Raven Report Sequoia High School
Volume IX, Issue 5
1201 Brewster Ave. Redwood City, CA 94062
February 3, 2016
Stratospheric explorer pushes students to fly to new heights By AVIVA FUTORNICK Staff Reporter
Photo by Maddie Pei
Africause hosted dance instructor Jess Adomako for a traditional Ghanaian dance workshop Friday Jan. 22. Adomako has been featured on Good Morning America and was trained in Rome, New York and Accra, Ghana.
Teachers, rather than students, often absent
Disruptive construction continues
By LEIGH ALLEY and GLENN BILLMAN Staff Reporter and Executive Editor English teacher Jose Rosario often finds himself subbing for the class next door, not because the teacher is sick, but because there isn’t one. An English 1 ICAP class has lacked a permanent teacher all year. Sub after sub has flowed through the classroom, with six teachers thus far going in and out of rotation. Even the location changes: it was in a temporary portable classroom for the entire first semester before switching to the B-wing. Similarly, an English 2 class has had at least three teachers, and other classes have had multiple substitutes due to teachers on extended leave. As a result, Rosario and other teachers have had to make lesson plans for classes they do not teach. For the month of January, an average of 14 substitute teachers were needed every day, whereas an average of 16 substitutes were called in every day in January 2015. According to Elvira Macias, the secretary for the Instructional Vice Principal’s office, the real issue this year is finding permenant teachers for the English department. “It’s that quick turnaround of teachers that we hire and then they leave, we hire another one, and they leave,” Macias said. “So we need to cover those classes in addition to the regular.”
Photo by Maddie Pei
By MATT EISENBERG Staff Reporter Ominous smells and loud noises have been have been disrupting classrooms as construction workers have been busy renovating and updating campus. While the possibility of new classrooms and other future projects are exciting prospects, students and teachers are being forced to endure the inconveniences caused by the construction. There have been several complaints involving the new location of the portables and the construction team’s persistent noise. “It is really distracting,” physics teacher Allison Stafford said. “It’s hard to think when people are hammering and sawing off sand.” Due to the construction, the gate by the quad has been shut, which adds
Feature:
Special: Let’s talk about sex
Page 4-5
Guessing the Grammys
Page 2
much time to many students commutes. “I have a class that’s really close to that area,” senior Erika Yao said. Yao is one of many students who sometimes opts to park in residential areas, as she fears that she will be late for her first class if she waits to get into the lot and then walks around the construction site. “Even if I am on time, it often takes a while getting into the parking lot.” The new building will hold a teacher’s lounge as well as the ten classrooms and will have a modern feel, while maintaining the current Spanish architectural style. This building and the remodel of rooms comprise phase one. Two more phases are planned for future projects that the Site Master Committee is currently at work designing.
Twenty-six miles, 15 minutes, 821 miles per hour and another layer of the Earth’s atmosphere: Alan Eustace made history Oct. 24, 2014 after making the world’s highest freefall. Eustace spoke at Sequoia Jan. 29 to talk to students about his journey out of this world. “[I thought,] what would it be like to hang out in the stratosphere and take in the beautiful sights of the Earth,” Eustace said. Stratospheric explorer, retired Google executive and daredevil Eustace holds the world records for highest-altitude free-fall jump and total free-fall distance after jumping from the top of the stratosphere. His wife, Kathy Kwan, is friends with principal Sean Priest, which allowed Eustace to come to Sequoia. “When you love someone enough you have to let them have their adventure,” Kwan said. “For us it was more like the biggest mid-life crisis ever.” Eustace decided to pursue the jump in 2011 after combining his three specialties: flying planes, engineering and skydiving. Working with World View Experience, a life support system was created so Eustace could still breathe. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India then created a balloon for Eustace to make his ascent in. “There’s a lot of science to it,” Eustace said. “I wanted to see if it was possible.” To complete this journey, Kwan had a few tasks for Eustace to complete. He had to first complete his will, write his own obituary and make a video to his kids explaining why he wanted to do that if anything had happened to him. Departing from Roswell, New Mexico, Eustace began his approximately two-hour ascent early Oct. 24, 2014. Eustace reached a maximum altitude of 135,908 feet, a little over 25 miles and reached peak speeds of 821.45 mph during his 15-minute descent. Eustace’s achievement, to be able to return human beings from the edge of space using only a minimal life-support system, created a new era of balloonbased space tourism, where ordinary people have a chance to take part in this record-breaking feat. “I’ve been a skydiver since I was 13, a pilot since I was 25 and an engineer my whole life,” Eustace said. “I just thought it would be fun.”
By the numbers
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