Amendola’s sticky hands will come as a huge relief to Brady. Aaron Dobson: While disappointing compared to Da’Rick, whom the Patriots could have drafted, have no doubt that Dobson will have secured his place as a Hall-of-Famer by the end of this season. He also scored really low on the wonderlic, but that’s ok because the highest-scoring recent Patriot was Ben Watson with a 41 and God knows he was bad. Defense: Adrian “The Incredible Hulk” Wilson: The main problem with the Patriots defense of last season is that as a whole they were massive wimps. Adrian Wilson is coming in to fill the shoes long ago left empty by the legendary Rodney Harrison. It has been too long since this downtrodden squad has seen a flag for punching a wide receiver after the play, or for hitting the football out of the referee’s hands because of a tough call. Is he the Honey Badger? No, but that ship has sailed, and when you get down to it theres no shame in losing in the Superbowl to the Cardinals every year until Tyrann Mathieu retires. Clay Matthews: Yeah, he sucks, whatever.
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A Biased “Reporter” By SARAH NIXON
IHS students have been exposed to biased articles about NFL football this school year. This series of articles, titled “The Win Column” and written by a reporter who wishes to remain unnamed, has appeared in the sports section of almost every Tattler issue since the beginning of the year. This reporter is a huge New England Patriots fan. He continues to write articles that idolize the Patriots, and that call them the best team in the league, yet he fails to provide readers with statistics or valid reasoning for his arguments. He also makes blunt statements about specific players that simply do not hold any truth. In one article, this reporter went as far as to refer to the Patriots’ quarterback, Tom Brady, as the “Second Coming of Jesus.” In his article “The Ideal Super Bowl,” he stated, “A guy dies on the cross, but is resurrected. . . . It was Tom Brady.” He also compared Bill Belichick, the Patriots’ coach, to God. It is extremely offensive to compare a sports figure to Jesus or God, especially when both Brady and Belichick notoriously cheated during the 2007 football season by videotaping other teams’ practices. Belichick has also proven to be a poor loser: in Super Bowl XLII, he walked off the field with one second left after losing to the Giants; after Super Bowl XLVI, he refused to attend a postgame interview after losing once again to the Giants; after losing Super Bowl XLVI, many players
said he did not shake hands with the coach of the opposing team; and just recently, after the AFC championship game in which the Patriots lost to the Ravens, Belichick blew off an interview with CBS. Anyone who chooses to idolize a coach with a personality like Belichick’s must have a very skewed view on what is right and what is wrong; Belichick is far from a good role model. This isn’t the only time readers have been subjected to this reporter’s sophomoric and insensitive opinions. In one article, he justified the Saints’ revolting behavior in the infamous “pay-for-hit” defensive scandal by stating “Players know that they risk getting hurt when they step out on the field. That’s why they’re repaid with obscene amounts of money, fame, and adoration. Paying players to get hard hits is like paying a baker to add extra frosting; they’re just going the extra mile.” In a game that already has horrible safety records, is it really okay for players to be paid extra money to cause more significant and life-threatening damage to each other? I think not. The ethical implications of this statement are frightening. Beyond comparing sports figures to religious figures, this reporter simply doesn’t include any verified information in his articles. His articles are almost entirely made of silly opinions. Instead of providing readers with interesting stats or information about the San Francisco 49ers’ rookie quarterback Colin Kaepernick, in
a section of one of his articles titled “Colin Kaepernick,” this reporter once again talked tirelessly about Tom Brady. This would have been fine had he included any non-opinionated information about Tom Brady and had readers not already read so much about him in this reporter’s past articles. He could’ve included information such as Brady’s phenomenal passing records and rushing records for this season. But once again this reporter simply stated Tom Brady was one of the best quarterbacks in history. Unfortunately, there was nothing about Kaepernick’s amazing record for rushing yards; this season he rushed 415 yards in just thirteen games. Brady’s thiry-two-yard rushing season performance was meager in comparison. This may be because he had a better offensive lineup, and has better passing skills than Kaepernick, but quite frankly, this is arbitrary. What is important to note is that both quarterbacks have interesting qualities and records that are worth reading about. Although this reporter’s articles are mildly entertaining, they lack the statistics and information that make a sports article one worth reading. His statements lack truth and are not based on real, verifiable statistics. This reporter is nothing more than a childish Patriots fan. At any rate, one would hope that a team coached by God and led by the “Second Coming of Jesus” would at least make it to the Super Bowl.
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June 5, 2013
SPORTS PHOTO/PROVIDED
NFL Draft Recap By AVEN ANDEMARIAM
This year’s NFL draft was the most unpredictable draft in years. No one knew who was going to be the first overall pick or which teams wanted certain players. Also, Bill “The Lady Slayer” Belichick surprisingly didn’t do too well in this draft. The teams that nailed it this year: The San Francisco 49ers pieced together the best draft out of anyone this year. They recognized that money doesn’t grow on trees and that they would lose guys like Justin Smith the way they lost Dashon Goldson. The 49ers dipped their hands into the fountain of youth and came away with the team of the future. When the veterans leave, the 49ers will have more than enough capable guys to step up. The Minnesota Vikings pulled off an unlikely triple play by landing three elite prospects in the first round. Sharrif Floyd is a disruptive interior defender capable of manning the point at the one and threetechnique positions. Xavier Rhodes is a big, physical corner with the size and athleticism to be effective against the big-bodied receivers, and Cordarrelle Patterson is an explosive vertical threat with the speed and burst to blow past defenders on the turf. With Adrian Peterson in the backfield and Greg Jennings functioning as the number one receiver, Patterson should be getting multiple looks from Chris Ponder. Jeff Fisher of the Saint Louis Rams followed through on his promise to upgrade the talent around quarterback Sam Bradford with this impressive draft haul. The Rams added Tavon Austin and Stedman Bailey, the dynamic duo at West Virginia, to a receiving corps that lacked explosiveness last season. Both are explosive players on the perimeter who have the potential to put the ball in the paint from anywhere on the field. Austin in particular is an all-around threat with the capacity to pick up chunk yards as a runner, receiver, and returner. Teams that didn’t make out so well: The Dallas Cowboys didn’t have a bad
The Chiefs’ selection of defensive tackle Eric Fisher started what was a fascinating NFL draft.
draft in the sense that they weren’t filling needs—they were just reaching on their draft picks and could have done better. They drafted for depth and addressed needs later when they should have been doing it the other way around. First off, they only received a third round pick to drop from #18 to #31, huge whiff. They could have taken any number of players to fill needs, such as Sharrif Floyd, Matt Elam, or Jonathan Cyprien. If they were going to trade down like they did, they needed to have gotten more than they did. The Cleveland Browns did a good job setting themselves up for next year by trading a fourth round pick for a 2014 third rounder and a fifth round pick for a 2014 fourth rounder. Only problem is this means that they aren’t filling needs for this year during their rebuilding process. Rather than using those picks to get players to develop now, they will have to draft and develop more players next year. Barkevious Mingo will be a starter from day one on their defense, and Leon McFadden might start opposite of Joe Haden from day one as well. Unfortunately the rest of their draft is brutal. Having two picks in the first five rounds will not cut it and this team will be in contention for the number one overall pick next year, without a doubt. Surprisingly in this year’s draft only one quarterback was taken in the first round, the Buffalo Bills’ E.J. Manuel, which shocked the football community. Geno Smith (Jets) and Matt
Barkely (Eagles) were both expected to be top-ten picks, but both dropped down to being second-round picks. Next year’s NFL season is one to look forward to, especially after this draft. One can expect next year the teams from the NFC West to dominate, especially after the Seahawks acquired Percy Harvin from the Vikings and Cliff Avril from the Lions and the 49ers after their amazing draft and the acquisition of Anquan Boldin from the Ravens. The one team one can expect to dominate in the AFC is the Denver Broncos after its spectacular offseason. All in all, my favorite draft pick is probably Ezekiel “Ziggy” Ansah, the defensive end from BYU who went pick number five to the Detroit Lions. His name signifies what he means to the city of Detroit because he is the “Ansah” to all its defensive problems. His backstory is also spectacular: He grew up in Ghana, where he played soccer, and came to the United States with his family. He attended BYU on an academic scholarship and ran track, posting times of 10.91 seconds in the 100 m dash and 21.9 for 200 m. He had no football experience until he tried out for the team at BYU in 2010, after being cut twice trying to make the basketball team. The lack of experience obviously did not concern General Manager Martin Mayhew. “This guy has tremendous athletic ability,” Mayhew said. “Size, speed, power—all those things. Obviously the team and all of Michigan has high hopes for him as he tries to succeed in the league.
Quiz: What Kind of Mythical Creature Are You? By TOVA WILENSKY Staff Writer
1. Which camp would you most likely go to this summer? a. Harry Potter Camp b. Tree-Climbing Camp c. Water Volleyball Camp d. Texting Camp e. Video Game Camp 2. It’s getting closer to finals week! How do you prepare for your exams? a. Write and read over a five-paragraph essay about every topic you learned about this year b. Incorporate studying into other activities you normally do c. Create a collage about everything you need to study d. Organize a studying party with your friends e. Study? You’re going to wing it 3. All of your friends are on vacation and it’s a hot, boring summer day. What do you do? a. Spend the day writing a fantasy novel b. Mow the lawn in a maze pattern and try to find your way through c. Build a waterslide in the backyard out of recycled materials d. Start a blog for your friends on vacation to read about your favorite summer memories e. Turn up the air conditioning and sleep, obviously 4. If you could have any superpower, which would you want? a. Granting wishes for others b. Crushing anything with your bare hands c. Controlling the weather
d. Making glitter appear out of thin air e. Tricking people into thinking whatever you want 5. What is your favorite part of a pool party? a. Teaching people pool safety tips b. Throwing people into the pool c. Swimming in the pool, of course! d. Telling people how much you love the pool but not actually swimming in it e. The ICE CREAM, what else? 6. You have to volunteer for ten hours this summer. Which volunteer job would you love to do? a. Tutoring kids in summer school b. Helping out in summer sports programs c. Being a volunteer lifeguard at the local pool d. Painting a mural with your friends to add color to the community e. “Volunteering” isn’t in your vocabulary 7. When it thunderstorms on summer nights, you: a. Take photographs of the storm so that you can study the cloud shapes b. Dance in the rain c. Fill a giant bucket with the rainwater so that you can swim in it d. Invite friends over because you’re afraid of thunder e. Run around the neighborhood and scare people 8. You are spending the Thursday afternoon with friends at a smoothie shop. You order the: a. Strawberry Stardust Storm b. Chocolate Chip Sugar Rush c. Blueberry Bubbly Beauty d. Mango Tango Madness e. Mega Monster Smoothie, a smoothie
made of all the flavors mixed together 9. To celebrate the last day of school, you are going to: a. Write a long essay about how beautiful summer is b. Ride your bike all around Ithaca and scream “FREEDOM!” c. Have a water gun party with your friends d. Plan all your summer travel destinations e. Catch up on all the sleep you’ve missed from the year Results: Mostly As: You are a majestic, magical unicorn. No, not the kind that’s a horse with a photoshopped horn on its head: the real kind. This summer, you’ll frequently be found in the forest. Mostly Bs: You are a griffin (head and wings of an eagle, body of a lion). You are strong, fearless, and mighty. You’ll be on the move and playing sports this summer. Mostly Cs: You are a mermaid (or merman). This summer, you’ll be spending a lot of time in the water, since it is your natural habitat. Mostly Ds: You are a flittering fairy. You love going on little adventures with your friends. Hiding and sneaking around are quite easy for you. You’ll be found everywhere this summer, as you’ll be traveling all over the place. Mostly Es: You are Bigfoot. There are arguments about whether you are even a real being. This summer, you’ll be spending an excessive amount of time just sleeping on the beach.
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PENULTIMATE
June 5, 2013
Dear Darwin, I am having relationship troubles! My boyfriend whom I once deemed my soulmate turns out to: be a cheater, a liar, a bully, have a police record, and may or may not sell illegal explosives, but he does have a car and a successful canned clam company and, therefore, money. What should I do?! Troubled Dear Troubled, Well, this lad doesn’t seem all that bad. It’s so easy in present-day society to become overwhelmed when things like “police record” or “explosives” come up in conversation. I can assure you that not all people with police records are bad: for example, my Aunt George went to jail for nineteen weeks after decades of racketeering, and she is one of the most moral humans I know! So don’t judge a book by its cover—get to know him better and learn about his illegal doings first. (If he is anything like my Aunt George, he makes very good okra pies!)
As for the cheating: Are we talking about cheating on a test or cheating in a relationship, because both are excusable. You also mentioned he is a liar— we all lie, don’t we? And in respects to the bullying, you need to find out the root of his anger. Perhaps it comes from a problem within, like dehydration or constipation— maybe all your honey needs is a tall glass of water and some cayenne pepper . . . it’s all good. Well, now that we have cleared up a few misconceptions, let’s get to some relationship advice: Have you tried singing together? Singing at absolute spontaneous times is sure to spark a flame
in any long-suffering relationship, especially old country (not that tasteless new-fangled-almost-rock-and-roll country, but the good ol’ twangy woman-losin’, truck-wreckin’, shed-burnin’down, my-dog-done-died country). Also, matching outfits will certainly help with any distrust issues. Especially overalls—you can’t go wrong with a pair of matching his and her overalls. So stop fiddle-farting around and start trusting and loving him while singing and wearing fabulous matching clothing. Pax! (Latin for peace) Don Darwin Dorward
Horoscopes Gemini (May 21–June 20): You will finally find a suitor who does not attract flies. Unfortunately, your mother still will. Cancer (June 21–July 22): You will vacation for 3.9 days in Somalia, fall in love with the breathtaking scenery, get food poisoning, and then buy a moo moo for your . . . “mother”. Leo (July 23–Aug. 22): The summer is a perfect time to run a marathon! But you won’t: ping pong and hacky sack are appropriate sports for someone of your demeanor! Virgo (Aug. 23–Sept. 22): You will be given a homework assignment involving squids. The man in Upper K knows a guy who can provide you with squids
Last day of school
for a dollar a pound. His name is Betty.
are great with creamed celery.
New “Tattler” editors
Libra (Sept. 23–Oct. 22): Your “mother” will ask you to clean your room. However, it is the truth that you live in a dumpster and thus have no room. . . .
Aquarius (Jan. 20–Feb. 18): For the next week, always wear a raincoat, for one day it will rain men.
Brooches
Scorpio (Oct. 23–Nov. 21): Look in the trash can: your future and dinner await. Sagittarius (Nov. 22–Dec. 21): In order to avoid being questioned about your attire, wear a pantsuit— they are “in”. Capricorn (Dec. 22–Jan. 19): It is apparent from your last colonoscopy that you eat too many vegetables, so eat more wild game like raccoon, opossum, and muskrat: they
Pisces (Feb. 19–Mar. 20): You will soon conceive that ”Skippy” is a suitable and beautiful unisex name. Aries (Mar. 21–Apr. 19): Looking for fashionable headwear? Bonnets are in style. Taurus (Apr. 20–May 20): The last day of school is nearing. You will meet an exciting octogenarian who has an admiration for clam juice and badminton. Befriend this person.
“The Great Gatsby”
MUN elections
Ungodly humidity
Prom
33 degrees in May
Gout
College apps
Exams
Judy’s last week at IHS