silverchips A public forum for student expression since 1937 Montgomery Blair High School
May 8, 2019
SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND
VOL. 81 NO. 6
PROM?
Boundary analysis divides county
Blair and Northwood vandalized
By Amanda Liu and Sarah Schiffgens
By Uma Gupta
STAFF WRITER
STAFF WRITERS
Four community meetings hosted by the Montgomery County Board of Education this spring garnered national attention as residents debated factors that impact current school and cluster boundaries. Topics of discussion ranged from racial and socioeconomic disparities among schools to general merits and drawbacks of redrawing boundary lines. Each of the four meetings, held over the course of the past few weeks at Quince Orchard, John F. Kennedy, Earle B. Wood Middle School, and Walter Johnson drew large turnouts with hundreds of participants. Over 300 community members attended the final meeting at Walter Johnson. The Board of Education proposed the use of an external consultant for an in-depth review and analysis of school and cluster boundaries, focusing on whether boundaries can support or impede education and student use of facilities, on Jan. 8. The four meetings compiled community input that will direct the external consultants’ focus in their efforts and analysis, according to the Board. No potential district line changes will be made until after the spring of 2020, at which time the Board will review the external analysis to make a decision.
Discrepancies among boundaries
Montgomery County schools have gaping socioeconomic and racial disparities, largely based on zip codes. Current boundary lines can split neighboring students into vastly different school systems. The downcounty schools Blair and Northwood are only 1.2 miles apart, and students from the two high schools may live no more than a neighborhood apart from each other. Nonetheless, at Blair, 36.3 percent of students are eligible for the Free and Reduced-price Meal System (FARMS), whereas at Northwood, the number jumps to 52.5 percent, eight percentage points above the Maryland state average. In contrast, at upcounty schools in the western part of Montgomery County, such as Bethesda’s Whitman and Bethesda-Chevy Chase, only one percent of the student population qualifies for FARMS. 77.5 percent of Blair is non-white,
see REDISTRICTING page A2
YEKATERINA VAKHROMEEVA
ROMANCE ON THE BOULEVARD Seniors Miles Brown and Helena Mulageta share an embrace as spectators gather around the main stairwell after their prom-posal.
Blair hosts teen book fair By Prayag Gordy STAFF WRITER
On April 15, multiple local authors visited the Blair media center to participate in a student-run book fair. The event ran from first period until the end of sixth, though some time slots were not evenly filled due in part to the school administering a student survey. Juniors Elias Chen (a Silver Chips staff writer), Lintaro Donovan, and Bianca Sauro were the main organizational force behind
the effort, according to Media Specialist Andrea Lamphier, who supported them. “I would say logistical support [was my main role], putting things on our webpage, sending emails directly to Blair teachers, helping get the schedule tweaked, definitely setting up the room—those kinds of things,” she said. The media center set up stands to sell the participating authors’ books. Sauro and Chen first thought of hosting a book fair at Blair when they attended a similar event in Virginia. “We started last year when Elias and I went to the NOVA book festival, and we [realized] we don’t have anything like this in Montgomery County,” Sauro said, “so we decided that we should make one.”
Among the authors in attendance was Michelle Ray, whose primary job is an English teacher at Eastern Middle School. Partly because she has another job, Ray writes for her own enjoyment. “This isn’t my only job: I’m a teacher and a parent who happens to write, and that’s awesome,” she said. “I have these things that I can hand my children and say ‘Look what I did,’ but if I’m writing for money it does not work well for me.” Ray believes that Chen, Donovan, and Sauro—all of whom were former students of hers—all of whom were former students of hers—organized the event well and hopes for an increase in Blazer participation in any following book
see BOOK FAIR page E3
insidechips
COURTESY OF JORDAN BONDO
NEWS A2
Conscious Protests
Estuardo Rodríguez
The importance of being an aware protester
Entrevista con el CEO del Museo Nacional Latinoamerica
B2 OP/ED B1
CORTESÍA DE SABRINA KALÍN
C2
LA ESQUINA LATINA C1
KHUSHBOO RATHORE
Robotics Success
Old Town Road
Inside the successful season of The Blair Robot Project
Lil Nas X’s charttopping smash hit: country or not?
D4
FEATURES D2
ELAINE CHENG
E2
CULTURE E1
Blair staff found vandalism on various parts of the school campus on April 22. The building’s sidewalks, storage shed, and turf field were graffitied by an unknown individual. The incident followed a similar occurrence of vandalism at Northwood by suspected Blair students the prior weekend. Police and school security are currently investigating the incident. Principal Renay Johnson described the graffiti, which consisted of words and drawings, as “vulgar and destructive to our facility” in a letter to families on April 23. Although the graffiti was covered up by the end of the week, students and staff alike expressed disappointment and anger after learning about the situation. “I feel a little mad at the people who vandalized it cause we have pretty nice fields and that’s kind of messed up,” freshman Owen Kaiser said. In her letter to the school, Johnson expressed concern over the use of school resources in clearing the graffiti from the premises. “It is unfortunate that our school, MCPS, and Montgomery County resources will have to be used to remove and investigate the offensive vandalism,” she wrote. According to security guard Brian Leatherwood, investigators have been using footage from security cameras to help inform the police department. “We try to use our cameras to see if we can identify students and if we can identify them, if they are ours [Blair students] we can pass it on to the police department,” he said. According to the MCPS Student Code of Conduct, intentional destruction of school property may be punished with consequences ranging from community service to expulsion depending on the student’s age, motive, and the value of property destroyed. The student responsible for the vandalism may also be required to pay a fine. As the school continues to investigate these incidents, Leatherwood reminded students to make better choices. “If you want to paint go to art class but other than that it doesn’t make sense to vandalize a school property or anyone’s property,” he said. Contact Blair’s security office (301-649-2828) to share any information relating to the investigation or call Blazer Tipline (240-6887940) to share an anonymous tip.
Silver Chips Print @silver_chips @silver.chips Silver Chips Print
CHIPS CLIPS E5
SPORTS F2
A2 News silverchips Montgomery Blair High School 51 University Boulevard East Silver Spring, MD 20901 Phone: (301) 649-2864 Winner of the 2015 National Scholastic Press Association Pacemaker Winner of the 2018 Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Crown
Editors-in-Chief: William Donaldson Adenike Falade Managing News Editors: Mindy Burton Miranda Rose Daly Managing Op/Ed Editor: Lucy Gavin Managing Features Editors: Elise Cauton Marlena Tyldesley Managing Culture Editor: Arshiya Dutta Managing Sports Editor: Camden Roberts Ombudsman: Hannah Lee Page Editors: George Ashford Teddy Beamer Elias Chen Mira Diamond-Berman Kie Donovan Itamar Fiorino Prayag Gordy Uma Gupta Amanda Liu Ethan Park Khushboo Rathore Louis Rosenberg Sarah Schiffgens Paloma Williams Victoria Xin La Esquina Latina Editors-in-Chief: Amanda Hernández Jasmine Méndez-Paredes La Esquina Latina Editor: Lourdes Reyes Valenzuela La Esquina Latina Writers: Yesenia Cruz Jenny Granados-Villatoro Executive Business Directors: Siena Butters Olena Zelinsky Business Staff: Preston Beatty Liang Lin Alyssa Ma Ray Mizui Merete Oakes Jennifer Ren Suveena Sreenilayam Managing Photo Editor: Avery Brooks Photographers: Emory Brooks Dede Greenfield Maggie Lin Lucy Martin Elenora Rue Yekaterina Vakhromeeva Managing Media Coordinator: Aidan Lambiotte Managing Art Editors: Seoyoung Joo Sally Zhao Artists: Shashi Arnold Elaine Cheng Niamh Ducey Amy Krimm Kelley Li Kennedy Salamat Katrina Warren Gabe Winston-Bailey Ivvone Zhou Managing Design Editor: Hannah Lee Puzzle Editor: Bennett Coukos-Wiley Copy Editors: Sara Kleine Ollie-Angel Nono Catherine Rodriguez Ruby Santana Luna Warren La Esquina Latina Advisors: Dianette Coombs Maria Eugenia Tanos Advisor: Jeremy Stelzner Silver Chips is a public forum for student expression. Student editors make all content decisions. Unsigned editorials represent the views of the editorial board and are not necessarily those of the school. Signed letters to the editor are encouraged. Submit your letter to Jeremy Stelzner’s mailbox in the main office or to silver.chips.print@gmail.com. Concerns about Silver Chips’ content should be directed to the Ombudsman, the public’s representative to the paper, at ombudsman.silverchips@gmail.com. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.
silverchips
May 8, 2019
Community discussions question de facto segregation Concerns raised over school economic disparities and overpopulation
Elevating the student voice
from REDISTRICTING page A1
while only 33.2 percent of Whitman is non-white. According to Rockville area parent Marissa Valero, housing prices throughout the county are largely driven by school zoning differences. “Around Rockville, the difference between being zoned for Richard Montgomery and being zoned for Rockville is up to 200,000 dollars in cost,” she said. Residents of District 1, including Bethesda and Chevy Chase, exceed county averages for income, employment, educational attainment, mobility, and housing price regardless of racial or ethnic group. Residents of District 5, including Silver Spring and Takoma Park, are often below the county averages and are less likely to have graduated high school, have enrolled in college, hold a well-paying job, or own a home. Valero said she believes that a vastly different socioeconomic makeup among school populations translates to differences in school resources. She saw differences in school equity when her son, a student at Twinbrook Elementary, played a baseball game at another elementary school and noticed the superior quality of their playground equipment. “Why is not every school a school that we should be proud of? Why are these schools, why are the inequities so great if we are in the so-called richest county in the world?” Valero said. “What are we prioritizing, and what are we telling the kids?”
Diversifying school populations
At community meetings, attendees divided into small discussion groups, focusing on three questions: What issues are important to you to include in the boundaries analysis? What are your greatest concerns about current attendance zones? What do you want to learn from the boundary analysis? One member of each small group took notes on the discussion at their table on poster paper; at the end of group discussions, posters were displayed at the back of the room for a gallery walk. Many community members cited increased diversity among schools as a key consideration in redrawing boundary lines. Rockville junior Iqra Mohamed, who attended the Earle B. Wood meeting, hopes that redrawing boundary lines will allow increased opportunities for students of color. “I don’t think that in 2019 de facto segregation should be a normal thing,” Mohamed said. “I don’t think that people of color should be not allowed to have the same opportunities and have overcrowded schools and not have proper sports gear because of their zip code.” Junior and Blair Secretary for MoCo Students For Change Adiba Chowdhury said she has personally felt discouraged by overtly homogeneous classrooms. “So often I’m in a class where I’m the only Muslim girl, or the only Bengali girl, or really the only person of color, and that’s really disappointing,” Chowdhury said. “And that’s not just classes: that’s in clubs, that’s in events, that’s where I go and what I do.” MoCo Students For Change CoPresident and Springbrook junior Michael Solomon also believes that classroom diversity can be equally beneficial to white students as it is to students of color. “It is a detriment to minority students and [students] in poverty as much as it is to your students from advantaged backgrounds,” Solomon said. “Kids at… Whitman are going to school with people who look exactly like them, and they’re not… learning how to… collaborate with people who come from different backgrounds than they do,” Solomon said. An upbringing with a lack of
AMANDA LIU
BREAKOUT GROUPS Parents and student activists engage in discourse at the Earle B. Wood community meeting. diversity could, Mohamed believes, most horrible aspect of humanity,” Valero said. “It’s just awful when you have lasting negative consequences. “If you’re surrounded by one race get the property owners [involved].” Besides the issues at hand, anothyour entire life, if one race is introduced to you out of nowhere, it’s go- er point of contention surrounded the ing to create resentment and it’s go- format of the meetings. Each meeting ing to cause that inner prejudice, and was held on a weekday night from 7 that inner racism is going to come to 9 p.m., possibly excluding certain perspectives of the population. out,” Mohamed said. “A lot of people work nights. The This year, a number of incidents involving racial epithets and racist be- fact that none of these [meetings] haviors have occurred at Montgom- were held on the weekend says to ery County schools. Most recently, me that there’s certain input that you two Whitman students are under might not want to hear,” Valero said police investigation for a hate-bias in- to the meeting facilitator. In response to Valero’s concern, cident after posting a picture in blackface to social media and captioning it Gboyinde Onijala, a spokeswoman for the district, responded that commuwith the N-word. nity members could submit additional comments and feedback through an online form on the MCPS website. “Why is not every “We strongly encourage parents to school a school that complete the feedback form if they are to attend a meeting... all of this we should be proud unable information is going to be transmitted to the Superintendent of Schools and of?... What are we the Board of Education. They are the doing, what are we decision-makers, that’s who needs to hear this information, so we want as prioritizing, and many people [as possible] to share that with us,” she said. The form is availwhat are we telling able in six different languages. While the small discussion groups the kids? ” encouraged involvement from all -Marissa Valero, community members, parents like Michele Bollinger found that the Parent county missed an opportunity for free discourse on the issue. An open Broad-scale community discussion, Bollinger believed, would impact have allowed for increased clarity for Many community members ex- all meeting participants. “If you have a town hall, a few pressed hesitation about redrawing district lines. Parents argued that re- kids say something, and you have districting will not solve inherent self- more and more people get into it and feel comfortable raising their segregation within schools. “We can solve the problem of voice,” she said. “I have no idea integrating schools, but even within what really came out of tonight, I schools there is still the problem of have to go read very small writing, segregation,” one parent mentioned and it’s not that clear, and I have no takeaways really from this, whereas at the Earle B. Wood meeting. During a small group discussion, if we had a town hall style, we would one parent mentioned inconvenient have.” transportation as a potential drawback to redrawn school boundaries. “I’m worried about the boundaries being far… you think it would be better if students went far for the fact of diversity? I’m saying proximity should be a top priority, and diversity number two,” he said in response to Mohamed’s advocacy for diversity. An Einstein cluster parent at the Walter Johnson meeting reflected on some concerns brought up by parents. “I think the concerns that people are having that kids are being bused from one part of the county down to the other... out of all the hypotheticals is the most ridiculous...that’s more fear-mongering than anything else,” he said. “Anything with real estate is probably the biggest thing that people are worried about.”
The resolution to hire an external consultant to conduct a boundary study was proposed by a student: 2018-2019 Student Member of the Board (SMOB) and Richard Montgomery senior Ananya Tadikonda. Yet, in the implementation of the resolution, student activists noted a lack of county initiative to encourage student participation. Joel Lev-Tov, member of MoCo Students For Change and a junior at Springbrook, expressed that he did not believe the county truly valued the student voice. “There’s just been a very bad outreach on the part of MCPS to parents and students... I only learned about this through MoCo For Change; I did not learn about this through MCPS, so I think there’s a major problem there,” he said. Clarksburg junior and former Student Member of the Board nominee Zoe Tishaev shared similar concerns upon noticing that the guiding questions for the town hall meeting only directly addressed Montgomery County parents. “We the students have to be leading this discussion, and when they… don’t include students in that, that breaks my heart,” she said. “I think that’s indicative that the Board of Education still does not see us as equals in the conversation.” Valero mentioned that the timing of meetings may have hindered student attendance, as many students have homework and extracurricular commitments. Even students who did attend the meeting, like Mohamed, felt that their voices were not always respected by the adults in attendance. “I feel like he was hearing but he wasn’t listening to us when we were trying to explain that… the divide between the wealth in the schools… is causing detrimental problems,” Mohamed said of one of the adult members of her small group. MCPS shared community newsletters about boundary analysis initiatives through email blasts to parents and posted town hall information to Facebook and Twitter pages. Principals have also received direct memos about community meetings to share with parents and post to the school website at their discretion. Lev-Tov highlighted ways he thinks that the county could place a greater emphasis on the student voice. “I just think that MCPS has to do a much better job of getting the input from students, like maybe holding town halls inside of schools, during the school days at lunch or something, because... it affects the students much more than it does the parents,” he said.
Acknowledging all perspectives The topic of discussion invited outspoken arguments from all ends of the spectrum. Some felt intolerance from those with opposing viewpoints. “The boundaries bring out the
MCPS
AMANDA LIU AND SARAH SCHIFFGENS
News A3
silverchips
May 8, 2019
School districts can now chose their own calendars
Bill passed to end Maryland’s school year ending and starting requirements By Mira Diamond-Berman STAFF WRITER
Maryland’s General Assembly voted to override Governor Larry Hogan’s veto of a bill that allows school districts to choose their own school year calendar on March 29. Hogan’s previous 2016 executive order required schools to start after Labor Day and end before June 15. School boards no longer have to follow such requirements, which could affect future MCPS calendars. Montgomery, Prince George’s, and Baltimore Counties are not adjusting their 2019-2020 school year calendar as they have already been set, but Anne Arundel has already changed the next school year to start earlier in order to add more days off during the year for students and teachers. This bill was passed to alleviate scheduling conflicts due to shorter school years. School districts had to shorten certain breaks for students, in order to abide by the mandated number of instructional days while keeping the school year between Labor Day and June 15. “We heard a lot of concern over the past few years about the impact of the executive order on schools, the shortening of spring break, the cancellation of religious holidays,” Maryland Delegate Eric Luedtke said. “It started to become a more consensus view among parents, students, teachers that it’s really the school boards that should be making that decision [about the school calendar].” Luedtke believed that the state school calendar requirements would be especially difficult to manage for the 2019-2020 school year because Labor Day is late in the calendar year. School boards would have to cancel previously scheduled days off for students and teachers to stay within Hogan’s requirements next year. “The next year’s calendar
COURTESY OF STATE SYMBOLS USA
MARLAND’S CAPITOL Maryland’s state house in Annapolis where the Maryland General Assembly meets to vote on billls and the Governor signs them. 2019-2020 and as well as 2020-2021 made it extremely difficult for us to plan because not only did our proposed calendar have no parent-teacher conference days but it pretty much had no spring break,” Josephine Urrea, Anne Arundel Board of Education Member, said. The school district’s greater control over their calendar will provide students and teachers with more days off throughout the school year. “The biggest impact is probably we will likely see a restored spring break… [it] helps teachers and students because at that point in the year people kinda need a breather,”
Luedtke said. Some students also support having more breaks during the school year. “I’m always in favor of more holidays during school and less summer [rather than] the long week after week of no holidays,” freshman Chris Parten said. If school districts decide to have a shorter summer, previous research suggested that students will forget less knowledge over the break. “The biggest impact is that the education research says the longer the summer is, the more educational impact there [is] on the students… People will retain more knowledge over the summer, which is a good thing,” Lu-
edtke said. Students will also have more time to study for May AP or IB exams throughout the year. “Some school systems make their systems start earlier in the year, so there will be more time for students to prepare for AP and IB exams,” Luedtke said. MCPS has not made any changes yet to its already approved calendar for the 20192020 year based on this new bill, according of Board of Education member Brenda Wolff. As for changing the start and end days after next year, MCPS has no current plans. “We will have local control and we’ll be looking to do what’s best for the district. Right now, that’s all I can say,” she said. However, Anne Arundel County’s Public Schools has already changed their calendar for the upcoming school year. The district put out a community survey to see if there would be support for last minute changes to next year’s calendar. “We just approved [our calendar for the 2019-2020 school year],” Urrea said. “So we added back Rosh Hashanah and extended the school year by one day, but we didn’t put back spring break because our community survey said that they wanted to keep the calendar the same.” Many school boards are appreciative of this new bill as it allows them greater autonomy when setting their school calendar. They can craft their own calendar that satisfies their county’s unique needs. “Our belief was and still is that the calendar for schools should be set locally and not gubernatorially because the school districts are so different in terms of their local economies and size,” Alvin Thornton, Prince George’s County Board of Education Member, said. “It allows school districts to make start and end dates in line with our local economic needs, instructional needs and the unique size of our school system.”
Up and Coming May 18
May 24
Prom
Last day of school for Seniors Student Appreciation Day
May 27
June 7, 9:00 a.m.
Memorial Day
Graduation
Student and Teacher Awards & Honors Senior Nobline Yoo was selected as a semifinalist for the 2019 U.S. Presidental Scholars competition and a national recepient of the 2019 NCWIT award for Aspirations in Computing at the National Center for Women and Information Technology. The Blair Robot Project qualified for the FIRSTRobotic Competition (FRC) World Championships. The team was also a finalist in both the regional and district competitions. Juniors Amelia Frey and Matt Weinsheimer and senior Nene NarhMensah were recognized for outstanding participation in this years Youth and Government session. Seniors Leo Blain, Anna Brooks, Absa Fall and Sophia Johnson and sophomore Maddie Graham were recognized by the EPA for the outstanding achievement in environmental protection. Freshman Druv Pai was awarded the 2019 Montgomery County Serves, Youth Volunteer of the Year.
Juniors Sophia Weng, Katherine Lei, Matthew Shu, Shawn Zhao, and Justin Zhang placed first at the Montgomery County Envirothon. Juniors Katherine Lei, Shawn Zhao, Justin Zhang, and Seniors Laura Cui, and Shwetha Kunnam qualified for the Science Worlds Fair. Freshman Albert Ho and Leela Mehta-Horwitz made semifinals and juniors Sophia Weng and Matthew Shu made playoffs in the National History Bee 2019. Sarah Fillman recieved of the Distinguished Service to Pubic Education Award from the MCPS Board of Education. Seniors Tinsea Deresse, Kayla Malone and Emma Morganstein were awarded a $4000 scholarship from Mark Levin, President of Blair’s Alumni Association. Michelle Elie was named a Bethesda Magazine Top Teacher.
A4 News Newsbriefs Nathaniel Tinbite to be the 2019-2020 SMOB The 2019-2020 student member of the board (SMOB) elections took place on April 24, with an 85.19 percent student turnout. Kennedy junior Nathaniel Tinbite won with 74 percent of the vote, while Clarksburg junior Zoe Tishaev earned 26 percent. Tinbite said he aims to level the playing field for students by providing various services through high schools in the county. These services include driver’s ed, test tutoring and college prep, all to integrated directly into schools in order to lower costs. Currently, he serves as the president of the Montgomery County Regional Student Government Association, and his term will commence on July 1, following the end of current SMOB Ananya Tadikonda’s term.
Montgomery County magnet programs accused of racial bias The Maryland Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights received and began reviewing a case relating to admission of Asian students in Montgomery County magnet programs in March. The group has alleged that the new admission process for magnet programs is discriminatory against Asians, citing the demographic’s dropping admission rate. The magnet programs have moved to a universal screening program, obtaining results from over 4,000 students countywide and used assessment scores, gender, and socioeconomic status in order to admit students. Some parents are frustrated and confused as to why their children are being rejected from their programs. “It’s really hard to understand why my child’s academic performance was so good, outstanding, and at the same time she was rejected; she was not making the wait list,” parent Alex Zhong said to the Baltimore Sun.
Montgomery College proposed budget faces opposition The proposed budget for Montgomery County has placed a larger focus on early education, putting more money towards MCPS, but cutting Montgomery College’s budget. Councilmember Craig Rice brought up concerns on April 12, citing information from college president DeRionne Pollard, who said that the proposed budget was already extremely narrow. The college proposed their lowest budget in seven years, using multiple methods to cut money. “We met the county’s savings plan that they asked us to do, we also cut approximately $8 million to our budget ourselves before even submitting it and then we have a proposed tuition increase that our board just approved, begrudgingly, earlier this week,” Pollard said at the Education and Culture Committee (ECC) meeting. Elrich has said that while Montgomery College has useful programs, their revenue is not balanced by how much they are budgeted, especially with the dropping enrollment rate. Once the proposal came to a vote, the ECC voted to provide more funding to the college, a proposal which will go to a full council vote in mid-May.
Newsbriefs compiled by Khushboo Rathore
May 8, 2019
silverchips
Countywide graduation rates continue to decline Blair’s graduation rate fluctuates over three-year period
By Victoria Xin STAFF WRITER
On Mar 31. a report on Montgomery County graduation rate data over the past three years, as well as graduation rate annual targets for future years, was released by the Maryland State Department of Education. Montgomery County four-year graduation rates dropped to 88.4 percent for all seniors, an all time low since 2015. Blair’s graduation rate increased to 86.7 percent, but is still relatively low compared to past years since 2015. However, the report also noted an increase of 846 graduates overall from last year, a sign of the county’s population growth. The report attributes a portion of this decline to the fact that students who receive a Maryland High School Certificate of Program Completion, awarded to those who have a disability that prevents them from meeting the requirements of a diploma, do not meet federal high school diploma guidelines and are not considered graduating seniors. MCPS Department of Communications officer Derek Turner noted that the decline may also be impacted by an influx of unaccompanied relocated high school minors. These students, according to Turner, arrived in the U.S. with limited English skills and are legally required to attend high school. “I don’t know about you, but if you put me in a country where I didn’t know the language, I wouldn’t graduate in four years,” Turner said. Montgomery County’s graduation rate is still above the state’s, with Maryland’s graduation rate
MARYLAND STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
hovering around 87.6 percent in the past few years. The county’s rate also exceeds the national rate, which is approximately 84 percent. Michael Durso, the president of the Montgomery County Board of Education, reiterates the superior rates of the county and attributes this success to “the hard work of our students, the commitment of our staff, and strong support from the community.” Several subgroups in the class of 2018 experienced increased graduation rates. Black students, students of two or more races, students receiving free or reduced
meals, and students with limited English proficiency all had rates increasing by more than one percentage point, with those rates being 89.6 percent, 94.1 percent, 83.1 percent, and 46.6 percent respectively. In particular, rates for limited English proficiency students increased by almost 6 percent, a dramatic shift, particularly considering the added enrollment of 444 students into this subgroup, according to the report. On the other hand, Asian, Hispanic/Latino, white, and special education students’ graduation
VICTORIA XIN
rates decreased by at least one percentage point each, resulting in rates of 96.6 percent, 75.9 percent, 94.9 percent, and 68.8 percent respectively. Hispanic/Latino students had a slightly harsher decline than other subgroups, losing 2.6 percentage points. Although Blair’s rate is currently facing stagnation, fourteen other Montgomery County high school graduation rates have increased over the past three years, with Seneca Valley, Springbrook, Richard Montgomery, and Northwest as the forerunners.
Op/Ed B1
silverchips
May 8, 2019
Are AP tests beneficial for student learning?
YES:
They provide an advantage for students entering college and careers College, an institution that is becoming a keystone qualifying factor in getting a job, is nothing short of expensive. Averaging at about $34,740 for private colleges per year, paying for college is a privilege many cannot afford. At Blair, students have the opportunity to join a class that bears the potential to save students thousands of dollars. These classes are known as the AP classes. Advanced Placement (AP) classes and exams allow students to chalAVERY BROOKS lenge themselves while earning college By Paloma Williams credit. STAFF WRITER In the long run, these classes can make college tuition significantly cheaper by allowing them to place out of equivalent courses in college. According to the College Board, when reviewing applications, 31 percent of colleges take AP involvement throughout high school into account when considering students for scholarships. AP tests are beneficial for students preparing for college as they train the students for the challenging nature of college classes, provide practice for college level exams, and serve as a rewarding measure of academic achievement. Historically, AP classes have been implemented within schools to allow capable students to challenge themselves academically. What were once rare classes that cater to a small percentage of students countrywide, are now commonplace classes that grace many Blair students’ schedules. AP classes teach content with a heavy workload at an accelerated pace, all in preparation for the infamous May tests. During class time, students are often motivated to take extensive notes on lectures given by teachers to later study in preparation for the test. At home, studying for AP tests often requires 1 to 2 hours of studying daily during the months of April and May. AP tests, like college classes, aim to score students based on the standard of understanding concepts below the surface level. The focal point of any AP class is the end-of-the-year test. All of the core principles of AP classes, including the test, mimic the nature of college-level classes, which are often centered around exams. Textbook readings, intense studying, notetaking, concept review and applications, are all commonplace aspects of college classes. Thus, to experience them in high school is extremely valuable.
Miles Grobeck Sophomore
AP tests also give students an extremely accurate practice for college level exams. While the tried-and-true format of memorizing seemingly meaningless facts from a textbook in preparation for tests as long as three hours seems tedious, that is exactly what students must do in college. Since MCPS has no final exams whatsoever, AP exams are one of the few remaining ways for students to practice important test-taking skills, timed test taking, and commitment to studying large quantities of material. Mike Zick, AP human geography teacher, cites the importance of AP tests. “The AP test is the thing that is most like a college class,” Zick said. “I am very much in favor of the AP test, not that the score on it is significant, but that the experience of taking it is important.” Because of this importance, AP scores are able to stand alone, not counting towards students’ high school GPAs. “That’s why they don’t factor it into the grades,” Zick said. “Kids need to take the test, like I can’t stress that enough, they should be taking the test.” Junior Enoch Agbalajobi found AP classes to be a good learning experience for test-taking in college. “It’s not a game. You actually have to put in work and do homework,” Agbodjogbe said. “Every unit [our teacher] goes over notes and everything and we write down notes, and we do a lot of homework problems. We spent a whole week just doing problems about chemistry,” Agbodjogbe said. While typical classes in MCPS have quarterly assessments that only cover material from that specific quarter, AP exams expect students to attain and remember material covered from each semester— just as college classes do. Overall, although AP tests seem tedious, they play a necessary role in the school system we take part in. The preparation for college level studying, standardized testing, and the feeling of accomplishment that these tests provide students make the AP testing process a worthwhile experience. AP test scores are also, if nothing else, a way to save thousands of dollars by receiving a credit that you would otherwise have to pay for to receive in college.
Maya Hofstetter Sophomore
NO:
They’re misguided measures that don’t reflect college cirriculums Every spring, masses of students rush to cram volumes of material onto flashcards, Quizlets, and review packets, preparing for Advanced Placement tests. As the anxiety and adrenaline spikes into overdrive, many students ask “why?” Their confusion stems from the hypocrisy of AP tests. As colleges clamor for applicants with developed critical thinking and critical research abilities, they still emphasize tests which rely on memorization, survey curriculums and information regurgitation as the AVERY BROOKS standard. These tests By Elias Chen have become the STAFF WRITER backbone of gauging students’ high school rigor and mastery of coursework, yet rarely serve as true indicators of a developed, comprehensive and applicable knowledge of material. As “teaching to the test” has become the norm, AP tests have fundamentally restricted students’ from exploring their passions and prohibited teachers from taking their higher level classes in a unique direction The nation is currently gripped in an AP frenzy. In 2018 College Board reported that 39 percent of the graduating class took at least one or more AP, up from 25 percent just over a decade ago. But while this rapid expansion has some hailing the success of AP, they ignore the failures behind the test.To be clear: there is nothing wrong with advanced classes. Under the right circumstances, to seek higher knowledge through rigorous instruction on par with the college level is a noble cause. But since its founding in 1956, the AP test KELLEY LI system has been corrupted by the voracious appetite of the College Board. First and foremost, there is very little to be said in praise of AP tests’ benefits. While various studies have shown that higher test scores correlate to success later in life, there is no proof that this correlation is anything more than a statement that high-achieving students go on to achieve highly. This lack of causality becomes much more dangerous when looking at AP tests as a business tool. While the number of students taking APs has increased significantly, the percentage of students earning 3s or higher has remained constant over the past two decades. And as
voicebox
Zakariya Gordon Senior
if that were not already enough to say the College Board is obsessed with student’s money, they have just recently announced a redesigned fees process to the AP process where all registration for AP tests is due in the fall instead of the spring, forcing students to decide early to hand their $90 plus over or face monetary penalty. But aside from the College Board’s corporation-esque attitudes toward education, APs also promote a flawed perception of education and learning. One of the most often cited criticisms of APs is their survey-course material. Most APs emphasize expansive curriculums over, promoting a learning style more concerned with an overview of knowledge rather than allowing students to explore their own passions. Higher level classes will always be necessary and are appropriate to allow students to learn at accelerated levels, but the AP test creates an unnecessarily rigid structure which fundamentally limits a teacher’s ability to foster creativity in the classroom. The AP World test, for example, is renowned for its vast cover of material, which forces students to review expansive swaths of history in exceedingly little time. “It’s daunting… [the class] is so much information to ask students to absorb in the course of a year,” AP World Teacher Rondai Ravilious said. The College Board even recognizes this breadth as a shortcoming and decided to redesign the class for the 2019 school year and onward, making the AP world class begin in the Middle Ages rather than prehistory. But in this “improvement” they have also exposed the flaw in their system: a test will always be restrictive and not conducive to exploratory learning. “Did something have to change? I think anybody who’s ever taught it will tell you ‘yeah, they had to make some change,’” Ravilious said. “You want students to know about not just what they’re learning about good historiography, good history practice.” The worst aspect of the APs is that they are not even true to the nature of a college classroom. AP classes have come increasingly under fire from selective colleges who are rejecting certain AP credits. Elite institutions recognize the lost value of AP courses in high school and have sought to curb this disparity by making students take their classes once they reach the college level. College courses are centered around lecture and research, not busy-work and monotonous document analyzation. Moreover, with APs, time-constrained teachers face the issue of teaching many high schoolers how to develop college level work ethics on top of the material. “In a college level class, which is what an AP class is, there’s a lot of expectation for independent learning and that’s fair,” Ravilious said. “But then you also have to keep in mind you’re teaching students who may be experiencing a college level course for the first time… So that’s a lot when you’re also trying to cover from the agricultural revolution to just past Barack Obama.”
Jaedyn Taylor Senior
Vincent Gao Junior
EMORY BROOKS
“[Yes]... AP tests are beneficial because they help us expand our knowledge on a subject.”
“[No]...while the concept of AP tests are beneficial, in practice they just put a lot of stress on students and they also unnecessarily commercialize learning.”
“[Yes]... they can give you a chance to take classes sooner because you have more credits already and you can get out of prerequisites.”
“[No]... counselors pressure us into taking AP classes and AP tests while shying away from better options like dual enrollment and honors classes.”
“[No]... you care too much about earning a five or a four but in reality you should be caring about the actual material being learned.”
silverchips
B2 Op/Ed
May 8, 2019
Setting the movement backward The self-sabotaging effects of uninformed protest March for Our Lives kids are trying to do because it really is about police brutality and not so much about mass school shootings.” The “hands up, don’t shoot” chant was likely started with good intentions. As Medina-Tayac said, “I don’t think any group did it to purposely offend anyone; I think students just… took it out of context, and thought ‘don’t shoot’ is about gun violence, when really it’s about police brutality… when someone starts to chant, people just start
chanting along.” Regardless of intentions, it is critical for protestors to be knowledgeable about subjects of protest. Studies have shown that when individuals are misinformed, their views on subjects tend to be far more extreme than warranted by reality. The Background Checks Expansion Act (HR-8) at the center of the March gun control movement, for example, is more nuanced than some protestors may understand. These nuances
can conflict with the Black Lives Matter movement, setting apart the two movements STAFF WRITERS AN OPINION and making conflations even more dangerous. Advocates for the universal background “Hands up, don’t shoot!” checks proposed in HR-8 might take more The well-known Black Lives Matter moderate stances, for instance, if they knew chant is juxtaposed by a sea of white faces that background checks are often infected and pale, outstretched hands. The proteswith prejudices related to race—principles tors’ signs read slogans like “Arms R 4 that are fundamentally antithetical to Black Hugs” and “Peace not guns!”—nothing to do Lives Matter. Although the two movements with the Black Lives Matter movement at all. share certain similarities, fusing the two can In reality, the protestors gathered in front be contradictory. An individual’s choice to of the Capitol on March 14 are there to propersist in this contradiction and support both test gun violence in schools, not police brumovements should be conscious and well tality. While their actions may seem benign, thought-out. their inappropriate chants not only impede History has shown that time and time their own movement, but also detract from again, movements have co-opted other the efforts of the Black Lives Matter movemovements’ forms of peaceful protest for ment. their own benefit. In recent years, modern The reality is that the two movements, movements, including Black Lives MatMarch for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, have adopted die-ins, a form of protest ter, are almost entirely independent of each where participants simulate death in public other. While ideas from both efforts are areas to maximize attention. These modern included in the Democratic platform, the movements use die-ins with little regard to Black Lives Matter movement, at its core, is where they originated: environmental activist a racial issue, while March for Our Lives is groups. about gun control. Partisanship can seem to That is not to say that movements “own” make them a package-deal, which dilutes the particular forms of protest. Sharing forms of efforts of both movements. protest among movements can be beneficial Conflation of the two is not uncommon. to all. Die-ins, for example, are particularly Emily Schrader, the communications head useful during the advent of social media: a of MoCo For Change, said the chants were haunting photo of unmoving bodies strewn “in solidarity with the intersection between across the floor elicits strong, disturbing the gun violence prevention movement emotions; strong emotions prompt change. and the Black Lives Matter movement.” It is okay for the usage of a form of protest As One Blair co-head Jansi Medina-Tayac to evolve over time, as long as we do not explained, the fusion of these unrelated issilence the voices of those who came before. sues is sourced in unawareness and can lead The inappropriate chants from the to a dilution of efforts that use the phrase March 14 gun violence protest elucidate correctly. “When people take the ‘hands some of the dangers of uninformed protestup, don’t shoot’ phrasing and associate it with the March for Our Lives movement, it COURTESY OF JORDAN BONDO ing. Nonetheless, this mistake paves the way for future movements to ensure that their disregards where all of this started,” she said. “It started with the Black Lives Matter move- HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT Students at the March For Our Lives protest on protestors are informed about the issues they ment. It’s completely different from what the March 14 co-opt the Black Live’s Matter chant and hand motion. are fighting for. By Itamar Fiorino and Amanda Liu
Pay teachers all they are worth By Khushboo Rathore STAFF WRITER
AN OPINION
For many, a 40-hour work week is the norm. But many teachers are at school before 7 a.m., and sometimes do not leave until after 4 p.m. In addition, they use their weekends to grade work, summers to plan out curriculum and complete trainings, and, sometimes, work other jobs to support their families during the summer. According to Blair math teacher David Stein, the amount of time they truly spend working is not what they get paid for. “A full time teacher is paid for 40 hours a week, but I think a good teacher probably works sixty hours a week,” Stein said. Even with all of their hard work, they are told that “those who can’t do, teach.” America should be ashamed of the stigma surrounding teaching. Teachers serve as the foundation to society and creating a culture that perceives teaching as “less than” only adds more harm to the world. They are disrespected by the government, often having their field ignored. “I think at least within our political system, our money goes to the defense budget or something like that...sometimes education is pushed aside because a lot of places, at least in our country, have decent education, but I think that teacher pay isn’t really something that people tend to focus on,” junior Kasey Hammond said. Without teachers, there would be no robots, no modern medicine, and no great works of literature. The world would not be how it is right now, yet teachers are criticized and mistreated every single day. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, their mean pay is $59,980 per year in the USA, which comes to about $17 per hour. On top of that, they deal with frustrated parents and stressed students, both inside and outside of the classroom. Teachers are the people that watch over
students as they grow up and develop. Ten months out of the year, they make sure that students are respecting each other, staying healthy, and taken care of. “I was doing a project at one point and there was a reason I couldn’t complete it due to a personal issue that I have,” Hammond said. “I have PTSD and something in the project triggered it... I was talking to my teacher about it and she was fine with it. She gave me an extension and sort of let me work things out. That was something that not only was helpful for the assignment itself, but was helpful for me as a student and with my relationship with academics.” Teachers deserve to be paid more, and that change would help to create a huge impact. Higher pay would mean bringing better teachers to public schools, rather than private schools and universities, along with encouraging people to try teaching rather than move to the private sector. “I think teachers should be paid more because it is increasingly difficult to attract people to teaching,” Stein said. … “Teacher salaries need to be attractive enough that we can attract the best people to do it.” However, as amazing as teachers can be, some can provide a bad reputation for all teachers. “In middle school, I did have a really bad teacher that a lot of people had really negative experiences with, she sort of just created a classroom full of anxiety because she was kind of strict and when she got angry... she would lash out,” Hammond said. The Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) and MCPS have created a system that evaluates teacher performance, known as the Peer Assistance and Review Program (PAR). In this system,
teachers are reviewed by their peers, and may be given assistance based on how they perform. However, the system does not account for how teachers act when no one else is in the classroom. The focus is just on what another adult sees is faulty, not considering the opinions of the students who are actually impacted by those teachers. Instead, when a teacher is up for review, they should be reviewed by both their students and their peers. With some type of surveying systems, including generalized ratings on the teacher’s capabilities, kindness, and helpfulness, there could be a huge change in the value that teachers are given.
ELAINE CHENG
In the meantime, while some unacceptable teachers continue to teach, it is up to the students to respect those who truly work to make sure that public school is the best experience possible. It is up to students to talk to department heads if they feel a teacher is subpar, and while doing that, they should also take a moment to show their appreciation for phenomenal teachers.
silverchips
May 8, 2019
My Blair: Personal Column What we must be taught about rape
AVERY BROOKS
By Marika Campbell-Blue GUEST WRITER
AN OPINION
Editor’s Note: The author, Marika Campbell-Blue, provided Silver Chips with detailed research, links, and additional materials accompanying this column. Although we did not have space to publish these in print, we will be happy to provide these materials to any reader upon request. Send requests, responses, or any other inquiries to silver.chips.print@ gmail.com. Teaching people how to drive better doesn’t teach them what to do when they get in a collision. Schools like MCPS are beginning to teach about consent, but not much about what to do if you are raped. Too many of us are leaving high school without vital information on what to expect and what to do. Your parents aren’t going to talk to you about it. Parents or guardians don’t want to even talk about sex, let alone rape. They rely on the school to teach us students about health and discuss sexual health—but this is
MCPS. The new addition to the MCPS curriculum teaching students “age-appropriate” material pertaining to consent is definitely a huge step forward, but it fails to teach what a person should do in the event someone violates that consent. In the wake of the deplorable gang rapes at Damascus High School, the importance of teaching students the clear procedure of what a victim is to do after they are raped has become increasingly more apparent. Since 2017, there have been over 30 on-campus rapes, sodomy, and rapes with an object reported in Montgomery County. Some of them taking place on school grounds during school hours. Just this April, an assault of a girl happened in the middle of the day on campus. Based on the research I’ve done over a multitude of sources, the general advice I would follow if I had been raped is to go to the police, call 9-1-1, or go to the Emergency Room (ER). They have people there trained to help victims of rape through the process. Medication to prevent STI’s and unwanted pregnancy is offered and administered by doctors or ER nurses. The questions they should ask you are if the person used a condom, and what orifices were penetrated, if applicable. Reporting to the police is sincerely suggested, but not a necessity. Don’t shower or change your clothes beforehand. They can be used as evidence in finding or charging the perpetrator. Make sure that the police get it. Surround yourself with people that support you. Doing this may ease the process of healing. If you choose to pursue legal action, then support from people around you can be very beneficial to you during a trial or while the perpetrator is being convicted. The steps should be simple and clear to understand, and we need to be taught how to deal with this now. The outlook does not get any better as we head out into the world. We need to be prepared and, after all, that is the purpose of school in the first place.
Opinion B3 Corrections: February and April 2019
The April 2019 story “One twi-LIT night” on E1 cut off the latter part of the final sentence of text. Uninterrupted from the last comma it should have read as follows: “together at the end as they were at the beginning, are ready for bed.” Text in the February 2019 story “Administration considers single lunch block” on A1 incorrectly spelled “accommodations” in the first subsection header. Text in the subhead for the February 2019 story “Bettering your rec lettering” on D5 misspelled the word “recommendation.”
What do you think? Feel free to access our feedback survey to tell us what you think about Silver Chips! Scan the code below with a QR reader app, or use the URL: http:// www.chipssurvey.com/
B4 Editorials
silverchips
The perils of a single lunch
EDITORIAL We are all too familiar with the struggles of failing to find a table in the congested SAC, tripping over students eating along the hallway floors, and waiting almost half an hour at the beginning of lunch to buy 75-cent fries. However, as the impending threat of a single lunch block looms closer on the horizon, hallways will only grow messier, louder, and even more crowded. We will face a new schedule, and countless new expenses will indubitably arise. Are the changes worth it? Hardly. The administration’s proposal aims to facilitate student access to academic support. Under a single lunch schedule, teachers will be required to stay inside classrooms to field questions and aid students, overcoming some of the current lunch-block scheduling challenges of academic support. While the benefits of a single lunch are more or less intuitive, they are ultimately marginal, and far outweighed by the consequences of the potential chaos, danger, and unexpected consequences that will ensue. As students, we have already experienced many of the negative aspects of a single lunch: Occasionally, standardized testing forces students to endure a 60-minute lunch period, ripe with hallway-blocking mobs, spilled food, and long lines. The administration seems to believe that knocking down our few remaining lockers, stuffing students into classrooms, and spreading lunch distribution across the entire school will smoothly mitigate these concerns. Rather, our school simply cannot fit 3,200 teenagers within its walls, regardless of how many new spaces the administration opens for students to spill their lunches. While this poses a problem at any time of year, it is especially dangerous for students to eat in the courtyards during the frigid winter, when Maryland temperatures frequently dip below freezing. In its frenzy to implement the new
Administration’s move toward one lunch will exacerbate an already crowded environment
schedule by next fall, the administration has seemingly neglected to consider the rampant security risks and troubling planning concerns that will clearly arise. Regrettably Principal Renay Johnson has made it clear that due to safety concerns, an open lunch is not in play. With thousands of students crowded into Blair with no option to leave, our already-stretched security team will have to reassess methods for handling fights, fire drills, and other potential threats, likely with no boost in resources. Even with the wide array of recent construction efforts—such as removing a large chunk of locker space beside Blair Boulevard to add lunch space—overcrowding at lunch has barely been alleviated. Both Silver Chips and Blair Network Communications have more than just overcrowding to worry about if Blair transitions to a single lunch. Our publications rely on our full staff meeting every day during both lunch periods to function, and we worry that without the ability to meet each day, the quality of our work and the frequency of our output will diminish significantly. Any disruption to the daily schedule—especially one as large as this—will be catastrophic, and would translate to a complete restructuring of the paper and how it functions. Despite these challenges, a single, hourlong lunch block for all Blazers remains on the menu. Whether you agree with a unified lunch or are against the idea, we must all ensure that the administration hears every voice. As students, we will be most directly affected by the proposed changes, and the decision-making process must reflect that reality. Blair administration is fielding feedback through an online survey, which is found at the link: www.mbhs.edu/onelunch
Rebranding the Ombudsman: our paper’s judiciary system
Editorial Cartoon
That being said, I urge you to recognize and put to action the endless amount of and responsibilities you, as the reader, have in fueling our paper and making unheard voices radiate throughout the community. Silver Chips views letters to the editor, criticism, praise, and any type of feedback as a valuable opportunity to raise the bar for just how far we can improve as a publication. Our standards as American citizens should not go anywhere below having our voices heard loud and clear. As my journey with Silver Chips is coming to a close, I am so proud to present Victoria Xin as the Ombudsman for next year. Her impeccable work ethic and passion for serving the community made her the person most capable for this position. From working with her over the past year, it is absolutely clear she is someone we can all rely on. I hope to see and hear from you all again after graduating from Blair, whether it is from seeing Blazers on the news speaking out at political rallies or reading future editions of Silver Chips.
Victoria AVERY BROOKS
By Hannah Lee and Victoria Xin
2018-2019 and 2019-2020 OMBUDSMEN
Hannah
From my first column back in April of last year to my last column that you are currently reading, it has been an absolute honor serving as your Ombudsman and design editor. When I accepted the position of Ombudsman, I envisioned this role mainly as a way to
May 8, 2019
raise awareness about the role of journalism within our society. Though my columns may have seemed purely directed towards journalists, the fact of the matter is that we are all connected to journalism as long as the press continues to exist. We are currently all affected by infringements on press freedoms, and no progress can be made without open communication between publications and the community.
What is an ombudsman? By definition, it is an independent investigatory body of an organization. Ideally, when members of the public feel their interests are being contradicted or their rights infringed upon by an organization, the ombud steps in to resolve the issue. For a newspaper, an ombud serves roughly the same purpose, but with a few added bonuses. Think of me as the paper’s judiciary system. Independent from the other branches of authority. My job is to check to see if our processes
are ethical and our stories are what you, the public, want to see. Much like the court system, you can air your issues about the paper, and after we come to a decision, I’ll refine the paper to match. Next year, the ombud will no longer be the face of SilverChips. There will be a clear distinction between the wishes of the paper and the ideas presented in the ombud column. The ombud will be the face of the people, not the press. This column will never be cut off, especially when crucial issues are at stake. This little corner of the paper is a place where you can express your concerns about the paper, Blair, and our community at large. If you see me in the hallways, don’t be afraid to stop me and tell me what you think the paper is doing wrong. Don’t be afraid to ask how the writing process works, how stories are assigned, why we choose the stories that we do. What do you want us to investigate? What do you want to know? What is bothering you about today’s high school class, society, journalism, government, management? Tell us. When we understand, we can tell everybody.
To connect with Victoria email her at ombudsmansilver chips@gmail.com, message her on Twitter @chipsombudsman
8 de mayo de 2019
español C1
silverchips
La Esquina Latina
Silver Chips el 8 de mayo de 2019
Nicaragua, hijos de esperanza y luchadores por la libertad Un año de conflicto social, resistencia y ningún paso atrás
Por Alzahra Rodríguez ESCRITORA
Ha pasado un año desde el inicio de la crisis en Nicaragua que empezó el 18 de abril de 2018. El gobierno nicaragüense creó una reforma al seguro social que le quitaba a los jubilados un cinco por ciento de su jubilación, aparte de que ya reciben pensiones limitadas. Ese día un grupo de jóvenes y algunos jubilados protestaron de una manera pacífica frente a las instalaciones del seguro social. Una intervención por parte del gobierno que acabó reprimiendo a los manifestantes. Como resultado, el pueblo nicaragüense, se unió, salió a las calles y personas de todas las edades se manifestaron. El presidente Daniel Ortega y su esposa, y la vicepresidenta Rosario Murillo, como contraataque, ordenaron la matanza a todo aquel que estuviera participando en las manifestaciones. “Creíamos que los jóvenes eran una generación perdida porque pasaban mucho con los celulares, pero nos enseñaron que eso no era cierto que estaban más conscientes que nunca pero que la historia no la iban a repetir,” dijo Haydee Castillo, defensora de los derechos humanos y miembro de la Iniciativa de Mujeres Defensoras de Nicaragua. De hecho, los nicaragüenses siempre han usado la violencia para enfrentarse a sus
conflictos. Sin embargo, por primera vez en la historia del país, los nicaragüenses decidieron manifestarse de una manera pacífica para exigir justicia y libertad. “En aquella cultura anterior se decía que había que dar la vida por la patria, pues los jóvenes dijeron no ya no hay que decir ‘patria libre o morir’ sino ‘patria libre y vivir’,” agregó Haydee Castillo. Desde el inicio, los jóvenes tenían en claro que no se quedarían inmóviles frente a la injusticia. “Ante este nivel de represión y donde el gobierno trataba de censurarnos o intimidarnos nosotros decidimos seguir manifestandonos.,” dijo Madelaine Caracas, líder estudiantil y activista feminista de 21 años
de edad. “Salimos creyendo firmemente que no hay una justificación por los crímenes que el gobierno cometió y que sigue cometiendo,” comentó Hansel Quintero, activista de la Articulación de Movimientos Sociales. Al cabo de un mes, el 16 de mayo de 2018, se inició un diálogo nacional donde participaron la Conferencia Episcopal de Nicaragua, el gobierno de Daniel Ortega, los jóvenes universitarios, los sindicatos de trabajadores, la empresa privada y los organizaciones civiles. En dicho encuentro el presidente y la vicepresidenta estuvieron presentes cuando Lesther Alemán, un joven universitario de 21 años, proclamó, “Pueden dormir todos
SHASHI ARNOLD
tranquilos, nosotros no hemos dormido tranquilos. Estamos siendo perseguidos, somos los estudiantes... nosotros hemos puesto los muertos, nosotros hemos puesto los desaparecidos, los que están secuestrados...esta no es una mesa de diálogo es una mesa para negociar su salida.” Establecer una tregua siempre ha resultado ser no concluyente debido a que el régimen Ortega-Murillo continúa reprimiendo a los ciudadanos nicaragüenses. No obstante, los nicaragüenses continúan protestando a pesar de ser reprimidos por los paramilitares y la policía. Según los registros de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH) hay 325 muertos, 28 de ellos siendo menores de edad, más de 2,000 personas heridas, y también más de 600 prisioneros políticos. Con este caos, más de 40,000 nicaragüenses han abandonado el país. Muchos activistas se han visto obligados a refugiarse en asilos seguros o salir del país. “Mi vida cambió de forma rotunda, tuve que ir a casas de seguridad para proteger mi vida, dejar la universidad y dejar a mi familia.” expresó Madelaine. Aun así, la principal motivación es lograr ser libres y obtener justicia. Madelaine comentó, “Mi motivación más grande para seguir es el regresar y estar con quienes amo y donde pertenezco y la sed de justicia.” Hansel agrego, “Me motiva saber que podemos lograr una Nicaragua con justicia social y que estamos en el lado correcto de la historia.”
Fraude universitario afecta los latinos y discapacitados Los ricos usan su riqueza para reprimir a los demás
Por Renata Muñoz ESCRITORA Una opinión
El esquema más grande de fraude universitario perseguido por el Departamento de Justicia de los Estados Unidos salió a la luz el 12 de marzo. Por lo menos 50 personas han sido arrestadas en conexión al escándalo, incluyendo a las actrices Felicity Huffman y Lori Loughlin. Los involucrados pagaron a un consultor privado, William Singer, quien ayudaba a los estudiantes hacer trampa en exámenes de entrada y facilitaba que se matricularan a la universidad a través de algún deporte sin mérito. Estos padres pagaron entre 200,000 hasta 6.5 millones SH ASH I AR de dólares. NOL D Singer ordenó que los estudiantes fingie-
ran tener una discapacidad de aprendizaje para que pudieran tener tiempo adicional. Después, Mark Riddell, un consejero en una escuela privada en Florida, corrigió las respuestas de los estudiantes o de ser necesario, tomó el examen entero por ellos. Cuando este escándalo fue revelado, me puse a pensar inmediatamente sobre las críticas de acción afirmativa, un conjunto de medidas que intenta igualar las oportunidades entre personas de color y personas blancas. En ciertos colegios y universidades, la raza es un factor tomado en consideración para favorecer personas de color. Una de las quejas sobre el programa de acción afirmativa es que el programa promueve las oportunidades a las personas de razas minoritarias cuando esa persona no es el candidato más calificado. Sin embargo el propósito de acción afirmativa no es seleccionar el candidato más “calificado”, sino
ayudar a que personas de otras razas tengan la oportunidad de asistir a instituciones post-secundarias a las que normalmente no asistirían. Por gran parte de mi vida, las personas me han dicho que solo he llegado a donde estoy hoy en día es porque soy latina. Personas como yo no lo merecen. Mi raza me ha permitido ciertas ventajas pero yo he luchado y trabajado muchísimo para llegar a donde estoy ahora mismo. Tener dinero es un privilegio pero uno tiene que demostrar que lo que vale y el dinero no ayuda con eso. Varias personas han dicho que “la riqueza es la acción afirmativa para personas blancas.” Anthony Jack, un profesor asociado en la universidad de Harvard, dice que este escándalo está “demostrando los pasos que familias ricas toman para asegurar un espacio que no es de ellos, y que ellos piensan es su propiedad.” En los Estados Unidos, personas de otras razas siempre tienen que demostrar que merecen su estatus. No es suficiente ser igual de inteligente como personas de raza blanca, tienes que ser considerablemente más inteligente. En un análisis hecho por el New York Times demuestra que desde hace 30 años, estudiantes de otras razas aún son los menos representados dentro de las mejores universidades de los Estados Unidos. Otro aspecto de este esquema es que es penoso el fingimiento de discapacidades. Yo soy una persona discapacitada y necesito obtener acomodaciones para tomar exámenes de todos tipos, incluso para los exámenes de las entradas a las universidades dado por el
College Board. Yo tengo unas cuantas enfermedades crónicas, incluyendo el síndrome de taquicardia postural ortostática (POTS) que incluye problemas neurocognitivos. A la hora de tomar exámenes es un proceso muy difícil para mí. Este año escolar fue el primer año que adquirí un plan 504, un plan legal, accesible a todos los alumnos que demuestran discapacidades, que me otorga acomodaciones necesarias a la hora de tomar exámenes. Lo único es que para recibir las acomodaciones tienen que estar vigentes 6 meses antes tomar el examen. En mi caso, yo obtuve un plan 504 en septiembre, eso significó que no pude usar mis acomodaciones en el examen universitario de PSAT cuando fue dado en octubre. Sin las acomodaciones, no puede tomar el PSAT porque no quería arriesgar mi salud. Ahora en mayo, voy a presentarme sin problemas a otros exámenes universitarios, los de AP, porque han pasado los meses requeridos y la institución College Board me accedió a mis acomodaciones, menos la de tiempo adicional. Esta es una acomodación necesaria para mí. El problema es que familias con dinero que tienen a sus hijos fingiendo discapacidades que no tienen para así tener acomodaciones. En mi caso yo las necesito y no me las otorgan. Esto es sumamente injusto. Este fraudulento esquema existe desde mucho y seguirá existiendo mientras que personas adineradas sigan aprovechándose del sistema de admisión y de las instituciones educativas. Las consecuencias afectarán a personas como yo.
C2 español
silverchips
8 de mayo de 2019
Entrevista con Estuardo Rodríguez
El CEO del Museo de Historia Latinoamericana, un analista político y el fundador del Grupo Raben
Por Lourdes Reyes Valenzuela y Yesenia Crúz EDITORA Y ESCRITORA
El 25 del mes de abril, Voto Latino, una organización sin fines de lucro que se encarga de incitar a los jóvenes hispanos a tener liderazgo en los Estados Unidos cumplió su decimoquinto aniversario y se realizó un evento para celebrarlo. En este acontecimiento varios representantes de la cultura hispana estuvieron presente de los cuales se puede mencionar a Estuardo Rodríguez quien aboga por los derechos de los hispanos en los Estados Unidos y también es presidente/CEO del Museo de Historia Latinoamericana. En el evento, Rodríguez fue el moderador en el foro que se llevó a cabo donde se mencionaron temas relevantes a la cultura y al liderazgo latino. Un tema muy importante en el evento fue el de hacer que la presencia hispana se note en las decisiones políticas del próximo año. La Esquina Latina: Me gustaría
saber ¿Qué lo inspiró para tener un evento como este el dia de hoy?
Rodriguez: Bueno, este evento tiene ya varios años, el enfoque siempre ha sido asegurar que la comunidad hispana, y también afroamericana, sean parte del narrativo. De definir quienes somos a través de los medios de comunicación. Vemos CNN, MSNBC y tantos portales que presentan las noticias de nuestra comunidad, pero pocas veces somos nosotros hablando de nuestras historias. Entonces es muy importante para
nosotros en este evento, asegurar que se acer- foro hoy, el comienzo de ese trabajo, ya se can todos de nuestra comunidad para que ellos ha hecho. Lo que se tiene que hacer es el mismos puedan representarse. trabajo de ustedes, de una nueva generación, enfocarse en los medios de comunicación La Esquina Latina: ¿Qué mensaje le como una profesión. Para muchas familias, podría dar a los estudiantes latinos que especialmente a los inmigrantes, no necequieren convertirse en comunicadores sariamente conocen que las redes sociales para la nueva generación, lo que va pa- puede ser una carrera profesional. Las nosar, que les espera? ticias, los vídeos y entrevistas, a través de la red puede ser una profesión que te paga un Rodriguez: Bueno gracias a muchas de sueldo. Especialmente la juventud cree que las bellas personas que estaban conmigo en el simplemente usando redes sociales es para
comunicarse con sus amigos, pero nosotros podemos manejar cómo el país nos conoce, que es lo que creen de nosotros, que es lo que ellos ven que representamos. Así que es el estudio, el trabajo, buscar oportunidades y tocar varias puertas. Se cierra una puerta, no importa porque hay varias puertas si sigues tocando las puertas.
La Esquina Latina: ¿Cuál es una manera que usted cree que los estudiantes de este momento pueden empezar a ser parte del movimiento, desde estos momentos?
Rodriguez: Las redes sociales. Lo que vimos en el 2018, en las elecciones de medio término, fue que un movimiento que se opuso a la retórica, a la forma que habla el presidente Trump, la administración y la agenda republicana. Esa agenda ofende a muchas de las comunidades diversas del país. Creo que a través de las redes sociales, muchos han podido sentirse más seguros, porque en todos estos tiempos, nos sentimos en un punto a otro, amenazados por esta administración. Pero hablando todos en conjunto, a través de las redes sociales nos sentimos más fuertes, más potentes, y así a la misma vez decidimos que vamos a salir a correr por un puesto político, vamos a salir a votar, vamos a registrar a la abuelita o la tía para que salgan a votar también. No es solo participar en el proceso democrático a través de las elecciones, pero también es, porque no vas a ser tu la alcaldesa de la ciudad, porque no puedes ser la congreCORTESÍA DE SABRINA KALÍN sista, y eso es algo que retiene a esta última EL VOTO LATINO La editora en jefe, Jasmine Méndez-Paredes y la editora, generación. Nos estamos dando cuenta que si Lourdes Reyes Valenzuela entrevistan y posan con Rodríguez durante el evento. podemos hacerlo.
Una crítica de “La Maldición de la Llorona” La Llorona “emigra” a los Estados Unidos
Daughtry, quienes no conocían la historia, por lo tanto nuestra querida Llorona fue represenESCRITORA tada de una manera negativa en la película. La película recibió un total de 30 por ciento en El 19 de mayo del 2019 estrenó la nueva Rotten Tomatoes, con varios comentarios sobre película La Llorona de la franquicia cine- sus fallas y críticas de que La Llorona esté en matográfica The Conjuring Universe. Aun- Los Ángeles y no en México o Latinoamérica. que muchos anhelaban el estreno de la película, al salir muchos quedaron insatisfechos con el elenco de actores y el guión. Esta interpretación de la famosa leyenda La Llorona no se vio representada correctamente en la película, lo cual enfureció a muchos que esperaban la película con ansias. El director americano de la película, Michael Chaves, para quien fue su primera vez dirigiendo una película en la franquicia de Conjuring, no tenía mucha experiencia en el tema, lo cual es notable en la película. El mito de La Llorona puede estar vinculado con la famosa figura histórica, Malinche, amante de Hernán Cortés quien traicionó a Moctezuma, un rey azteca, y sirvió de intérprete a los españoles. Malinche quedó embarazada pero Cortés nunca se casó con ella. Al contrario, la dejó y se casó con una mujer de alta clase social. No es seguro, pero se piensa que Malinche se puso furiosa y ahogó a su hijo en venganza a En la película, la protagonista, Anna, interlo que hizo Cortés. Estos eventos tomaron pretada por la actriz Linda Cardellini, y sus hilugar en 1500. Ha partir de ahí la historia ha jos Chris y Samantha, se ven perseguidos por la cobrado muchas formas y se ha esparcido llorona. El elenco de la película está compuespor Latinoamérica. to en su mayoría de actores estadounidenses, El guión fue escrito por el alemán To- incluyendo los tres personajes principales. La bias Laconis y la estadounidense, Mikki película solo incluye tres personajes hispanos, Por Yenmis Quinones
como el reconocido actor Raymond Cruz, quien interpretó el papel del curandero y ex-cura Rafael. La actriz Patricia Velásquez también tiene papel de un personaje latino llamada Patricia, una madre que perdió a sus hijos a causa de la llorona y echa la culpa a Anna. La famosa llorona es interpretada por
SALLY ZHAO
Marisol Ramírez. Aunque agradecemos que la llorona fuese interpretada por una actriz latina, la mayoría del elenco también debería ser hispano. La película tuvo muchas faltas técnicas dado a la inexperiencia del director y falta de conocimiento de los escritores del guión. La
falla más evidente fue la ubicación en la cual toma lugar la película. La historia original de La Llorona toma lugar en un pueblo en México pero en la película La Llorona “emigra” a Los Ángeles donde trata de ahogar a los hijos de Anna en una piscina. En la leyenda, las lágrimas de la llorona pueden quemar personas. En la película, son sus manos las que queman. Los eventos de la película toman lugar al principio de 1963, cuando la llorona ahoga a sus hijos en un río en México y después en 1973, en la ciudad de Los Ángeles. Esta diferencia de diez años no concuerda con las edades y testimonios de los personajes. En la película, un sacerdote menciona que el escuchó la leyenda de La Llorona cuando era un niño, pero eso no puede ser posible si los eventos ocurrieron hace diez años, como el padre tiene alrededor de 60 años. Además de las fallas cronológicas, la película tiene objetos fuera de su época, por ejemplo fotografías perfectamente impresas en color. La Llorona es una historia muy conocida en Latinoamérica, y con los años se ha convertido en parte de la cultura latinoamericana. Existen muchas versiones de La Llorona, pero todas tienen algo en común, y eso es que todas son en latinoamérica. Es positivo que los creadores de The Conjuring Universe quisieron incluir la cultura latina en su saga, pero la película dejó que desear. Quizás es hora de que un director latino tome la historia en sus manos y reviva las expectativas del público latino.
May 8, 2019
silverchips
AD D1
SAT Prep and Plus
Math: Dr. Li, Ph. D in Computer Science, Purdue Reading/Writing: Dr. Thomson, Ph. D in History, Yale Location: 10101 Molecular Dr, Ste 100, Rockville, MD 20850 www.MathEnglish.com
Spring Program
Summer Camp
Day camp Sess 1 6/17 - 6/28 Ivy Literature/Leadership/Entrepreneurship Sess 2 7/1 - 7/12 4th Quarter: 3/16 – 4/28 Sess 3 7/15 - 7/26 Each term with 6 lessons in small group. Sess 4 7/29 - 8/9 Sess 5 8/12 - 8/23
Evening Intensive Math: T/Th English: M/W/F 7/8 – 8/23 (7:00 – 9:00 pm) Weekend Intensive (both Sat and Sun) 7/6 – 8/18 (2:00 – 5:00 pm)
E-mail: DL@MathEnglish.com A perfect team of prominent teachers with over 25 years of devotion Proven Results Attained by Magical and Practical Methods SAT analysis and prediction will be provided in details.
Recent SAT Achievements: 1600 (8/7/8) A. S. (RM/IB) Authentic SAT mock tests will be available for our 1590 (8/6/8) J. H. (Severna HS) students only. 1580 (8/8/8) G. W. (TJ) We are proudly confident to help you to target over 1500. 1580 (8/8/8) O. W. (TJ) 1580 K. B. (Centennial HS) W. W. (Blair HS) Perfect test timing for the rising juniors and seniors: Aug 1580 24, 2019. All potential exam questions will be reviewed extensively.
More on WWW.MathEnglish.com “This prep has to be witnessed to be appreciated. The combination of fascinating teachers and repetitive test preparation create the winning environment for success.” “A magic binder full of challenging, all sorts of tricky SAT math questions, a hot list of SAT vocabulary words with illustrative sentences, and a collection of hot essay topics, critical readings” “A real prep to help you master what you think you know. We illuminate the true path through your tunnel of dismay. We spark your full potentials.”
silver
May 8, 2019
As the school year draws to a close, the graduating class of 2019 prepares to say goodbye to familiar faces and take a leap into the world outside Blair’s halls. On May 24th, the building will grow quieter as seniors head off to summer vacation. As they move on to their next chapter, they will carry with them lessons, stories, and friendships to guide their future endeavors. In less than a month, they will walk away from the last four years with memories to look back on, and a diploma in their hands. With the end of high school fast approaching, Blair’s seniors share their ups, downs, dreams, and reflections of the past four years. Those like Sidney Gray experienced significant growth throughout the course of high school. “Freshman and sophomore year I was so… full of making sure everybody liked me… I didn’t really care about school itself,” she says. By the end of high school, this changed. “I was just lazy, and then it kind of hit that I was going to be an adult soon so I had to get my act together… I’m [more] valuable of my time now than I was before,” she says.
Bittersweet
As all these memories come together, seniors say goodbye to Blair with mixed emotions. Cierra Belton, a part-time student at Thomas Edison High School, says that the thought of her upcoming graduation stirs up nerves and excitement. “I’m ready for the next part of my life but at the same time I’ve been in school my whole life, so it’s something to definitely miss,” she says. Like Belton, Lance Nique will miss the normality of the school routine he has followed for so many years. “I think [I’ll miss] the mindlessness of just going to school and just going back,” Nique says. Luna Warren feels the same mixture of sadness and excitement as she considers the reality of moving away. “Everyone is going to say this, but it’s a little bittersweet because I’m very very excited to go to college, explore
the whole world, [and] live independently but also [I] am going to miss my friends a lot, and we’re going kind of all over the place.”
The best parts
As seniors move off to their next adventure, they will leave behind friends and family. Sam Butler, a senior hoping to pursue marketing in the future, will miss the proximity of his friends here at home. “I’ll definitely miss all my friends being in one place because now everyone is going to be all over the country,” Butler says. At Blair, the sense of community has played an important role in the experiences of many seniors. Warren feels as though some of her best experiences at Blair were “days where we come together as a study body, like community days and stuff like that,” she says. “Just places where the whole student body or class would come together and we could just hang out, it was really good.” Butler also appreciates the camaraderie that he found at Blair. “I definitely like the sense of community; talking to your friends, meeting new people, building bonds with the teachers,” he says. Connections with teachers have helped many seniors grow and work through their four years at Blair. These bonds become important in times of difficulty, which Emma Markus learned when history teacher Robert Gibb spent the morning of his birthday ensuring that Markus’ college application would be complete. “My transcript had not been sent to Tufts and they sent me an email. They were like ‘we need it by tomorrow morning otherwise you’re not being considered… [Mr.Gibb] did it on the morning of his birthday so that I could still be considered and eventually accepted,” she says. “We have really really good teachers.”
After high school
After Blair, Butler remains curious and open as to what the future may bring.
Features D2/D3
rchips
At present, Butler plans to go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but he does not have any definitive plans for the future just yet. “Right now, [the plan is] just get to college, find the job, and see what happens from there,” he says. In Grey’s case, Blair was an opportunity for trial and error before she enters the larger world. “High school is a place where you can kind of mess up your future or you can prepare yourself for the future,” she says. At Blair, Grey started a fitness-focused Instagram page, and students at Blair began to notice the changes she was making. Grey wants to bring a similar set of skills to her college community. “My goal is later on in life to have that same impact [that] I had here,” she says. According to Markus, graduation will provide her with a much anticipated change of scenery. “I feel like when you’re in the same environment for four years it can… start feeling like you’re breathing stale air. I’m just tired of being in the same place,” she says. Markus intends to branch out through a gap year spent traveling to places she has never been. “Right now I’m working [two] jobs. I’m paying for my gap year which I’m spending learning Arabic in Amman, Jordan and interning in Costa Rica learning Spanish,” she says. “I just wanted… to be in a completely different environment.”
Takeaways
As Blazers gear up to tackle whatever new environment comes their way, they are prepared to bring values and ideas learned at Blair into their futures. Nique says that he learned the most from overcoming challenges in difficult classes like AP Chemistry. “I think [the class] shows that you have to put the effort in to get the results that you want,” he says. If Nique could have made a change to his time at Blair, it would be to fill his schedule with more difficult classes, like AP Chemistry. “I would take more AP classes earlier to try
and challenge myself,” he says. For Butler, who enjoyed going to school in a diverse community, the unique environment of Blair influenced his biggest takeaway from high school. “Blair is a really diverse place so it has given me really good interactions with people from all walks of life,” Butler says. Warren feels the same way about the population of Blair. “I love how big and diverse Blair is, I think that’s really been a great part of my growing up… I just love how Blair has so many things to offer and it just fits everyone,” she says. Warren feels that Blair has also helped her grow as a person. “Blair has shaped me into a more energetic, social and empathetic person. I just feel like the people here are really great,” she says. According to Belton, attending Blair has left her wanting to share her high school lessons wherever she ends up. “Blair has made me very open and accepting of everyone so I think taking that with me to another area and being able to spread that is definitely something I’ll look forward to,” Belton says. As their school year comes to an end, seniors prepare to graduate from the first chapter of their lives, children no longer. Caps and gowns will feel bittersweet, but seniors will take their Blair experience with them onto their next feat.
D4 Features
May 8, 2019
silverchips
Leaving their Legasus: The Blair Robot Project By Ethan Park STAFF WRITER
2004. That was the last time Blair’s Robotics team won a competition—until now. That 15-year cold streak was broken when The Blair Robot Project and their robot, “Legasus,” won the FIRST Robotics Competition Bethesda Event in March. Last month, they represented all of Montgomery County at the World Championships in Detroit, concluding their competition season. Behind the blue banners reading “WINNER” and the flashing, 125-pound metal contraption, there is a group of dedicated Blair students putting in the time and effort for their success.
types out of scrap wood before creating the robot out of metal. They then test out the first version of the robot, and continuously tweak and change it to make it better. In order to keep up with their schedule, the team meets six out of seven days of the week for approximately 28 hours per week. One of the most difficult parts of the game this year is the final task, which requires the robot to
the hardest part this year, and one of the hardest ones FIRST has ever made,” Gleason says. “We came up with the idea on day two, and everybody thought it was ridiculous. There were several bets made that it would not work—ever.” Despite doubts that the robot would not be able to complete its task, the moment of euphoria when it elevated itself onto the platform was memorable for the whole
Bots to the top After the six-week construction process is finished, competition season starts. Robotics competes against other teams around the DMV for the next six weeks, as they put their robot to work and try to score the most points for their team. Members of the drive team and pit crew are responsible for operating and repairing the ro-
The Process
Each year, the FIRST Robotics Competition releases a challenge for robotics teams around the world. This year, on Jan. 5, they revealed the game: over the next six weeks, robotics teams must design, build, and program a robot that is able to drive on and off of platforms, install “hatch panels”— 19-inch polycarbonate discs—onto cargo ships and rocket ships, and move balls, or “cargo,” into receptacles on the playing field. The process of building the robot starts right away for The Blair Robot Project, as they map out their plans for creating the most effective design for the challenge. “The first thing we do is we try to think about the strategy. We have to figure out what we want our robot to do,” senior robotics president Noah Gleason says. After strategizing, the team builds proto-
COURTESY OF FIRST CHESAPEAKE
SWEET VICTORY The Blair Robot Project poses with their finalist trophy and flag at George Mason University on the last day of the FIRST Chesapeake District Championship. elevate itself onto a platform at the end of the match. To address this challenge, the Blair Robot Project constructed extending legs to lift the body of the robot—a task that many members thought would not work in the first place. “That was
team. “Getting it to finally work… that was incredible. We were all just so happy that it was working, and we thought we would actually have a good shot at doing well at competitions,” Gleason says.
bot throughout the competition. “[On drive team], you’re very, very intimately connected with what happens with your robot because you’re watching your robot play on the field,” sophomore and drive team member Anika Dasgupta,
says. “You’re watching how it interacts with the other robots. You’re watching your robot succeed or fail.” The Blair Robot Project performed well enough this year to earn themselves a trip to the Northern World Championships in Detroit. Senior Wensen Liu, vice president of technology, attributes their success to the collective skill of the team in all aspects of the building and competition processes. “For our team, I feel this year’s game played to our strengths very well,” Liu says. “[The challenge] focused a lot on delivery, it focused a lot on cycle time, it focused a lot on the good driver positioning and fast robots.” Besides their success in competition, the Blair Robot Project also provides students skills that they can use in the future. “I do want to get into the field of robotics because it really does interest me,” Dasgupta says. “We’ve [also] learned some soft skills of how to interact with each others we know how to keep our calm in times of stress, because this season has still been stressful.” Beyond the competition, veteran members like Liu try to ensure that everyone enjoys their experience and finds a true interest in robotics no matter how long they have been on the team. “I feel like that is what we strive for on our team,” Liu says. “It isn’t necessarily the winning itself, but making sure that the rookies themselves have the best time that they can during a robotics season—because interest in robotics doesn’t come out of just one year, haphazardly coming in and out. It’s something that we want to build up, and we do that by making sure people come and do robotics, and truly enjoy the experience of it.”
Studying the campaign Political candidates and staffers reflect on student contributions By Prayag Gordy STAFF WRITER
Putting together yard signs, pasting stickers, and stuffing envelopes are common intern tasks—and some of the jobs that Blazers commit to when they work on a political campaign. “[Students] would dedicate about three to four hours a week doing all sorts of different tasks,” campaign manager Sarah Van De Weert of Marilyn Balcombe’s 2018 Montgomery County Council At-Large says of the student volunteers she managed. Many local political campaigns rely on a grassroots mobilization, with candidates emphasizing door knocking and phone banking in an effort to form direct connections with voters. Blair parent and 2018-elected Delegate Lorig Charkoudian spent much of her time on voters’ doorsteps: “I [knocked on] 12,000 doors myself,” she says. With doors to knock, phones to call, and envelopes to stuff come a range of opportunities for students with little experience to contribute to a campaign. Balcombe’s campaign had Van De Weert as its one full-time staffer, and was competing to be among the top four against 32 other candidates in the Montgomery County Council AtLarge Democratic primary. In both Charkoudian’s District 20 race and the Montgomery County Executive race, seven candidates ran, most of whom had few paid staff. Many adults, however, are not willing to do the grunt work every campaign requires, unlike students, Van De Weert finds. “[Students] are pretty much willing to do anything to earn the experience
[unlike] the adults,” she says. It is precisely because students have yet to select a career path that they are open to doing the heavy lifting. “Nobody wants to do the grunt work,” Van De Weert says. “But it has to get done, and students are far more willing to do it. Those things are critical to a campaign regardless of who’s doing that—it may be boring, but those small,
seemingly menial tasks are [very important]. They have to get done.” Eric Suter-Bull, who served as Rose Krasnow’s field manager in her County Executive campaign,
is grateful for students’ flexibility. “Overall, student volunteers are really helpful because they’re people willing to do all the low-level work for no pay,” he says. Besides a few students who were paid to man
confined to canvassing roles. Caroline Thorne, whose mother managed and father served as treasurer for Will Jawando’s County Council At-Large campaign, had the opportunity to organize fellow students. “In NSL we were talking about [local campaigns], so that turned into people [needing] to volunteer for a campaign as part of a project, [which was] a great opportunity to get a whole bunch of volunteers,” she says. “I helped to coordinate volunteers.” Campaigning, Van De Weert believes, boosts many skills that taking AP United States Government and Politics, for example, does not. “Professionalism, structure—I think that [student volunteers] are exposed to real-world work,” Van De Weert
explains. “What they’re teaching you in school only supplements what you can learn in the field, and [student IVVONE ZHOU volunteers] are able to move on to college having both.” Working for an electoral camthe polls on Election Day, the mapaign is not the only jority of these campaigns’ student way students are involved in polivolunteers were just that—volun- tics. Student groups, especially in teers. Montgomery County, abound, Not all student volunteers are and protests are oft-held and well-
attended. “I think campaigns and advocacy groups would provide more of a structure and experience [than protests], [which] would be valuable to [students] moving on to college or the workforce,” Van De Weert says. “Advocating for yourself or joining a protest is important, but I think that when you do it in a structured and organized way… you can really see the results of your efforts.” Some students, like many candidates, cultivate local connections and use local experiences to find positions on state or even national campaigns. “The difficulty with getting on a local campaign is you have to find exactly the right people, and usually the websites don’t have a big volunteer [section],” SuterBull says. “But once you find that out, local campaigns are always gonna be more desperate for people.” National campaigns set up offices across the nation to organize volunteers, but Suter-Bull still suggests starting local. “My advice to students is try and start at a local thing—no local campaign will turn away a volunteer,” he says. Suter-Bull began his own career as a paid fundraiser on a team pushing a ballot initiative in Washington, D.C. “I think once you get bit by the bug and you have any sort of grassroots experience, you’re attractive to all campaigns of any type,” Van De Weert says. “Students would bring value… because you understand the community, you understand the geography and the political landscape.”
May 8, 2019
Features D5
silverchips
When classrooms turn into cafeterias A field study of students eating in class
By Victoria Xin STAFF WRITER
Where first names appear, names have been changed to protect the identities of the sources. It is the first block of the day. Freshman Seneca Simon pulls out a granola bar and takes a bite. For Simon, breakfast begins at school. She is not the only one enjoying her first meal of the day as the sun shines through Blair’s windows. Students across the school follow suit, munching on blueberry muffins and oreo cookies, and sipping on smoothies and milk. The smells of sustenance fill Blair’s classrooms. The aroma of banana bread wafts across beige desks. Citrus peel scents cling to the air. The crunch of potato chips couple with the crackling of their aluminum-plastic bags. Eating during class is a unique part of Blair’s culture. Blazers eat during all periods of the day, outside, any class, any time. “I gave a talk at [Montgomery Blair High School’s] eating disorders club, and there are kids everywhere eating.” Nutritionist Dr. Daisy Miller says. “I’m just stepping over teen bodies eating sandwiches in the hallways. They’re everywhere.”
Sandwiches everywhere
Blair’s students have plenty of reasons for their continual consumption. The most common motivation seems to be convenience. “I don’t
eating two snacks a day, it’s kind of hard not to fit that into class.” Besides personal reasons, adequate nutrition is crucial to the developing brains and bodies of all young teens. “Undernutrition can affect … both athletic and mental performance,” Dr. Miller says. “Athletes [especially] need regular nutrition to balance blood sugars and [since they] have a high, fast metabolism, [they] need to eat about every 3 to 4 hours.” Long term undernutrition can have vast and irreversible negative effects. These can include low heart rate, poor bone formation, poor nervous and immune system functioning, and poor sleep. “Undernutrition can [also] vastly affect mood: depression, anxiety, general emotional regulation,” Dr. Miller says.
Lunch time crunch
“[Lunch is for] work that I’m too busy to do at home because I’m too busy working on substantial projects,”
- Amie Frey, Junior
Dining Counterpoints
The second class of the day is host to both breakfast and lunch foods. Sophomore Ruth Bernahu lists a few of the foods she commonly observes. “Cookies, oreos, chips, McDonald’s sometimes,” she says. A cornucopia of nutrients. But some teachers are not so thrilled about food in class. “I really don’t like the smell of McDonald’s,” English and Drama teacher Kelly O’Connor says. She has a strict classroom rule: No Eating! O’Connor’s first contention is cleanliness. “There definitely has been a mouse situation in the building, and why feed them?” she says. Building Services member Carl Lacey reiterates the rodent problem prevalence, but notes that this year is “the
Angelique Bosse is against food consumption in class due to safety reasons. “Technically, in research labs, you’re not supposed to be eating,” she says. “[And] in biochemistry class, [eating] is not advised when you’re working with chemicals.” Students also may object to their fellow classmates snacking during class. “Eating in class is not right because you get distracted, and you distract others,” sophomore Berry Shalanyuy says. Medical reasons against snacking pop up as well. Senior Jonathan Berkowitz has a severe allergy against peanuts, tree nuts, sesame seeds, chickpeas, and various other foods. Even the smell of these items in the same room can trigger adverse reactions. “I get
The lunch bell rings and students burst out into the hallways like a pot boiling over. Blazers hustle to the lunch line, bunch around their favorite seats, and visit friends. Many students, however, cannot use this time for lunch. Instead, they go to quiz make-up sessions, review lessons, consult their teachers for materials they missed, and attend club meetings or team gatherings. Junior Amie Frey always finds herself with work to do when lunch rolls around. Her assignments—finishing up her assigned books, her latest worksheet, the last touches to a major project, or a quiz redo— leave her with no time for a dedicated lunch session. “[Lunch is for] work that I’m too busy to do at home because I’m too busy working on substantial projects,” Frey says. Dr. Miller suggests a solution to this lack of time: uninterrupted lunchtimes where students do not focus on getting in another quick quiz, lesson, or practice. Instead, the focus is to sit down, eat, and enjoy a nice meal, a calm oasis to the bustle of everyday activity. “Ideally, all makeup quizzes and meeting with teachers would happen before or after school,” Dr. Miller says. “Lunch would be preserved.” Blair is currently weighing a shift towards
one large lunch period for all students, a system dubbed OneLunch. OneLunch seems to align slightly with Dr. Miller’s solution, providing students with an hour to incorporate lunch into their daily routine instead of only 45 minutes. However, Frey doubts the effectiveness of this proposed solution. “More often than not, kids need more time to work,” she says. “It’s too short of a time period [to get anything done].”
Eating in the adult world
eat breakfast because I don’t have time,” Simon says. “I don’t want to wake up earlier, so I just take my bars to school and I eat them, and that’s it.” Another critical point is concentration. “Eating helps you stay focused,” sophomore Semhal Asamnew says. “If you don’t have the proper nutrition … [you] can’t stay prepared and ready for class.” Junior Jasmine Xu says, corroborating this sentiment. “[I eat] whenever I’m bored,” she says. Although students operate at school by a strict schedule of bells and blocks, their bodies do not necessarily follow that pattern. “I just don’t feel the urge to eat [during lunch],” junior Matthew Shu says. Like Shu, some students’ innate biological clocks just do not align with the ideals of the bell schedule every day. Students may even have medical reasons for snacking. Lauren, a junior who is recovering from an eating disorder, is specifically told by her nutritionist to eat approximately every three hours. “[By] restricting when you eat, it’s bad for the [recovery] mentality,” she says. “If you’re
GABE WINSTON-BAILEY
best it’s ever been” in terms of rodent control. Smell is another one of O’Connor’s concerns. “If somebody brings something that’s quite strongly smelling, you either like that smell or don’t like that smell, and you kind of have to put up with it,” she says. For other teachers, particular lessons may discourage the consumption of any food —specifically, when students are conducting labs in class. Research and Biochemistry teacher
some swelling, especially my throat … it’s not fun, and [it’s] uncomfortable,” he says. To combat his allergy situation, signs were emailed to teachers who host Berkowitz in their classes declaring the room an allergen free zone. Many of the signs include a list of the different foods he cannot be exposed to. According to Berkowitz, Blair’s staff members are very accommodating to his allergic condition. “[The teachers have] been really good with … enforcing [the restrictions],” he says.
At the moment, Blair allows students to dine relatively freely throughout the day. “We have to balance our initial goal, which is education and those things, against some practical rules to keep the building clean, and that’s always going to be [the question],” administrator Peter Ostrander says. “Where do you balance it, right?” MCPS seems to have no regulations regarding eating in classrooms, giving schools and teachers freedom to decide whether or not to set their own rules according to different situations at their schools. That leaves many students at Blair who do not fall under the jurisdiction of munchies-strict teachers free to eat at will. However, as they grow into young adults, they may not be able to enjoy these same eating privileges. Bosse justifies her strict in-class eating rules through this principle. “Since research class is getting ready for working in research labs or office environments where eating is not encouraged, we’re practicing to get used to that,” she says. College professors may not have the same lax attitudes that Blair high school teachers usually do towards eating while lectures run. Dr. Miller testifies to shifting attitudes as students age. “When I taught at Penn State University, … either you were not allowed to [eat in class], or nobody did it,” she says. But for now, snacking habits are safe.
silverchips
E1 Culture
Blazers of Note
May 8, 2019
Korean Wave crashes into Blair
The global Korean phenomenon reaches new heights By Kie Donovan and Sarah Schiffgens STAFF WRITERS
CAMDEN ROBERTS
Isaac Sileshi Sophomore
Many Blazers might know sophomore Isaac Sileshi by the name “Ice Cooler.” “My name is Isaac Sileshi. Sileshi sounds like slushie, which is ice. So I was like, Slushie, my name is Isaac, Ice Cooler. That sounds cool. Ice Cooler,” the young rapper says. Ice Cooler goes throughout his day with a purpose. A vision. While most teenagers dream of eventually sharing their passions with the world, Ice Cooler is already nearing this mark. With a Soundcloud featuring rap songs, he shares his creativity with thousands of listeners. He spends an extensive amount of time perfecting his music. “I lock myself in a room and just listen to beats and just try to think about what to say on them,” he says. To Ice Cooler, the whole music-making process is very gratifying. “I learned that I can do things on my own, I’m an influencer. I’m not somebody to be influenced,” he says. “I can influence other people, and I can make positive change,” he says. After the release of “Lil Inji,” a rap song produced by popular producer 1KTELE that would eventually reach 10,000 listens and become well known throughout Blair, Ice Cooler describes feeling a noticeable change. “Everybody in the school was buzzing. They liked that song. I was like, ‘That’s the first professional song I’ve made with a professional person.’ So, that thing got me recognition.” As for the future, Ice Cooler has big plans. “When I actually start singing on the track and get professionals to edit it, it’s going to be sounding crisp,” he says. “People are not going to only take me seriously, people are going to be respecting me.” Keep an ear out for Ice Cooler, which might very well become a household name.
VICTORIA XIN
Lucinda Zhou Junior
Among the hallways of Blair, there are many innovators, creatives, and brilliant minds. Lucinda Zhou is one of them. Zhou, a junior in the Magnet program, is no stranger to the beauty and complexity of STEM competitions. However, in many areas of STEM, people are sometimes left out of the loop. Teen-level competitions enjoyed by students like Zhou are striving to be more inclusive. Zhou is a key organizer of InteGIRLS (stylized “inteGIRLS”), a math competition specifically for middle and high school girls which strives to promote female empowerment and involvement in math. The contest aims to include girls who typically wouldn’t be involved in math competitions. “We want to reach out to the [girls] who normally go to schools [where] they want to join or for some reason don’t,” Zhou says. In the competition, students receive a score for their responses to a range of math questions. Zhou created a program that weighs the amount of points awarded based off of the amount of people who responded correctly to the question. “It sounded like a really cool idea and... something I could help with,” she says. “The program… processes how many people got each problem right and how many people got each problem wrong and it calculates how much points each question should be worth,” Zhou says. Through her experience with InteGIRLS, Zhou managed to push the boundaries of her programming skills, making small steps towards a more inclusive world.
By Paloma Williams
When Korean pop artist Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became the first video to top a billion streams on YouTube in 2012, its heavily stylized visuals, infectious dance moves, and supercharged beat captivated the world. Seven years later, the Korean idol and music industry flourishes at new heights as fervent fans sell out American stadiums to see their favorite Korean artists. Big-name Korean music groups book gigs on American television shows, and popular Korean television series even inspire their own American adaptations. The influence of Korean culture seems to have become inescapable; Korean music continues to dominate global music charts and garner massive online followings, with high schoolers leading the charge in this new global phenomenon.
The idol powerhouse
At the heart of the Korean wave is Korea’s lucrative idol industry. Prospective artists are signed under a Korean entertainment company and trained for at least a decade before being allowed to perform in the public limelight. Prior to their debuts, idols will undergo intensive vocal and performance priming. Korean pop, or K-pop entertainment companies are unique in that they manufacture their talent rather than seek readymade artists, marketing their idols in a way that showcases their character and relatability. Unlike American artists, Korean idols seek intensely intimate relationships with their fans—often at the expense of their own privacy—to cultivate an extremely loyal following. Idols’ very lives are packaged and commercialized so as to establish the impression of a personal relationship with fans. Junior Shreeya Khurana, an avid K-pop and K-drama fan since freshman year, believes that K-pop idols are more personable than American artists. “I know a bunch of K-pop artists, they regularly do live streams of their daily lives and with their Twitter or Instagram accounts so kind of like conversing with their fans... I see them more as just normal human beings who just have their job on the other side,” she says. Lilianne Blaise, a junior who has followed K-pop since middle school, found that the synchronization and engagement at the heart of K-pop is one of its greatest appeals. “It’s not just one person, and it brings something new because it’s harmonization and synchronization and the dance moves, it’s not just singing but it’s also dancing,” she says. “And there’s the culture with going to the shows they have fan chants, stuff like that that makes you involved in the fandom which I think is very cool.” It is not uncommon to find a popular Kpop idol on a plethora of Korean TV shows and reality television episodes, with snapshots of their daily life posted online for their extensive fan base to follow. To spot the results of the intensely devoted fan base, one need look no further than American television, music charts, and radio. The infectious, high-production, and captivating world of KPop has seeped its way into the Grammys, late-night television and morning shows, conventions and clubs, and renowned concerts venues like New York’s Citi Field Stadium.
The international K-pop fever BTS, also known as the Bangtan Boys, is the most notable global success, currently holding two tracks certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America, the most retweets for a musical act on Twitter in 2017, and hitting No. 7 on the U.S. album charts for their EP, Love Yourself in 2018. American artists have even been jumping on the K-pop bandwagon, with Nicki Minaj and Halsey both recently collaborating with BTS. The seven member boy group is not
look larger through the artificial creation of a double-eyelid fold, a trait that occurs less commonly in East Asians than in Caucasians. However, in an interview with Business Insider, The Atlantic writer Zara Stone says that Koreans don’t necessarily want to look Caucasian; rather, they want to adopt “a new beauty aesthetic that nods to Caucasian features but doesn’t replicate them.” There are also many who say that surgeries like the double-eyelid are well in line with traditional East Asian beauty standards, and not driven by a desire by Koreans to look white. Regardless of the craze’s origins, there may be damaging effects to presenting an industry that is heavily centered around a generally non-inclusive beauty standard that promotes plastic surgery so heavily. Khurana has noticed that while there seems to be a greater trend towards inclusivity in Korean beauty standards, she still disapproves of the pressure put on idols to look a certain way. “I feel like they sort of see idols as just the ideal for everyone and if you don’t fit this one perfect ideal of how you look, how skinny you are, how much you eat, that it’s like you’re not good enough. And I know that’s changing a lot these days where I’ve seen more idols kind of ignoring those standards and being their own person,” she said. Blaise also stressed concerns about expressing her love for K-pop because of how Western K-pop fans may be received. “I’m lowkey about my like for K-pop because there’s a difference between liking something and fetishizing it and trying to become something that you’re not... I’m not Korean, I never want to act like I’m Korean or try to be Korean and I think people have to understand that. You can like (2016), something, but that doesn’t mean performed on you have to become that,” Blaise said. the Kore“Koreaboo” is derived from the term an show, SHASHI ARNOLD “weaboo,” which refers to a non-Japanese a Westernized rendition of the show quickly followed, person who is obsessed with Japanese culture and entertainment, particularly Japanese titled “The Masked Singer.” It is clear that Americans are scrambling anime. Similarly, “koreaboo” refers to a nonto take part in the Korean Wave. This is per- Korean who is infatuated with Korean culhaps no better exemplified than by the popu- ture, especially Korean entertainment, most larity of Korean dramas. Korean dramas, or notably K-pop and K-dramas. K-pop’s grow“K-dramas” have built up a substantial fol- ing popularity in the West has produced a lowing in the United States for the passion- substantial number of people who could be ate, romantic, and often mystical tales they called koreaboos, whom many other fans of tell, so unlike those of traditional American Korean culture often frown on for suppostelevision. In fact, they have become so pop- edly fetishizing Asians or appropriating Koular in the U.S. that according to the Korea rean culture. However, the fact remains that Creative Content Agency, about 18 million K-pop is upwards of a $4.7 billion-dollar inAmericans are estimated to be fans of Ko- dustry—a major cash cow for Korea. Netflix is even starting to peddle Korean shows cenrean television shows. Online streaming service Netflix is trying tered around K-pop stars and K-dramas to to take ownership of this new market by furi- American audiences. It is clear that Korea is ously acquiring licenses to popular K-dramas packaging its own culture and entertainment like Mr. Sunshine (2018) and Something in for international export to the West, and the Rain (2018), in addition to producing its while concerns about fetishization and apown original K-dramas, such as Kingdom propriation are not unfounded, they haven’t (2019) or Love Alarm (2019). As Netflix dissuaded it from trying to solidify a foreign continues to license and produce, the Ko- market to fuel its expanding entertainment rean Wave will no doubt grow even larger as sector. But not all results of the Korean Wave more people in the west become introduced to the unique and compelling attributes of are negative. In fact, many positive developments have occurred because of it. AccordKorean dramas. ing to the Modern Language Association, college enrollment in Korean language courses Two sides to each story The whimsical world of Korean culture is has increased by 45 percent between 2009 not as innocuous as it seems at first glance. and 2013, as the growing popularity of KThe Korean entertainment industry and Ko- pop and Korean entertainment in the United rean culture are heavily centered around a States has prompted many Americans to try cosmetics and plastic surgery craze; South to gain a better understanding of Korean culKorea has the highest rate of plastic surgeries ture. Additionally, K-pop and K-dramas proper capita in the world, according to Busi- vide East-Asians and East-Asian culture with ness Insider. The craze in Korea seems to much-needed representation in the West. Its owe its origins, at least in part, to the work of idol-based nature is also able to bring fans American doctor and plastic surgeon Ralph closer together around a shared interest in a Millard in the years following the Korean specific member of a K-pop group. Although produced halfway across the War. Miller began his career in Korea performing corrective surgeries for war victims, world, Korean music and television has taken but later began to perform cosmetic surgeries the Western world by storm, breathing a new on his Korean patients who wanted to look life into dance pop and bringing more Asian less “Oriental.” Among these operations was faces to the forefront of pop culture. The his version of the “double eyelid surgery” or realities of the Korean idol industry aren’t blepharoplasty, a procedure which many Ko- always pretty, but the Korean entertainment industry’s wild success has united fans across rean women choose to undergo today. The operation is purely cosmetic and the world, fostering amiability and cultural performed in order to make one’s eyes exchanges between East and West. alone in their record-breaking success either; the girl group, Blackpink, scored the highestcharting U.S. single debut when their single “Ddu-Du Ddu-Du” entered the charts at No. 55—just one group of many Korean artists who have charted on billboards and broken YouTube records recently. “I know three of my favorite groups were nominated for Billboard music awards, so it’s nice that they’re getting recognition here and increasing in popularity here and selling out concerts,” says Khurana in response to K-Pop’s rising Western popularity. “Sometimes I feel like it’s nice that they’re getting recognition here, but at the same time the recognition that they’re getting is just companies trying to use them for clout and you can sort of see it in the interviews they do as well,” she added. Korean influence also extends beyond the realm of music, with Fox Broadcasting Company picking up the Korean musical competition show, “King of Masked Singer” earlier this year. After Ryan Reynolds, who plays the Marvel Comics character Deadpool in Deadpool
silverchips
May 8, 2019
Culture E2
Does he really have the horses in the back? Why Lil Nas X’s hit song is country, and should be charted as such By Ethan Park STAFF WRITER
AN OPINION
In this day and age, hip hop is the new mainstream. The genre has taken over the music industry, dominating the charts and music culture as artists like Drake and Travis Scott continue to produce chart-topping hits. However, in April, the number one song on the Billboard Top 100 charts is not explicitly hip hop. It is not pop, nor is it electronic. It is country…or is it? “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, an intriguing fusion of southern twang, country lyricism, and a hip hop beat, went viral on all social media platforms. With lyrics about riding horses and matte black cowboy hats backed by a bass-heavy trap instrumental, this musical anomaly took the world by storm and climbed up to the top of the charts. As of May 7, it has stayed at the number one spot for upwards of 3 weeks, maintaining popularity for over a month. Despite its popularity, the song garnered controversy among the music community. After “Old Town Road” debuted at number 19 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs in the week of March 16, the song was removed from the chart only a week later for allegedly not being ‘country enough’. Billboard claimed that the song was removed due to its “trap beat, a lack of country airplay, no involvement by Sony Music Nashville and mixed categorization and playlisting on leading streaming services.” A week later, as the song continued to go viral, Lil Nas X released a remix with well-known country star Billy Ray Cyrus. Cyrus’ verse and contribution to the chorus caused another tidal wave in streams, leading to the
song shattering the single-week U.S. streaming record, racking up 143 million total streams and beating out Drake’s “In My Feelings” by almost 30 million streams. This increased popularity prompted Billboard to release a statement saying that they may “revisit” their initial removal of the song from the country charts. However, even with Billy Ray Cyrus’ country icon status, Billboard has yet to reinstate the song onto the country charts. Although some country fans may believe that hip hop and country music cannot and should not be blended, “Old Town Road” is ultimately a musical hybrid that will increase exposure to those unfamiliar with country as a genre - therefore, it should be charted as a country song. Not only that, but this dispute over “Old Town
ELAINE CHENG
Road” exposes double-standards for artists of color in arguably the most white-dominated genre in music. In order to deconstruct how country “Old Town Road” is, it is important to understand the explicit definition of country music. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, country music is “music derived from or imitating the folk style of the Southern U.S. or of the Western cowboy… popular vocal music characterized by simple harmonies, accompaniment by stringed instruments, repeated choruses, and often narrative lyrics.” ‘Old Town Road” has most, if not all, of these aspects. Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus harmonize in southern accents over a stringed instrumental, repeating a chorus about taking a horse to the “old town road.” The only additional aspects that may seem different to the traditionalist country fan are the most obvious - the rattling hi-hats and trunk-knocking bass of the song’s modern trap instrumental. Despite the unconventional beat, “Old Town Road” undoubtedly exposed a new audience to country music that may not have listened before. Music fans like junior Abem Addis believe that the song went viral because of its ability to appeal to two distinct groups of listeners. “It appealed to two different groups of people,”
he said. “Hip hop [appeals to] mostly black people, I guess, and country appeals to people in the country. With a blend of that, it can get to a lot people.” Although the song may help bring music fans together, some listeners have started to question the double standards for black artists in country music. Artists like Taylor Swift have topped the country charts with genre-blending songs like “We Are Never Getting Back Together.” Swift’s song, which arguably had more aspects of pop than it did country, stayed at the top of the Hot Country Songs chart for 10 weeks. Additionally, many white artists have made pop-rap fusions that do well on the hip hop charts, despite the songs not having traditional hip hop themes in the first place. Post Malone’s 2018 hit song, “Psycho,” peaked at number 1 on the Hot Rap Songs chart despite the majority of the song consisting of Post Malone crooning over a slow-moving trap beat. Comparatively, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” had more country style in it than Post Malone’s “Psycho” had rapping. Although Billboard may not acknowledge the country aspects of the song, fans like Addis believe the popularity of “Old Town Road” may lead to more cross-genre hybrids between country and hip hop. “Since other artists probably saw how [Lil Nas X] blew up off of mixing genres, other artists are probably going to try that too,” said Addis. The success of the song in both the hip hop community and mainstream culture may force the standards for country music to adapt, despite the genre’s perceived incompatibility with hip hop - the genre that is most popular today. Until that day comes, however, Lil Nas X will ride his song’s success ‘til he can’t no more.
E3 Culture International Newsbriefs Mozambique hit by major earthquake and flooding MARCH 10 A passenger aircraft operated by Ethiopia’s top national carrier crashed, killing 157 people. Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said that the company will work with investigators in Ethiopia, the United States, and elsewhere to investigate flight 302. Ethiopian Airlines is arguably the biggest aviation brand in Africa, but the crash put the company’s reputation and safety record into the spotlight. The Boeing 737 Max has suffered three major crashes in 70 years—a Lion Air flight using the same aircraft crashed in similar circumstances in October, potentially diverting criticism away from Ethiopian Airlines.
Protests against Sudanese dictator continue MARCH 17 - New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a ban on assault and semi-automatic weapons less than a week after a white nationalist killed 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch. The sale of high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which allow semi-automatics to fire like automatics, will also be made illegal. These measures are to be implemented virtually immediately. To remove weapons from public access, the government will implement a gun buyback program for military-style semiautomatic (MSSA) weapons. The prime minister’s cabinet will continue to make decisions on issues surrounding gun licensing, registration, and storage. The two semi-automatic rifles used by the Christchurch shooter were purchased legally online.
Anti-government protests in Austria MARCH 21 - Former Brazilian President Michel Temer was arrested on corruption charges. Judge Marcelo Breitas issued an arrest order for the ex-president as well as former Cabinet minister and Temer ally Moreira Franco and eight others. According to the prosecutors, construction company Engevix paid Temer bribes to build a nuclear power plant in the city of Angra dos Reis in the southern part of Rio de Janeiro. Prosecutors told reporters that the former president had engaged in pay-for-play deals involving hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes since the 1980s. Throughout his presidency, Temer was charged three times by the attorney general for corruption and obstruction of justice. He left office on Jan. 1 and no longer has the partial immunity to avoid prosecution but continues to deny any wrongdoing.
International Newsbriefs compiled by Teddy Beamer
May 8, 2019
silverchips
Students organize book fair for local publishers from BOOK FAIR page A1
fairs. “I’m so impressed,” she said. “It’s really hard to put together an event in a school, and something where they had so many authors.… I hope it’s the beginning of something great and new.” In the future, Sauro listed a few possible improvements, including increasing the types of authors present. “Next year I would definitely like to go for a little more diversity in the authors. [This year] we focused on local, young adult authors and I think it worked out well.” The book fair included workshops, question-and-answer panels, and speeches. “We had a couple things going at the same time: We would have [about] two workshops and either a Q&A panel or a speech going on, and then we just broke those up into 45-minute
Ray, who said she did not anticipate publishing novels, has released four books, one of which was made into the television show “Royals” on E!. The show, based on Ray’s book “Falling for Hamlet,” ended after four seasons when producer Mark Schwahn was accused of sexual harassment. Another local author presenting at the book fair was Mary Amato, who lists 20 published books on her personal website. Though it came while Amato was facing an upcoming publishing deadline, she feels strongly about such events. “I really like connecting with students who are interested in writ-
ing, and I did not have this chance growing up: I desperately wanted to be a writer, and I never met someone who was making a living in writing until I was actually working,” Amato said. Similarly, Sauro wanted students to feel encouraged to write. “I want students to take away a sense… that they can [write],” Sauro said. “I also want people to be excited about reading and writing.” The whole process, according to Lamphier, took over a year to plan. She also gave credit to Sandie Chen, Elias Chen’s mother, who is familiar with some local authors.
“She has very deep contacts in the publishing industry, and she probably was the one who might have helped introduce Elias and Lintaro and Bianca to [the book fair],” Lamphier said. Overall, Lamphier felt the inaugural event went well and should be held again. “As a first-time effort, I’m pretty impressed. Getting the teachers in has been key, and that’s actually been pretty challenging… we have to really sit down and regroup and think,” she said. “I would absolutely do it again. Getting 10 published authors… to come out and not have a speaker’s fee, that’s huge.”
“I hope it’s the beginning of something great and new.” -Michelle Ray, Local Author
blocks,” Sauro said. In the workshops she led, Ray emphasized that writing as a profession is not the only way to master the craft. “Writing is an amazing way of expressing yourself… so I would love for that to be something that people do—not for school, just for themselves,” she said. “It’s not something you have to go to school for, but it’s something that you can do; anybody who tries and writes, they can really make this happen for themselves.
By Arshiya Dutta CULTURE EDITOR
Arshiya’s Aesthetic is a monthly column where Culture editor Arshiya Dutta expresses her opinions on anything and everything culture and entertainment. As springtime rolls around, so do some of the most enjoyable activities of the year-- picnics, spring cleaning, biking, the cherry blossom festival, and many others. However, when people are looking to spend a little bit more money, hear their favorite artists perform, witness some appalling cultural appropriation and almost die of heat stroke, they head to Coachella.
LUCY MARTIN
FACES BEHIND THE FICTION Local author and teacher Michelle Ray speaks about her books and how she crafts her stories to a group of Blair students in the media center.
Coachella is the fifth most attended music festival in the country, based in Indio, California. Every year, thousands of people rush to buy tickets to the festival to hear popular artists perform live, and this year was no different with over 99,000 attendees per day of the festival. With artists like Ariana Grande, J Balvin, and Childish Gambino, this year’s Coachella was highly anticipated and a smashing success.However, Coachella’s creators have skeletons in their closet that, while they reoccur every year,do not garner the appropriate attention from the press. One of these skeletons is that Coachella’sowner, Phillip Anschutz, has made substantial donations to anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups. In 2016, an LGBTQ+ advocacy
group Freedom For All Americans released a report showing the various sources of funding for the anti-LGBTQ+ group Alliance Defending Freedom. Among the 11 people shown to have donated money to the group was Phillip Anschutz. Aunchutz is currently one of the richest people in the world, as he owns 100 arenas and concert venues and his ownentertainment company, the Anschutz entertainment group, owns the most sports teams andvenues in the world. Upon examination of his tax returns, it was confirmed by Pitchfork online magazine that between the years 2010 to 2013, Anschutz donated money to various antiLGBTQ+ groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, the National Christian Foundation,and Family Research Council. When these findings were first released to the public in 2016,social media users were outraged, many using the hashtag #Boycottcoachella. However, after ashort statement from Aunchutz denying these claims, the controversy fizzled out. In these pastyears around festival season, the conversation is
rehashed on Twitter yet little substantial actionagainst Coachella has been taken since the report. Coachella’s attendance rates have remained consistent throughout the scandal, and public figures have shied away from this topic completely. Despite how dismissive the media and public figures have been on the topic, it must be addressed. Coachella cannot continue to be so successful if a portion of the profit goes towards hate groups—it must be boycotted on all levels possible. By attending Coachella, concert goers must stop funding a person with an agenda to outlaw same-gender marriage. Pro-LGBTQ+ artists who actively take a stand against homophobic organizations should not continue to play and make money for the festival. While some may claim this is drastic reaction to something seemingly indirect, it represents something that is much bigger than just a music festival. In this day and age where dark money runs rampant, Americans must remain educated on where their money goes and what organizations are really benefiting from their money.
May 8, 2019
silverchips
Archives
Culture E4
Edited by Avery Brooks and Camden Roberts
With this being our last cycle on Silver Chips, we would like to say goodbye to the deteriorating books in room 158, and this page that we work so hard on. Saving the best for last; we would now like to present our favorite sports stories. Editor’s note: In keeping with the change made earlier this year, every mention of DC football has been changed to [Washington Football Team].
GIRLS’ SPORTS NEWS Sept. 29, 1961 Cries of “I really got my skin banged today,” or strains of the latest top tunes are again echoing forth from the girls’ locker road as the Girls’ Physical Education Department goes into high gear. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors now have all the paraphernalia needed to start the routine of dressing out, participating in an activity, undressing, showering, and re-dressing. Some sophomores will start the year with paddle tennis (tennis played with an oversized ping-pond paddle), while the others begin with field hockey. For the first time juniors as well as seniors are being taught archery.
THE TALE OF OUR CITY Dec. 23 1993 The [Washington Football Team], Capitals, and Bullets: Washington’s teams as well as my teams. Through the good, the bad and the ugly I’ve stuck with them. The story around here for the last few years is that the [Washington Football Team] always win, the Caps get to the playoffs but can’t do anything there, and the Bullets, well the Bullets have had a different story; they flat out have sucked. Blair could probably have beat some of the teams they’ve had over the years. But that was then and this is now. Oh boy, have we gone through some changes. The once mighty [Washington Football Team] have fallen below the soles of my shoes. The Capitals are under .500 but show more signs of life than that [Washington Football Team]. And those Bullets, well I’ll be damned, they are sweet compared to last year’s team. I think it’s Wes Unseld’s new mustache that did the trick. It’s hard to talk about the [Washington Football Team] without having a scowl on my face. They have 4-10 and have less of a chance of making the playoffs than I have a chance of making the playoffs then I have of getting straight A’s. It seems like after they won the Dallas game they decided to take off for the rest of the season. Or maybe they think they’re still playing exhibition games. Or better yet, maybe the play sheet Richie Petitbon has tied to his belt is really the menu for his new restaurant, Petitbon’s Bar and Grill. On to the Capitals. They started off slow enough, didn’t they? It’s like they were in a trance for the first games of the season, but then they went on a surge, winning six in a row all thanks to the defense. The Capitals need a big scorer, a LoFontaine, a Jagr, a Hull or someone of that caliber to win the Stanley Cup. Until then, they will remain a mediocre team. The team of the 90s used to be the Bulls. But now you can add an ‘ets’ to the name because the new team of the 90s is your very own Washington Bullets. I suppose I should get serious now. The Bullets are not #1 in the league. In fact, they are in fifth place in their division and have lost the last ten straight. I guess the reason I’m so excited is because the Bullets started out so hot. In order to get out of this recent losing streak, they need one guy to step up and be the leader. I think that guy is going to be Tom Gugliotti. Googs has it all. He can post up inside, yet still drain the tray from outside. That guy is the Bullets’ future. You want tall? Well you got tall in 7’7” El Giante Mr. Georghe Muresan. His head almost sticks through the roof of the Capital Centre. I think he’s going to be great once he learns to run down the floor in under three minutes. Realistically, come January, Richie will be sitting on the couch eating a two pound bag of fried pork rinds come January 27th. The Caps will be in second or third place. Dale Hunter will be in the Holy Cross Emergency room recovering from multiple bee stings to the face.
NEW FAN Sept. 29, 1961
A basketball player goes to extreme measure to obtain the ball. (March 3, 1942)
SHE’S LEAN LARA DEAN, THE BLAZERS’ BASKETBALL QUEEN Dec. 19, 2002
RIFLE TEAM SCHEDULES MATCHES FOR N.J.C. Mar. 11, 1949
At 5’7” with a lightweight physique, cocaptain of the girls’ varsity basketball team, is not the typical female point guard. But Dean’s atypical build, her combination of ball-handling skills and her mental intensity have proven her to be a versatile player. A basketball player since the age of seven, Dean has played on a number of teams, including the Montgomery County Classics team and the Wheaton Boys and Girls Club team. Dean frequently plays pick-up basketball with her siblings and friends. From the street ball, Dean says, she “gets the aggressiveness and fun aspects of the game.”
Blazers’ Rifle Team faces Maryland University freshmen, Saturday, March 12. They will match representatives from surrounding states and the D.C. area for the National Junior Championship the following week, March 19. Their only shoulder-to-shoulder match to date, played with Anacostia High, Blair won by 189 points. In the weekly postal matches, the local team has lost only once. Postal matches consist of those in which the team sends the targets to their opponents, who score and return them.
“A wonderful new addition to the girls’ locker room has been made,” stated Miss June Lippy, head of the department. It’s a huge ventilating fan which helps tremendously when all of the girls are in the locker room.
TAKING STRUGGLE IN STRIDE Feb. 11, 1968 This story is for sports fans, non-sports fans, blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, striped and polka dotted people, boys, girls, in-betweens, whatever. It just happens that this story is sports. On January 31, 105 million people in this country, and even more across the world, watched as the Washington [football team]’s quarterback Doug Williams added another amazing episode to an already incredible life. Super XXII was for Williams the ultimate example of how well he handles adversities both on and off the field. … He showed up all the people who say that a black man can’t be quarterback.
‘HELPLESS FEMALES’ BRANDISH WICKED STICKS FOR HOCKEY Oct. 27, 1961 “Ground, sticks, ground, sticks, ground, sticks, hit!” This is the cry of a bully that rings out every fall in the junior-senior girls’ field hockey intramurals. Every Monday from September to November about 50 girls change from sweet, helpless beauties, to screaming, powerful athletes. Blair girls play on Nolte Field about three blocks from Blair. Here the teams battle it out on a 60 by 100 field to see who can get that three-inch, wooden ball through the goal without being mortally injured by flying 36-inch sticks. It is an experience to watch the teams of 11 girls each play.
BABY BLAZER WIN FIRST, 12-6 Oct. 3, 1972
A member of Blair’s track and field team leaps over a hurdle. (April 13, 1995)
Last saturday, the strength of two runs by Rusty Beckwith, the Baby Blazers won their first game of the year over B-CC, 12-6. The first touchdown, a 30 yard sweep, came in the first quarter and the second, covering 35 yards, came in the fourth. In earlier JV games, Blair lost to Gaithersburg, 30-6 and Peary, 28-14. The first game of the season against Gaithersburg consisted mostly of long drives by both teams. However, for the Blazers, most of those drives ended in turnovers. The only one that didn’t was an 80 yd. drive brought to a score by Rusty Beckwith just before the final gun. Beckwith had 150 yards for the game.
E5 Chips Clips
silverchips
May 8, 2019
Mid-May Mental Maladies by Sophia Weng Across 1. Chinese food boogeyman 4. Three-legged bar seat 9. Slithery Egyptians 13. ___ Lingus 14. San Diego swinger 15. Goodbyes in Florence 16. British overseas terr. near Cuba 17. Helped 18. Pastoral poems 19. People placement 22. Neighbor of India and Oman 23. Objectives 25. 2nd grader’s favorite class 26. Comes in feather and crop varieties 28. Young seedling 29. American precedents 32. Long ago 34. Bonding and breaking up 38. Perpendicular to a ship’s length 43. North or south in the great plains 44. Verdi’s Moor of Venice 45. Cogito ____ sum 46. Dismal mood 50. Itty bitty finances 52. 2014 Winter Olympics locale 53. Tagged out at the plate 54. Dynasty after Tang 55. Where to find vocab. words 56. Indie rock in SoCal 57. Mineral source 58. Malicious group (abbr.) 59. Horan of One D 60. New Eng. blizzard cyclone
Sudoku (medium) COURTESY OF WEBSUDOKU
EVERY YEAR
Down 1. M.C. Escher genre 2. More safe 3. McDonald’s purple blob 4. Neruda, Borges, and Cervantes 5. Frosty forest biome 6. Make weirder 7. Cream-filled cookies 8. Cliffhanger hold 9. Former help 10. Greet casually 11. Chain gang? 12. Snakey sound 15. Spy agency headed by Haspel 20. Owned by Lincoln 21. Roger responder 24. Texting apology 27. Resident of the fifty nifty 29. Greenwhich clock setting (abbr.) 30. Computer char. construct 31. What’s up! 33. Mexican bbq 34. AB follower 35. Musical coexistence 36. Heart machine spiking line 37. Parasitized 39. Capt. Marvel and Rogue One actor 40. Kyrie _ ______ 41. What ice bucket challenge funds went to 42. More lichenous 44. Alternative to zero 47. Author of “What is a Nation?” Ernest 48. Chipotle scare 49. Ventricle vehicle 51. Expelled 52. Familial nickname
To see the answers to the crossword, scan the QR code below.
SALLY ZHAO
May 8, 2019
silverchips
AD F1
F2 Sports
silverchips
May 8, 2019
Girls’ lacrosse falls to Blake on senior night Blazers lose in overtime after staging late comeback
By Elias Chen STAFF WRITER
Blair fell short in a heart stopping 13-14 loss against Blake on April 25, leaving them 3-8 for the season. The Blazers met Blake in an explosive exchange at home for their Senior Night, losing in sudden death overtime. Sophomore midfielder Sydney Greenberger and senior captain Addie McDonough set the pace for the game, putting the Blazers up 2-0 in the first minute. Blake quickly fired back, making it 2-1 within the first five minutes and exposing Blair’s defensive troubles. The fierce offensive pressure from both sides continued well through the first half, as constant turnovers allowed Blake’s offense to drive deep into Blazer defense, only to be blocked with big saves from sophomore goalkeeper Molly MerloCoyne. Blair bounced back with a big rush from junior defender Amelia Frey, giving them a 3-1 lead, the largest of the game. The match intensified deeper into the first half, but despite consecutive shots and another good save from Merlo-Coyne, Blake’s offense kept pushing to get up 4-6. Blair’s attackers struggled to gain ground against Blake’s pressure, until junior captain Lucy Martin scored with three minutes left in the half. With a newly energized offense, Martin and sophomore midfielder Nell Re-Yonkos tied it up 6-6 for Blair at the end of the first half. Blair’s defensive coordination issues continued in the second half, allowing Blake another goal in the opening minutes. However, the Blazers’ offense picked up where they left off as Martin took possession, tying it back up at 7-7. After a fiery back and forth, Blake brought their lead up 7-10. With a comfortable 3-point lead, Blake pulled back as the two teams cautiously pushed back and forth in the midfield. Finally, halfway into the second half junior
After a brief timeout, Blake returned looking to seal a win with the ten-minute mark approaching, managing to pull ahead 9-11. Undeterred, Blazer offense persevered with Martin and Greenberger rushing to tie up Blair’s trailing score. Tag-team defense between Frey and Merlo-Coyner led to a pass down the field to Pigrom, who scored to finally secure a 12-12 tie up entering the last five minutes. Suddenly, in a breathtaking play, sophomore attacker Cassidy Wenger brought the ball from a tight spot on Blair’s defensive side to charge up the field and single-handedly rush Blake’s offense. The spectacular run put Blair in the lead for the first time in the second half, 13-12 into the last couple minutes. As the sun set over Blazer Stadium, both teams looked to cement a victory. Martin brought the ball deep into Blake territory, only for a rapid turnover to give Blake possession and even the score. Blake seemed to break through the stalemate and score, only to be called a nogoal. Down to the last minute, Blake circled Blair’s goal before Frey came through with a massive defensive play, forcing Blake to take a wide-missing shot at goal. Tied at 13-13 with only 34 seconds left and newly secured possession of the ball, Blair’s offense pushed one last time for a nail-biting shot on goal, making it in only for the ref to call a heartbreaking no-goal. Down to the last ten seconds, Blair missed two scoring attempts from Frey and McDonough before entering overtime. Unfortunately, the lack of cohesive defensive plays allowed Blake’s star offense to break through, leading to a quick goal and a Blazer defeat. Still, the overtime capped off one of Blair’s most electrifying games of the season. “So much stuff went on that game, it was also my birthday, so it was just very exciting, a little bit of pressure,” McAVERY BROOKS Donough says. “But, I don’t know, once STICKS UP Blair girls defend against Blake’s powerful offense in April 25 game. we started playing it wasn’t a big deal.”
midfielder Olivia Scarano broke through to score, waking up Blake’s defense and bringing the Blazers within striking range once
again to take the lead. Freshman attacker Sky Pigrom charged into Blake’s defense, passing to McDonough for another goal for Blair.
MCPS updates guidelines for athlete supervision By Lucy Gavin and Louis Rosenberg OP/ED EDITOR AND STAFF WRITER
MCPS issued new guidelines regarding the supervision of student athletes in a March 29 memo. The MCPS Athletics Supervision Action Plan now requires all coaches to submit a student supervision plan to their school’s athletic director before the start of each season. The plans will need to be approved and signed by the school principal and athletic director. In addition to the supervision plans, MCPS student-athletes are now required to view Building a Positive Culture, a presentation on the MCPS Bullying and Hazing Behaviors policy. The new guidelines were issued in the wake of the sexual assault in a Damascus High School locker room last fall. The presentation has been shown to athletes in the past, but was refined in the wake of the Damascus incident. “Bullying was always a part of [the presentation], but now it’s more of a significant part, and the processes for reporting it are now in the presentation,” Blair Athletic Director Rita Boule said. The MCPS memo stated that coaches must get approval from the athletic director and principal on their proposed supervision plans prior to the start of the season. It instructs teachers to allow “a finite, small window of time... when students are changing and using locker rooms and team rooms.” Furthermore, the memo also stipulates that “students shall only access locker rooms and team rooms under the direct supervision of the coach or other designated, certified staff member.” Coaches are now required to catalogue which teacher or coach is supervising the locker room and when. If an incident occurred, the administration would be able to reference the record in order to answer any necessary questions. Principal Renay Johnson said that the school would be able to approach a coach in the event of an incident and say, “‘We’re looking at your plan and your plan says supervision would be pro-
vided from this time to this time. Yet the student was allowed into the locker room. Who let the student in?’ And then we start doing an investigation,” she said. “And if there’s a sexual assault then we don’t even investigate. We turn it over to the police and they investigate.” Jeff Sullivan, Director of System Wide Athletics at MCPS, said the purpose of the changes is to “be proactive and to do everything we can.” Sullivan, however, believes there is still work to be done in ensuring student safety after school. “The supervision plan...is enhanced, but it [will] not be the final product, we are going to continue to look at it,” he said.
Senior boys’ lacrosse captain Garrett Anderson believes that these new implementations have changed the locker room environment. “We don’t mess around in the locker room as much as we used to,” Anderson said. “We’re definitely a lot more careful with what we consider hazing.” While the new after school policy is being implemented county-wide, Blair’s large size creates a greater need for safety resources. “I’ve asked for more security because we’re a pretty big school,” Johnson said. “I’d like to have security that would extend until 6 p.m.” Johnson draws a tie between the new poli-
cy and the sexual assault at Damascus. “After the Damascus incident, and I only know what I read in the papers, there really wasn’t any supervision,” Johnson said. “We want to make sure that horrific thing never happens again.” Anderson finds that the changes are overall positive, but recognizes their limitations. “Letting people know ‘this is right, this is wrong’ is definitely helpful to crack down on some of the questionable behaviors that we do,” Anderson said. “But I still think that if there’s something seriously wrong that isn’t gonna stop, it’s just a matter of keeping those kids off the team.”
DEDE GREENFIELD
KILLING TIME Senior Noah Levin and junior Raffa Perez play catch after school in the University Boulevard parking lot.
silverchips
May 8, 2019
Sports F3
The attendance gap
Why some Blair teams are not feeling the love By George Ashford STAFF WRITER
The imagery of a high school sports game is iconic, and Blair’s games are no exception. The powder toss, the “parting of the red sea,” the roar of triumph after a successful play, and the general liberating sense of celebration make Blair sports games an experience that many look back on for years. However, that large amount of spirit surrounds only a small number of sports: varsity football, boys’ varsity basketball, and a few others. Other sports are treated very differently, with low game attendance and little buzz surrounding their performance. Specifically, many girls’, co-ed, and JV teams don’t receive the same attention as their boys’ and varsity counterparts. “More people come for the boys’ games than for the girls’ games, and definitely way more for varsity than for JV,” girls’ varsity basketball coach Amy Ferguson says. Athletic Director Rita Boule sees a similar pattern. “I think you see this at most schools, where your most well-attended events are football and boys’ basketball...so that would be true of Blair,” she says. The reason for discrepancies between sports, and between genders within sports, are varied, and factors down to who the time of a game can have an impact on attendance. “A lot has to do with the sport itself, [whether] there’s just a general interest in that sport. I would say who we’re competing against has something to do with it....and the time of our events can be late at night, a 7:00 game or a 5:30 game and a lot of our students have left...so I think it’s a combination of a lot of things,” Boule says. Junior field hockey and girl’s varsity lacrosse player Annabelle Chase believes that lack of familiarity with sports such as field hockey is at the heart of the issue. “Sports that people know really well, like basketball and football, they’re pretty easy to follow, but sports like lacrosse and field hockey, they often have difficult rules and not a lot of people know them.” However, there’s also a wide gender gap between attendance for teams playing the same sport, such as boys’ and girls’ basketball. Varsity girls’ basketball senior Megan Burke has noticed that attendance to girls’ games often relies on if boys play on the same night. “Every time that we played first, be-
fore the boys, at home, we would have more people because they would come in early to watch the boys’ game, and every time the boys played first, after their game everyone would leave,” Burke says. “So people would actively be leaving as we were trying to take the court.” She points out that even when the girls were doing well, their attendance remained low. “Honestly, no matter how well we were doing, I really didn’t think our attendance changed either way.” Ferguson believes that differing play styles between boys’ and girls’ teams is playing a large role in attendance disparities. “A lot has to with what people think is exciting or more fun. I mean I have to say that a lot of the guys’ sports move faster than the girls’ sports . . . in a style of play . . . but the girls are just as competitive and working just as hard, and people might not understand more of the strategy
behind the sport and the finesse of the sport as opposed to just overpowering people,” she says. Chase, too, points to the pace and style of girls’ lacrosse and field hockey as making them less interesting to students. “They’re not always as interesting to watch, they’re kind of slow-moving games sometimes,” she says. Chase and Ferguson believe the enthusiasm around a team can have a significant impact. Ferguson notices a difference in her players when attendance is good. “When there are more fans, it can create a more fun environment, and kids get excited to play,” she says. In field hockey, Chase experiences the other side of that coin. “Some [players], they don’t take it as seriously because there’s less attendance at the games, so [players] don’t really feel like they have to show up and impress,” Chase says. “If there were more people actually coming to the games, [play-
ers] would probably want to show up to practice every day...but because there’s so little attendance at the games [players] just don’t take it as seriously.” According to Boule, teams are generally responsible for promoting their games, and the athletic department helps. “We want the teams to promote themselves and use social media. We do put the calendars on the website, we do tweet out games ... so we do some things to promote games,” she says. But Chase feels that the lack of promotion for teams such field hockey is part of the problem. “People don’t make a big deal about [field hockey]. For football games, there’ll always be themes and posters and stuff and obviously it makes sense, you can’t do that for [every] sport, but that’s just why we don’t perform that well, because we don’t have people coming out to support, I guess,” she says.
SALLY ZHAO
as benchwarming position players. Assign each franchise a number. Within each category, assign each player a number 1-30. Randomly pair a player from each category with each team to fill out the rosters. Suspend your disbelief for a second. Listen to me. No more powerhouses, no more evil empires in the Mid-Atlantic. It’s perfect. People might come to Orioles games again, White Sox tickets would stop being only $15 for the first deck. Games would be more consistently interesting instead of ei-
ther blowing someone out or getting blown out. I want to be able to watch an entertaining, well-matched competition again. Of course the secondary level of this idea is that players would no longer be paid ridiculous amounts of money to play a game, which is a pet peeve of mine. Maybe if they listened to me, they could try to pay their minor leaguers a living wage. I’m not saying that I should replace Rob Manfred. However, I’m not not saying that I’d be a better commissioner. Just a thought.
“Camden’s Yard” is a monthly column where sports editor Camden Roberts expresses an opinion on current events in sports.
Sitting in Nationals Park, watching the Nationals blow a game for no apparent reason, getting text updates about the Orioles blowing a game, I realized how bored I am with Major League Baseball. My mind wandering, I had a genius idea to make the league better. Obviously there’s no reason to trust me on this, as an eighteen-year-old high school senior who is going to college for something completely unrelated to sports management. You should trust me though, because I spent the whole Metro ride home with my friend discussing hypotheticals and that makes me at least as much of an expert as 50-year-old angry men on Twitter. First, let’s start with the teams. We should dissolve all rosters. No more 2018 Yankees,
stacked with Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Didi Gregorious. No more 2018 Red Sox, with Chris Sale, backed by J.D Martinez, Mookie Betts and JBJ. The franchises can stay (expect maybe for the Padres, because no one even remembers they exist. That’s just a bad business). Second, let’s sort into pitchers and batters. We should sort batters by average, into people hitting .300+, hitting between .250.300, etc. The same for pitchers, by earned run average. You have your (when they are at their Cy Young caliber) DeGroms, your Scherzers, and your Bauers, and a second category for your Arrietas and your Porcellos. Follow this idea through to relievers and closers, as well
Washington Capitals partner with Montgomery County Public Schools By Khushboo Rathore STAFF WRITER
Middle and elementary schools around the county have received old equipment from the Washington Capitals in order to promote hockey playing in physical education classes. 138 elementary schools and 40 middle schools will each be receiving 30 to 40 hockey
sticks, 30 balls, 10 pucks, two nets, and a curriculum. The Capitals have also worked with D.C. schools and Baltimore schools. Over 100,000 students will be impacted by this donation, which may help to improve hand-eye coordination and inter-student interactions, according to Peter Robinson, director of community relations for the Capitals.
F4 Sports
May 8, 2019
silverchips
Springing into the spring season A recap of the teams’ years
By Teddy Beamer and Mira Diamond-Berman STAFF WRITERS
Co-Ed Softball
With a perfect 6-0 record, the co-ed softball team has performed its best in recent history. Senior captain Snegha Saravankumar attributes this success to the team’s work ethic and diverse range of abilities. “There’s half of them who are like really good at batting... half of the people are good at [tagging the base]... so it’s pretty balanced out,” Saravankumar said. Co-Ed softball’s season is still far from being over, with playoffs still
Blair softball, but I think we’re definitely getting there,” senior captain Maia Greene-Chang said. To help these underclassmen become more accustomed to the team’s dynamic, this season had a focus on team-building. Despite the uncertainty regarding the amount of less experienced players on the team, they have a winning record of 115. With playoffs soon approaching, the varsity softball team is preparing to face their competition. The added pressure causes the team to become fierce and competitive before the season draws to a close. “Everyone kind of gets mad in a way,” Greene-Chang says. “We’re just really hyped for the end.”
add to the overall number of points given for the individual, meaning the team benefits from individual prowess. “Everybody either has a handstand or a roundoff which is rare,” senior captain Sophia Lindsay said. In hopes of making their way into the championships, Blair has created Varsity A and Varsity B teams which split the members of the team to those who will compete in championships and those who will not. However, Lindsay believes the pressures of competition does not bother the athletes during the season. “Everybody’s there to make themselves better and isn’t stressed out by the people around them which makes the team environment very supportive and not competitive,” she said. Key Players: senior Sami Mudd, juniors Elayna Davis-Mercer, Alysse Swann, Alejandra Vides- Austin, sophomores Abonie Blount, Betty Moose, X’oniyae Stewart, Allison Swann.
Co-ed Volleyball STRIKE OUT Senior ball to batter and
EMORY BROOKS
pitcher Courtney Wyche pitches a catcher, senior Maia Greene-Chang.
around the corner. Saravankumar believes that the team gets in their heads, which impacts them in action. “The thing is that when we get on the field, most of us are really scared that we might have to lose, which is why we lose the ball, we don’t catch, we make mistakes, because we’re [afraid],” she said. Key players: seniors Manubhav Tamta, Snegha Saravankumar, and Eva Bhattarai, sophomores Lela Hall and Daniel Dao, freshmen Kyrsten Lewey and Christina Dao
Baseball
Before the season began, the varsity baseball team was uncertain how their team would perform with 10 underclassmen. Once the season started, this skepticism faded and was replaced with enthusiasm and determination. “We didn’t know how good we would be because we only had two returning starters,” senior captain Will Gorman said. “But everybody really wanted to play and was really excited for the season, so we were definitely very confident in ourselves.” The relative youth of the team is both positive and negative. The younger players on the team are not as confident in their plays, leading to errors in games. However, in coming seasons, as the younger players gain the confidence and skill that comes with age, the team expects to improve from their 3-11 record. Key Players: seniors Will Gorman and Will Donaldson, junior Nick Maynard, sophomores Oliver Goldman and Charlie Wiebe, freshman Alex Valdez
Softball
Softball has a large number of first-year varsity players, leading to an adjustment period. “It’s been a little rocky just getting all the underclassmen to really understand
inside SPORTS
Key Players: seniors Courtney Wyche and Cassia Williams-Rogers, junior Mariko Yatsuhashi, sophomores Fiona Harrington and Grace Walsh
Girls’ Tennis
The girls’ tennis team experienced several major changes throughout their season. First, was the team’s shift to the spring season, meaning that the boys’ and girls’ tennis teams had to share space on the tennis courts. “It’s been interesting having the boys and the girls have a combined season,” senior captain Nishka Parikh said. “It hasn’t been bad, but it’s just been new. I don’t know if they’re going to keep it next year, but I’m pretty sure they are.” The team was also short a player. “We didn’t really have a full team,” Parikh said. “We only had nine players and you need ten for a starting lineup.” However, they managed to pick up their energy through the season, leading to the 3-6 record. “I think we definitely have grown together and are more optimistic, but in the beginning we were a little bit upset,” she said. Because tennis is an individual sport, the team does not have the chance to work together on the court. Despite this separation during competition, the spirit of the team remains strong. “We’re not playing with each other when we’re actually at matches,” Parikh said. “[But] we still support each other, and cheer each other on.” Key Players: senior Isabella Lucero, junior Mary Chang
Gymnastics
The gymnastics team faced several changes this season, including rule changes and new divisions. Despite the major changes to the way competitions are scored, the team has been able to succeed and have a member place at every meet. Specific skills done in the performance
The co-ed volleyball team ended the regular season with 6-5 record. The team graduated many of their key players last year, but has still managed to succeed. “Last year we lost 6 seniors … so I worried that we were not going to be great this year. But I think we pulled through,” senior captain Fiona Haverland said. The team believes that they can come close to replicating last year’s success, despite their struggles. “Already, we haven’t been doing as well [as last year],” senior captain Nick Rohrman said. “We did exceptionally well last year, won our division for the first time in Blair history. I think we could still do close [to it this year].” However they lost round one in the playoffs. Both the new and returning players have improved throughout the season, which gives them hope for the playoffs. “We have really good players, and a lot of people
proved from last year’s season where they were 1-10 in the regular season, according to Zhang. The returning players spent a lot of time practicing in the off season to enhance their skills for the school team. “Last year was more of a learning period for us. The team was very new, and this time a lot of
nior Kevin Ju, sophomore Alex Jang, freshman Ryan He
Track and Field
After a great indoor season, the track and field team is still improving in their spring season. “We’ve started to kind of transition from indoor to outdoor… it’s hard to
YEKATERINA VAKHROMEEVA
HURDLING AROUND Junior runner Helen Reumann jumps over a hurdle during track and field practice. people went to play club, everyone top what we did [during the indoor practiced a lot over the summer, season], but we are settling into and everyone just got a lot better this new routine and we’re getting overall,” Zhang said. He is hope- stronger every day,” senior captain ful about the teams’ success in the Luca Cannuscio said. He believes playoffs. “So this year we have very the team has a lot of potential for good prospects to going very far in the championship season. “I exthe playoffs,” he said. “We have a pect great things from some of our relays … the 4x800 has a great shot very good outlook.” at the state title this year,” CannusKey Players: seniors Asif Islam, cio said. They are not the only ones Ricky Morri, Jeremy Zhou, junior who could make an appearance. “We have a lot of individual runEric Hao, sophomore Clark Zhang ners who have already qualified… for states so we’re just going to have Boys’ Tennis The boys’ tennis team had a to replicate their performance at disappointing beginning to their regionals and we’ll have a lot of season. “We came off to a rough people running at states,” he said. start,” junior captain Neil Kunda- Mid-season, the coaching staff grami said. “We messed up a few changed, adding an unexpected games that were very vital to us, so hurdle. “We had to deal with the right now we’re lagging in the bot- challenge of going through some tom of the division.” Because they more leadership changes, but I feel are at the bottom of Division I, the like we have kind of settled into team finds it difficult to compete. our new dynamic,” Cannuscio said. “We’re a good team, but since we “We just got a new coach yesterday typically place low [in] Division 1 a and things are looking bright for lot of us don’t really pay too much the future.” attention to top division schools like Whitman and Churchill,” Ku- Key Players: seniors Caleb Francois, Nate Kinyanjui, juniors Leah Kannan, Ryan Temple, sophomore Joel Simpson, freshman Samantha Rodriguez
Boys’ Lacrosse
After a bad start, the boys’ lacrosse team has been improving. “We started off kind of slow, but we really picked it up recently,” junior attacker Aidan Rogers said. The slow start was in part due to player injuries. “We had a few notable absences for the first couple games of the season, so it was a tough start,” senior captain Garrett Anderson said. According to AnLUCY MARTIN derson, they have high hopes for STICKS UP Lacrosse players gather together on the the playoffs. “[We] have a pretty good form sidelines to sub in for their teamates during a game. going for the playoffs… we have that have come on the team have dagrimi said. Their strength lies in tough matchups if we want to go never played before and they’re re- their doubles teams, which they far, but just [like] any game we can ally getting better,” Haverland said. hope will help them in playoffs. “I keep on playing with these guys,” have solid hope that our doubles Anderson said. They are aiming to Key Players: seniors Fiona Haver- will be able to pull through a few go farther in the playoffs than they land, Nick Rohrman, Maggie Lin, games in the championships,” did last season. “Last year we got out in the first Kudagrimi said. A few of their unjunior Olivia Freer derclassmen joined the team with round, so hopefully we can make it tennis experience, which helps the farther than we did last year,” RogBoys’ Volleyball The boys’ volleyball team is cur- team. “We have a few freshmen ers said. rently thriving with a 7-4 record. who have played tournaments for a “Our season has been going really while and they are pretty solid play- Key Players: seniors Jose Garcia, Calvin Bruwelheide and Garrett An well,” sophomore captain Clark ers,” he said. Zhang said. The team greatly im- Key Players: senior Hadyn Gwyn, ju- derson, sophomore Brady Mason
New Guidelines see page F2
SEOYOUNG JOO
Girls’ lacrosse loses to Blake
School Spirit
see page F2
see page F3