Volume 104, Issue 16

The Spectator The Stuyvesant High School Newspaper

Volume CIV No. 16

An Accidental Champion of Physical Education

By Ariella Kahan When most people hear the quote, “a day without laughter is a day wasted,” they chuckle, acknowledge it’s truthfulness, and move on. However, when Assistant Principal of Athletics Lawrence Barth heard this quote during a Charlie Chaplin movie, he pulled out his pen, scribbled it down, and made it his life motto.

Barth, who first arrived at Stuyvesant when “Goldberg”s outnumbered “Li”s, has had a tremendous impact on this school, and many will be sad to hear that he is retiring this spring. He lists the creation of the popular Rollerblading elective, the girls handball team, the girls softball team, and, with the help of Physical Education teacher Peter Bologna, the girls bowling team

Christy Ku / The Spectator

Computer Glitch Caused Errors in General Elections Results

Students used an electronic voting system called StuyVote in order to elect the junior and senior caucuses and SU president.

By Shahruz Ghaemi According to the Board of Elections (BOE), a computer glitch in the system used to record votes caused massive vote inflation in the initial reporting of Tuesday’s general election results.

The errors were most serious for the Senior Caucus race, in which

Features

A Modern Renaissance Woman

there were only two candidates and no runoff elections. BOE Facebook posts at about 6:00 p.m. on the evening of Tuesday, June 10 reported that Adam DeHovitz and Sanam Bhatia won over George Kitsios and George Triantafillou continued on page 2

Article on page 7.

A Chat with Stuyvesan’t Head Cook, Khadija Eddahbi The Features Department talks to a member of our cafeteria staff, and serves her personal story to us.

among his accomplishments.

For Barth, however, forging relationships with his students is more important than any of his aforementioned achievements.

“I’d like to be remembered as a fair person, a good teacher, somebody who cares about his students, somebody who liked to have fun,” Barth said.

It is hard to imagine what Stuyvesant’s athletics would be like without Barth, but it was only through a few well-timed coincidences that he ended up as first a Physical Education teacher, and then a teacher at Stuyvesant. “I went to Queens College with around 30,000 other students and my first term there I waited on lines and lines and lines to register. After my first term I heard if you declare a major, you get to pre-register. continued on page 27

Tanumaya Bowmik / The Spectator

• Sophomore Calvin Lee was invited to participate in the United States Mathematics Olympiad finalist camp, making him a possible candidate for placement in the United States team that will compete internationally. Sophomore Max Fishelson received an honorable mention.

• A team of sophomores in Assistant Principal of Social Studies Jennifer Suri’s Advanced Placement Human Geography class was awarded second place in the New York State National Geographic Challenge.

• Speech and Debate team members Jacob Urda and Ben Kessler participated in a televised debate titled “Oversharing and Unelectable: Teenage Mistakes and Adult Consequences in the Snapchat Era” in the Internet Week New York Festival.

• At the International Science and Engineering Fair national competition in Los Angeles, senior Soham Daga won the American Statistical Association’s First Place Award and the Behavorial and Social Sciences Third Place Award; senior Lily Lee was awarded the National Institute of Drug Abuse and National Institutes of Health Third Place Award; senior Libby Ho was awarded the Microbiology Third Place Award; and junior Mika Jain was awarded the Engineering Materials Third Place Award.

• The Assistant Principal of Guidance, Casey Pedrick, along with the Student Union, has set up a suggestion box in front of room 222 where students can communicate issues they believe Stuyvesant has not addressed.

To resolve the issues, $400 have been set aside.

stuyspec.com

Tanumaya Bowmik / The Spectator

Newsbeat

June 16, 2014

“The Pulse of the Student Body”

By Kachun Leung and Lisa Shi It is 1964 and a young girl briskly walks to the library in a small Louisiana town, clutching her favorite book, Nancy Drew, in her arm. Several years later that same girl, now in college, is strutting confidently down a runway, with her chin pointed up and her eyes focused ahead of her. Later she will be gleefully strolling the streets of Rome and attempting to learn Italian, and a bit after that you will find her perched behind a wooden desk in a law office. But, you won’t find her there for long, because the next thing you know she will have decided to pursue her love for literature and will work as a teacher and librarian. She will settle into her life as a librarian

for twenty-five years, and today you just have to walk up to the sixth floor and into the library to meet the woman who led this astounding life: librarian DeLisa Brown. Soon, she will move on to the next phase of her life as a retiree, but first, let’s backpedal to Brown’s childhood.

Brown was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but lived in California when she was young.

In third grade, however, she returned to the South, and settled into Slidell, a small town outside of New Orleans. Growing up in Slidell, Brown recalls going to the library at least two or three days a week. “I read maybe five or six books a week because my parents didn’t really let me watch a lot of telecontinued on page 8

CEP Meeting Promises Change for New School Year

By Sonia Epstein and Kevin Lin

From fixing sporadic air conditioning to reviving the Writing Center, goals centered on improving Stuyvesant continue to be addressed through the Comprehensive Educational Plan (CEP).

Goals like these are devised by the CEP committee, a subset of the School Leadership Team (SLT).

The committee consists of Principal Jie Zhang, four parents (Barbara Reiser, Julie Brown, Haiying Ju, and Bonnie Beacher), Chemistry teacher Samantha Daves, and guidance counselor Ronnie Parnes. The goals pitched by the CEP are then signed by the SLT. The SLT gathered on Tuesday, May 27, and the majority of the meeting’s agenda was designated for working on Stuyvesant’s CEP. The discussion began by revisiting last year’s goals and then continued by considering goals for the upcoming school year.

Each year, representatives are chosen from each constituency of the SLT to work on the CEP Committee. The committee has met twice this year to brainstorm ideas for relevant issues to be addressed in the CEP. One plan is written

each year. It consists of three to five aims for each year that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART, for short). “We work to design things that really have an impact on students day-to-day,” Daves said.

For example, a previous CEP goal from the 2010-2011 school year was to incorporate writing exercises across the curriculum in order to meet Common Core standards, which outline what students in each grade should accomplish in English and math.

This has been a continual effort for many years at Stuyvesant, and the Writing Center was revived as a result of the CEP initiative. One goal from last year’s CEP was to implement a new system of evaluating teachers called the Danielson framework, which was successfully accomplished. However, not all of the goals developed in the CEP are instant successes.

Another aim from last year was to develop more proactive freshmen advisories to ease the transition into Stuyvesant and encourage healthy habits. Student Union President Eddie Zilberbrand, who contributes to the CEP at SLT meetings, noted that “the action plan for freshman advisories was Article on page 18.

not completely followed.” Unsuccessful goals are not, however, abandoned by the CEP Committee. In fact, they are revised and scrutinized further so that if the attempt is made to implement them again the next year, they have a better chance of being successful.

The CEP committee hopes to improve five different areas in the coming school year: learning environment, support for the Research Program, ethics, student support, and communication.

The committee’s current goal for the learning environment, as written in the tentative action plan, is to “create a formal, well-publicized process whereby deficiencies in the physical environment are identified and documented by staff and students.” The CEP noted that some issues include inconsistent wireless signals, leaks, mold, malfunctioning windows, lack of heat and cooling, and dim lighting in some classrooms. Additional action plans for improving these conditions include designating an administrator to address, document, and evaluate repairs. continued on page 2

A&E Killing It, Heathers Style

Like “Mean Girls”? This will be a review you’ll want to check out--go to page 18 for more on the musical adaptation of the movie that inspired it all.

Page 2

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

News CEP Meeting Promises Change for New School Year continued on page 1

Zilberbrand views the learning environment as something that can and should be improved quickly. “It’s kind of ridiculous to have the air conditioner sometimes on and off or have bathroom cleanliness be an issue,” he said. “That definitely doesn’t seem like something that we need to spend over half a year [fixing]. I would definitely try to fix the learning and work environment because it affects everyone throughout the school.”

Another major goal for the upcoming school year is providing adequate time for the research coordinator position. Currently, there is no research coordinator.

When physics teacher Rebecca Gorla resigned in January, she expressed the need to increase the compensatory time (the amount of teaching time from which teachers with other positions are exempt) for the position. The CEP Committee hopes to enhance the research program by funding 0.8 or 1 compensatory time for the research coordinator, which would only require the teaching of one or no classes, respectively.

“We couldn’t decide on it 100 percent because we didn’t know the budget for next year, and we are not sure if we have the resources to have a full-time research coordinator,” Zilberbrand said. “But everyone supported the idea.”

The next three goals were recommendations from the SLT Tone and Ethics Committee. One of these aims is to support the ethical environment at Stuyvesant.

Spanish teacher and member of the SLT Tone and Ethics Committee Milton Diaz is an advocate for the improvement of the ethical environment at Stuyvesant.

Diaz attended Bronx High School of Science before going to Sarah Lawrence College. There, Diaz learned to appreciate the evaluations that were given in place of numerical or letter grades, which he had been accustomed to at Bronx Science. At Sarah Lawrence, “less was more,” he said. Working at Stuyvesant, Diaz observed an environment similar to the one he himself had experienced at Bronx Science. “There is so much talent,

but somehow some of that talent is misguided or very results-driven.

For example, ‘I need a medal for this and I need a trophy for that,’” he said. “You somehow lose the joy of learning and you also lose the whole quality of the learning process…. Why do we have to be like police officers while proctoring exams? Students should really care about not plagiarizing anybody’s work and should really take ownership of what they are doing.”

One suggestion for fostering ethics at Stuyvesant is to design a Student Leadership Academy, a group that would analyze the importance of ethics, and present the product of their studies at assemblies or meetings. Furthermore, the SLT Tone and Ethics Committee would continue to work on identifying ethical issues at Stuyvesant and providing helpful resources for students to learn about ethics.

Another goal proposed by the SLT Tone Committee is to promote student support. For example, a new policy that may be instituted would require teachers to alert the guidance office of students who are excessively absent.

Additionally, bi-weekly guidanceattendance office meetings, which were held during the 2012-2013 school year, may be revived. Further action plans include setting Daedalus, the software Stuyvesant uses to organize and store student information, to send automatic emails alerting guidance of students who receive consistently low grades. All of these methods would assist in identifying students who do not regularly attend school or are struggling in their classes, and enable guidance to plan early intervention.

“For me student support is very important,” Parnes said. “Early identification is crucial, and the earlier the intervention, the better.

The whole idea here is excellent, efficient, and quick communication. If you have good processes in place, then no one falls behind.”

The suggestions for increasing student support all focus on helping students who are not attending school or are receiving poor grades. For students who do not fall into these categories but are still in need of extra support, Parnes suggested holding daily homerooms. “We are always

talking about stress reduction and community. Homeroom gives you twenty minutes a day to take a breath or catch up on work, while building community,” she said.

Parnes acknowledged that this would be an enormous change, and would involve the support of many teachers and administrators. “I don’t really see it happening for next year, but maybe for years after that,” she said.

The final recommendation of the SLT Tone Committee is to increase communication between school staff and the administration. Several plans to accomplish this have been proposed. The first would promote discussion with Zhang by holding monthly breakfasts, five for staff and five for parents. Further communication between the principal and staff may be promoted by instituting an online survey through which teachers could submit their input on a variety of issues.

These five goals will either be submitted before the spring semester ends or during the fall, according to the requests of the Department of Education. If additional work must be completed for the CEP over the summer, each newly-elected constituency will choose their representatives to do this. After the goals are firmly established, the SLT can focus on writing action plans for each goal. These action plans serve as a references in writing to guide how the CEP will be carried out during the course of the school year. The action plans are living documents, meaning they can be reconsidered and rewritten according to new developments or issues that may arise.

The school year is drawing to a close, but already plans for the coming year are being addressed. “I know some folks think that the CEP is just an exercise an SLT goes through,” said Reiser in an e-mail interview. “But I am optimistic and I think the rest of the Team would agree that we can make our school even better than it is with these goals. The fact that our Team could reach consensus on these proposed goals is positive; in the remaining days of this year and into next year, the work will be to follow through.”

Computer Glitch Caused Errors in General Elections Results continued on page 1

by one vote, 274-273. In fact, Kitsios and Triantafillou won 262-52.

Carpen and Jonathan Aung, with 550 votes, and Gabe Rosen and Justin Kong (511 votes) both entered the runoff for Student Union (SU) President and VicePresident. The BOE initially reported that both runoff tickets had tied with 552 votes each. In the Junior Caucus race, the BOE reported that the two tickets of Krzystof Hochlewicz and William Yang, with 205 votes, and Sorato Doken and Shuhei Yamaguchi, with 177 votes, had entered the runoff. The revised results, however, indicated that the runoff elections were between Hochlewicz and Yang (205 votes) and Jennifer Dikler and Rahul Debnath (158 votes).

At 7:11 p.m., the BOE released a statement on Facebook nullifying all previous posts about the election results. According to this statement, the incorrect results were “due to a technical error (a mixup of screencaps of the results).” A second statement at 8:24 p.m. denied that tampering with the vote count took place and this time said the invalid counts were “due to a technical glitch inflating the vote count.

Since then, the system has been fixed by a technical advisor.”

The correct results were then released on Facebook, first for the Senior Caucus race (at 8:44 p.m.) and then for the Junior Caucus and SU President races (at 9:35 p.m.).

BOE Chairman junior Shazif Shaikh confirmed the content of the 8:24 p.m. statement, denying tampering and citing a glitch in Stuyvote, the electronic system used by the BOE. Speaking with The Spectator after Wednesday’s debate between Carpen and Aung and Rosen and Kong, he said that a miscommunication about when voting was supposed to end coincided with a routine system check that began before it was intended to. BOE Chariman senior Charles Lee agreed, saying: “The update was expected to be at 4:30 pm, but started during 8th period.

In addition to this, the voting

Cindy Li / The Spectator

Changes for Five Tech Classes Continue

Students put their finishing touches on their final projects in the Video Production and Editing 5Tech class.

By Namra Zulfiqar and Sonia Epstein Several students who opened their Student Tools accounts to complete Phase Two of programming noticed that fewer Five Period Tech Labs, hands-on learning classes commonly called Five Tech classes, were available to sign up for than were listed as available courses on the Stuyvesant website. Of the 10 Five Tech classes described on the website, only five were available on Student Tools: Introduction to Interior Design, Graphic

Arts Communication, Jewelry Design, Video Production, and Computer Technology. The five classes missing were Digital Photography, Introduction to Architecture, Principles of Technology, Robotics, and Technical and Scientific Illustration.

Though it appears that fewer classes are available, both the number of types of classes and the number of sections (the number of each individual class) have increased from this year. According to the programming office, two Five Tech classes were offered each term this year: Graphic Communications and Interior Design. Next year, there will be eight sections each term, comprised of the Five Tech classes listed on Student Tools.

Over the past several years, shifting graduation requirements involving technology and computer science classes have resulted in a cascade of changes. In 2007, Introduction to Computer Science became a required one-semester course to take in sophomore year. Until the Class of 2015, all sophomores took one semester of computer science and one semester of drafting, followed by a Five Tech in junior year.

Then, computer science coordinator Michael Zamansky, conducted an experiment in which the entire Class of 2015 was required to take two terms of computer science in their sophomore year, and drafting in their junior year. “[However], there were many students

who didn’t like having a whole year of computer science so they asked [Principal Jie Zhang] if they could take it [drafting] the second term,” Programming Chairperson Sophia Liang said. Zhang allowed sophomores of the Class of 2016 to choose to take a full year of computer science followed by drafting in junior year or take one semester each of computer science and drafting during sophomore year, followed by a Five Tech class in junior year.

The Class of 2015 took two terms of computer science during their sophomore year, thus fulfilling their computer science and Five Tech requirements. Therefore, only two Five Tech classes, Interior Design and Graphic Communications, were offered this year because the entire Class of 2015 did not have to take Five Tech classes. Now, however, “many students are choosing not to take two terms of computer science, so that’s why the number of classes of Five Tech has increased from last year,” Liang said.

Still, many technology teachers expressed concern about the decrease in number of Five Tech classes. Technology teacher Leslie Bernstein noted that because students now have the opportunity to avoid taking Five Techs entirely by taking two terms of computer science, Five Tech classes are diminishing in importance. “The classes are not needed as much, and it seems that there will be less of them,” she said.

Bernstein also noted that many technology teachers have retired over the past several years. “This is my 11th year here, and we’ve lost at least three teachers who have not been rehired.” For example, there used to be an Engineering and a Mechanisms and Structures class, but both were lost when the teacher who taught them retired. “I have a sophomore who really wants to take a Mechanisms or Structures class, but when he looks at his options there is nothing like that. This school puts out many future engineers, so it would make sense if we had an engineering class,” Bernstein said.

“The whole idea was that to increase the amount of computer science education in the school,” Liang said. “In order to do that, we needed to shift our resources from the technology department to computer science.”

“When we lose a tech teacher, they hire a computer science teacher,” technology teacher Robert Rosen said. With fewer technology teachers, fewer technology classes have been able to be offered. “If the kids don’t see it [the loss of classes], then they don’t miss it,” he said.

“We want the technology department to survive because it’s been around in the school for more than 100 years. It’s very valuable for kids to be able to use their hands, and so many of them love to build,” he said as he gestured to the hum of activity in his woodworking studio.

period was extended on that day due to afterschool activities. The BOE wanted to ensure that all students would get a chance to vote.

“Elections were supposed to end at four o’clock... However, since we became aware of an ARISTA meeting after school, and we wanted the entire student body to have a chance to vote… Due to that, we allowed the voting booths to continue to five o’clock— around five o’clock,” Shaikh said.

This coincided with a bug that caused a system update scheduled around 4 p.m. that day to start during eighth period, and this combination of events created a glitch in the Stuyvote system. “What had happened was, at four o’clock, voting was supposed to end and we were supposed to have a system update,” Shaikh said. However, after the update during 8th period, students continued to vote. Shaihk said: “That created a technical glitch within the system because people were voting after there was this update.”

The glitch created duplicate votes that resulted in high jumps within a short span of time. When the BOE realized this, the systems administrator of the Stuyvote system “removed all the votes because you can’t have a 50 vote increase within 1 second…that’s just not possible,” Shaikh said. The administrator was able to distinguish “between [a vote] was created by the system, and what was created by actual OSIS numbers” and remove the illegitimate votes, he added.

Shaikh flatly denied that any tampering with the voting system took place, however. According to him, the only two people with sufficient knowledge of Stuyvote’s weaknesses to interfere with it are its designer, an alumnus of the Class of 2014, and the current BOE systems administrator.

Shaikh did not wish to reveal the administrator’s name but said that the BOE would be able to see records of any tampering activity on their part, assuring that the mix-up that had happened with the elections were accidental.

Students expressed mixed opinions on how a fewer number of Five Tech classes would impact them. For those with an interest in art and technology, the change is alarming. “When I chose Stuyvesant I was worried that art and tech classes would not be offered,” freshman Anna Usvitsky said. “I was ecstatic to hear that I would have the opportunity to take these classes, but now I’m not sure if I will.”

Upperclassmen provide a view of how taking these Five Tech classes have impacted their academic career at Stuyvesant. “In sophomore year I took drafting, and then I continued by taking Architecture as a Five Tech and a 10 Tech [10 Period Tech Lab],” senior John Lin said.

“That is what got me on my path, and I’m going to college majoring in architecture. These classes showed me that architecture was something I was good at, something I could do.”

Alternatively, students who are taking two terms of Computer Science do not feel as if they will be impacted because they do not need to take a Five Tech. I don’t think the decrease in Five Tech courses bothers me at all,” sophomore Gregory Redozubov said. Redozubov took two terms of Computer Science, and thus does not need to take a Five Tech class. “But, if a Five Tech course I want to take gets cut, I lose my opportunity to take it too,” he said.

The Spectator ●June 16, 2014

Page 3

News

Julie Chan / The Spectator

Summer School is Coming to Stuyvesant

Summer school classes will take place at Stuyvesant instead of Brooklyn Tech.

By Sharon Chao and Sharon Lin While most Stuyvesant students will be relaxing at home or going on vacation this summer, a select few will have to go to summer school. This year, for the first time in recent history, summer school will be held at Stuyvesant.

The Department of Education (DOE) decided to move summer school to Stuyvesant this year due to ongoing construction at Seward Park. Schools are typically grouped together based on location, but Stuyvesant High School has sent its students to Brooklyn Technical High School for summer courses for the past few years. This year, even though Brooklyn Technical High School is still open, the administration believes that it will be cheaper to send students to Stuyvesant.

Construction at the Seward Park Educational Complex caused the administrators of Eleanor Roosevelt High School, High School for Dual Language and American Studies, and Bard High School Early College to consider finding another site to host summer school. Two of these high schools are in Manhattan and one is in Queens. Because Stuyvesant is also in Manhattan, the DOE has asked the adminis-

trators to keep the building open.

Approximately 200 total students, with 100 from Stuyvesant, will be coming to the building five days a week from July 1 to sometime in mid-August for summer school.

The summer courses are designed to help students who failed courses during the school year, as well as to allow them to pass Regents tests and move on in their academic careers.

However, not all school courses will be offered during summer school. Only those with at least 20 qualifying students will run.

In addition, only a few Regents will be offered, such as Living Environment and Geometry.

Normally, foreign languages are not available because the lowest city-wide diploma only requires one year of a language to graduate. However, most other courses will be offered, especially those necessary for a Regents diploma. “[As long as] we can get [the course] out of the way during the summer, students [can] come back on grade [level],” Principal Jie Zhang said. “That’s my hope—to help our kids to come to a place that they are familiar with so they can catch up with whatever they missed.”

For instance, if a student only fails one semester of chemistry, he or she may wish to attend summer school just to get that semester out of the way. This applies especially to upperclassmen, who may not want to double up on unnecessary courses, such as physics and chemistry, in their next standard academic school year.

The summer school day will run from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., with three periods lasting one and a half hours each and a lunch break at around 11 a.m. The cafeteria will be open during the summer to provide free breakfast and lunch to students as part of the Department of Education’s summer meals program. Both meals are free for all children under the age of 18, with breakfast lasting from 8 a.m. to 9:15 a.m., and lunch lasting from 11 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. No registration is required for the program.

Since not all students need to fulfill the requirements of

three courses, some will only stay for the one or two classes they need. Although it is unknown how many students will be in each class, Zhang estimates around 40 to 50 students to begin with. “Some kids don’t stay, [or] some kids have their grades changed and they pass. Eventually [the number] goes down to thirty-something,” Zhang said.

There are no official minimum requirements for the number of students in a class. There are, however, limits due to funding. “We will not hire an art teacher if there are only five students who need to take Art Appreciation,” Zhang said. “It just doesn’t make sense, budget-wise.”

Only a few floors will be used for summer school classes. “We’ll use the second floor and the third floor gym and one of the rooms,” Assistant Principal of Technology Edward Wong said. “We’ll use the seventh floor for biology, [and the] eighth and ninth floor [for] physics and chemistry.” This will allow other programs, such as professional development classes and summer camps, to use the building at the same time.

Zhang has no fears about the building’s usage by students of four schools. Instead, she thinks that having summer school at Stuyvesant will encourage more Stuyvesant students to come.

“I feel that more of our kids will come if [summer school] is in our school. [Since the students] come [to the building] every day, coming here in the summer will not be as bad,” Zhang said.

Along with summer school, other programs traditionally take place at the school building over the summer as well. For instance, the pool is open for recreational use in the late afternoons and evenings, and summer camps and professional development are held in the building at various times during the day. Additionally, those wishing to rent rooms at the school over the summer can apply to the DOE for permission to use the building.

Summer school students will not have to come into contact with these other programs, however, since the DOE will have certain

rooms of their own in which the summer classes are conducted.

Not all of the staff members will be staying for the summer sessions, but the guidance counselors, secretaries, principal, and a select number of teachers will be present. “All of those principals of the schools that are joining me are going to be in and out.

We [are] all [given] our vacations for two to three weeks. If I’m not here, I make sure another principal is in charge. We also have assistant principals,” Zhang said.

The administrators will be present for the entirety of summer school, watching over the program, as well as performing general duties, such as maintaining the school’s security and the students’ and professionals’ safety. The teachers running the summer school classes will be chosen by the DOE through an application process.

“Teachers are chosen based on seniority, retention rights, and [assignments],” Wong said. They will apply online this year, although those who have previously taught at Brooklyn Technical High School will be given preference.

Because teachers are given bonuses, there is generally a positive consensus around teaching during the summer. They receive extra pay per hour of work, as well as gaining experience and credibility. For instance, teachers who have taught at summer school in Brooklyn Technical High School prior to this summer will receive preference in the selection process.

However, because of the workload and potential loss of vacation, some teachers have expressed distaste in working for an extra month. “I don’t think any teacher would want to teach over the summer,” math teacher Glen Chew said. Other potential drawbacks, especially for teachers used to instructing high-achieving students, include having to teach remedial courses to lower-achieving pupils.

Nevertheless, having Stuyvesant teachers at summer school is still preferable to hiring unfamiliar staff. “I would like to have our teachers, but right now teachers are starting to apply online. We tell them what we want, [such as]

Alicia Chen / The Spectator

College Board’s AP Computer Science: Principles to Be Launched in 2016

AP Computer Science: Principles will be launched by the College Board in 2016.

By Sharon Chao and Griffin Strout Over the past decade, the number of students planning to major in computer science has dropped almost 70 percent, according to the College Board.

Additionally, the number of students who have taken the AP Computer Science (APCS) Exam has fallen 15 percent between 2001 and 2007. In 2009, a grant was given to the College Board, in partnership with the National

Science Foundation, to develop a new computer science course in hopes of increasing these “alarmingly declining” levels, as well as filling what its website calls “a critical gap as an adjunct to the existing APCS A course.”

The new course, named APCS Principles, will be an introductory computer science course.

According to the drafted curriculum released by the College Board in August 2013, the new course aims to instill the basic ideas of computer science. For instance, algorithms, the differ-

ent visual representations of data, and the Internet will be covered.

The course was first piloted in 2010. During the 2010-2011 school year, five colleges offered the course. Between 2011 and 2013, the scope of institutions offering it expanded to a larger group of colleges and high schools. Phase II pilot testing began in Fall of 2013, and it will continue until 2016. It is currently being offered in 11 colleges and 37 high schools throughout the U.S., including The Academy for Software Engineering and The Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology in New York City.

The College Board is planning to officially launch the course in the fall of 2016, and it will administer the first AP exam in spring 2017. However, Coordinator of Computer Science Michael Zamansky does not feel that the course should be offered at Stuyvesant when it is released in 2016. “No college is going to give you credit for this [course],” he said. “In my view, CS Principles is like putting ‘AP’ in front of Regents [biology] or putting AP in front of our Regents math classes, because it’s really at a more introductory level to expose more people to the topic.”

Zamansky believes that his own creation, Stuyvesant’s Intro-

duction to Computer Science, is much more thorough and covers the topic at a higher level than the AP CS Principles course does. “The good stuff that [AP CS Principles] does, we were doing better ten years ago,” he said.

Computer Science teacher JonAlf Dyrland-Weaver believes that the course could be valuable at schools that do not have a prominent computer science program. “I am aware that most students do not have access to computer science at all in high school, and so when they get to college, it could be an entirely new thing. The whole idea is to provide an AP course with the materials and concepts of what students would learn in an introductory CS course,” he said.

Zamansky also noted that programming, which he feels is a vital part of every computer science course, is optional for this course.

One of the few programming systems that APCS Principles will employ is Scratch, which allows a user to program interactive games and animations, according to Scratch’s website. “You don’t really need to know much programming in order to use Scratch.

Scratch is great for a group of middle school kids, or even fifth graders or in programming contests. In terms of actual program-

one math teacher, one English teacher, two social studies teachers, and [the DOE] sends [them] to us,” Zhang said. The teachers each teach for thirty days, for four and a half hours each day. Normally, the state requires 54 hours of class time, but in the summer the time is reduced to 45 hours.

Teachers are still compelled to cover the full curriculum of the course that would have been taught during the school year, but in a shorter period of time.

In addition, although summer school is public and free for all qualifying attendees, schools will be paying for every student they send. Wong states that this does not have a significant impact on the schools’ budgets, however. “We are reimbursed [by the other schools] for our [students]. The expenses for summer school are tremendous, [since] you have to pay for permits and staff. If you send kids to a bigger school, the budget works out in the long term,” Wong said.

Zhang agreed that having summer school at Stuyvesant will drastically reduce costs for other programs. “We do not [usually] have enough students, so we have not been recently opened and centrally funded [by the DOE].

This year, the opportunity came.

Seward Park Complex, which is a centrally funded site, was closed for construction. So, I was asked by the DOE to open [our school], meaning we don’t have to pay for the overhead,” Zhang said.

“I’ve always wanted to have our building open. If the building is open, I think we can have other things. The Science Department has proposed to let some students come in to do some research. Once we have the building permit, the other costs are minimized. Opening the building [requires] a big chunk of money that we cannot usually [afford].”

The potential for allowing students to come to Stuyvesant to conduct research over the summer is an unexpected but intriguing and positive result of having summer school in the school building.

ming, I don’t think it provides a lot of detail,” Dyrland-Weaver said.

Sophomore Aaron Choi, who took two semesters of Introduction to Computer Science this past year, also noted that the Stuyvesant curriculum already covered many of the topics, including Internet use and function, which are major features of the APCS Principles course. “We have learned about how a computer takes what you search online and relays the information through an Internet hierarchy built on servers and proxies to send you back to the page you want,” Choi said.

Ultimately, both DyrlandWeaver and Zamansky think that AP Computer Science Principles is too simple for Stuyvesant students. Another problem is that there would not be enough teachers to teach the course. “We don’t have the faculty to teach another course, especially one that is redundant. I think it would be a bad use of Stuyvesant’s teaching resources,” Dyrland-Weaver said.

Zamansky sees no place for it at Stuyvesant, unless it replaces the current introductory course offered to sophomores.

However, he feels that would be a bad decision. “I think that’s doing a disservice to our students.

There’s no value to it,” he said.

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 4

News

Katherine Fennell / The Spectator

Summer Happenings at Stuyvesant

Summer school classes will take place at Stuyvesant instead of Brooklyn Tech.

By Stephanie Chen and Sharon Lin Summer is quickly approaching, and even while final exams and Regents may loom overhead, there has already been talk of happenings occurring around the school in preparation for the 2014-2015 school year.

For the first time in years, the Stuyvesant High School building will be opened for summer school. The summer courses, which include subjects such as Biology and Physics, are intended for students who have failed at least one semester during the school year. This year, in addition to hosting the summer school session, Stuyvesant will be inviting students from Bard High School Early College, High School for Dual Language and Asian Studies, and Eleanor Roosevelt High School to enroll as well.

The building will also be opened for professional development programs for teachers.

The DOE annually hosts these programs, targeted at both new and experienced teachers, and teaching assistants to provide training for the upcoming year.

These programs are aimed at teaching Core Curriculum programs to instructors. Examples include ReadyGen, Go Math!, Code X, and Connected Mathematics Project Three (CMP3).

ReadyGen is a comprehensive English and Language Arts program, Go Math! is a K-8 mathematics program, Code X is a language arts curriculum created for middle school students, and CPM3 is a middle school-

targeted mathematics program that seeks to engage students in personalized learning. “[The programs] will probably take up one or two floors, but they will be [set] apart from the students,” Principal Jie Zhang said.

Science labs will also be open to allow students to work on their Intel Science Talent Search research projects. Stuyvesant will also be offering a variety of courses in computer science, mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry, and social science for students to get a head start on scientific research.

The principal, along with administrators, security guards, teachers, and custodial staff will be present in the building during the duration of these projects. “The students will be working under close supervision,” Zhang said.

In terms of maintenance, every clock and window will be investigated. The clocks in our school are always regarded as a nuisance as many of them are never functionally operating. “Just the fact that my clock doesn’t work makes me want to throw something at it,” Zhang said jokingly.

The school custodial staff works solely on general maintenance during the summer months—cleaning classrooms, waxing and stripping floors, cleaning bathrooms, etc. If there are any specific repairs that must be made, a complaint is filed by the school. In response, the Division of School Facilities, an organization responsible for maintaining all facilities under the jurisdiction of New

York City’s school system, decides whether their budget allows for the repair to be made.

“For instance, if repairs need to be made with the clocks, the [Division of ] School Facilities sends the clocks [to the school].

The head contractor then comes in and his staff repairs them.

That’s going to happen, but we don’t know when,” Head Custodian Fred Arnebold said.

A typical complaint from the students is the perpetually malfunctioning escalators. These are repaired by outside contractors, according to Arnebold.

The school’s custodians are not in charge of hiring contractors to perform maintenance, however. In the past, contracted repairs have taken up to a year and a half to follow through, so Arnebold is not holding up hopes for sudden changes in the summer. “The administration’s the one in charge of the money in the budget.

All I do is turn in work requests to get the work done,” he said.

Because of the school’s limited budget, it may not be plausible for major repairs to occur over the summer, even with the two months. “The escalators are capital improvements, but they’re a pretty large scale. It’s like asking for a million dollars to improve the pools, but we really need approval for those,” Zhang said.

Another common complaint among the student population, especially during the months of late May to early June, is the poor air conditioning in the building. Zhang is also aware of this issue, as it was brought up to her numerous times by both students and administrators. Air conditioning is installed and maintained by the school’s custodians. “There are specific rooms in the building where the air conditioning doesn’t work.

Those are specific univents.

If we can fix them ourselves, we will do so,” Arnebold said.

From summer school to maintenance of the school, the Stuyvesant building will be filled with bustling activity throughout the summer. Many hope to see a better Stuyvesant, albeit with some skepticism. “I believe there will be change, but it won’t be apparent,” sophomore Jessica Tom said.

Intro to Computer Science Finals Cancelled

By Susan Wu and Sharon Li

When the finals and Regents schedule was initially released on the Stuyvesant website on May 29, a wave of confusion swept through the computer science students of the class of 2016. An allotted time period for the departmental Introduction to Computer Science final was nowhere to be found.

The previous Fall term, students were required to pass a rigorous hour-long computer science final, complete with a multiple choice and short answer section. In addition, students in all classes, except those taught

by Computer Science teacher David Holmes, were required to submit a final project in which pairs of students were given a period of approximately two weeks to create a game or model based on the NetLogo language.

Currently many teachers have opted to replace the final exam with the final project.

The final project, as opposed to the test, allows the students to experience a more real world aspect of coding. “[The final project] is not only based on memorization, but more on logic, skill, and the ability to meet a deadline. [It] is more similar to a real life situation, where a programmer is given a task and a certain amount of time to complete it,” sophomore James Chin said. Chin also believes it is both applicable in the working world, and a valuable experience, comparable to the work often completed in technical jobs involving coding.

The final exam was initially administered to determine if students in the introductory class were suited to take the Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) class.

Because the students who will be advancing to AP CS have already been chosen, many of the computer science teachers felt that there was no need to create another departmental final.

“The decision for the kids taking AP CS next year is already made, so what good is

making them all take a final?

I’d rather let the teachers give them assessments and assign them final projects,” computer science department coordinator Michael Zamansky said.

Another argument against final exams focuses on Stuyvesant’s graduation requirements.

Final exams are primarily given to assess individual students and provide their teachers with a general overview of their mastery of the course material. In addition to this, the unique requirements of the Stuyvesant diploma state that although Introduction to Computer Science is a required class, further computer science classes are not necessary for graduation.

This was the main issue, as the computer science teachers felt that it was unfair to issue an exam that would not be relevant to students in the future.

While first term computer science needed the evaluation for their second term teachers, students taking the course only to fulfill graduation requirements were not likely to take additional computer science classes.

A few students agree fully with the decision to stop administering the computer science final exam, satisfied with the decision to replace it with the students’ final projects. “Giving final projects is a better choice than to give a final because students can take time to think about their code and actually analyze what they do wrong, something they can take advantage of if they use coding for a job,” sophomore Brandon Lin said.

In addition, because computer science is a more creative and less technical class than trigonometry or chemistry, some believe that it would be unfair to place a time limit on the final exam. “[Computer science] is a time consuming, meticulous process that requires trial-and-error and further ingenuity to discovering an alternate route to the same objective. [In addition,] CS is a visual class. Students need to be able to see the result,” sophomore Spencer Eo said.

Former Civil Rights Activist Talks to APUSH Classes

By Rebecca Chang with additional reporting by Sharon Lin In the 1960s, when a young man and civil rights activist born and raised in New York City, Ivanhoe Donaldson, first heard about the sit-ins that were occurring in Greensboro, North Carolina, he was amazed. He was inspired by the message of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that advocated social justice and equality.

Fifty years later, Donaldson was recruited by the Zinn Education Project, an organization that strives to emphasize social history and how history can be viewed from victims or oppressed individuals. The organization was founded by Howard Zinn, most well known for his revisionist text, “A People’s History of the United States,” and engages in many different projects that try to emphasize different areas of history. Donaldson was asked to be a part of the SNCC Legacy Project,

whose goal was to preserve and extend the organization’s legacy. In addition, the project also accepted applications for teachers who were interested in having Donaldson speak.

Social studies teacher Robert Sandler was extremely interested upon seeing an email that mentioned the project, and applied for the program.

“I explained how I showed [my students] films and I had them see an exhibit on Civil Rights in art. I had them read Taylor Branch’s trilogy on civil rights,” Sandler said. “They were impressed and chose me and two other teachers in the country to have him come and talk.”

After discussing with the project staff regarding the logistics behind the talk, they both decided that a Google Hangout session for his period two and three Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH) classes would be the most logical way to have Donaldson speak.

Donaldson started his talk with a short introduction about who he was, and his role in the

SNCC. When Donaldson was a college student at Michigan State University, he decided to leave in order to aid the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

He had heard about the terrible conditions and discrimination that African-Americans faced in Southern states, especially in Mississippi and Alabama. Ku Klux Klan members terrorized and intimidated many AfricanAmericans to stop them from voting, and were not afraid to use tactics like burning down houses and churches or even killing those who spoke out.

As a result, even though Donaldson knew he was taking a big risk by going to the South, he along with other students from Michigan State, were willing to make the sacrifice to help other African-Americans. He worked as a SNCC employee for two years in Mississippi, and helped to deliver food to impoverished African-American neighborhoods where the residents were not given enough money for their work by their white counterparts, and also ended up in

jail for two weeks for doing so.

“I thought that was really awesome because we usually only hear about the famous figures of the movement. We know what they did, but we don’t know how other people got into it,” junior Udita Tonnee said.

One negative aspect, however, that students mentioned was that Donaldson tried to encourage the students to speak about their own initiatives, rather than explaining more about his experiences.

“I thought it helped a lot to understand his point of view of what happened but I felt like if he had lectured a little more, we would’ve gotten more information,” junior Leonard Margolis said. “But when he did answer the questions thoroughly or in the first part where he lectured us, I found that very engaging.”

Sandler agreed that he also noticed the different interests of Donaldson and his students during the Hangout. “The kids wanted to hear more dramatic stories about his jail time, but he really just wanted to hear about

what they were doing,” he said.

In addition, since the visit was conducted over Google Hangout, there were also some technical issues. “I had a problem with the quality of the screen. They could’ve worked out a better connection but I guess it was a pilot program so I couldn’t really expect more,” Tonnee said.

“There were so many communication errors, especially since he’s so softspoken. A lot of kids had to repeat their questions twice,” Sandler said. “It could’ve been more effective, but he really couldn’t come all the way here, and it was really just an experiment with technology.”

Overall, the presentation was a very eye-opening experience for the students of Sandler’s APUSH classes, as they were able to listen to a first-hand story of what the civil rights movement was like.

“The reality is, people like Ivanhoe [Donaldson] were really the people who changed the course of history,” Sandler said.

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 5

News

Jake Brimberg / The Spectator

SMART Boards In A Smart School: A Closer Look at Classroom Technology

Señora Montserrat uses a Promethian board while teaching her Spanish class.

By Julia Ingram and Claire Jin SMART Boards, activity boards, ELMO’s, Macbooks, and projectors are some of the few items that distinguish a 21st century classroom from its predecessors. These gadgets are becoming a leading part of the future of education and beginning to appear more frequently in many schools, Stuyvesant being one example. However, the technology usually costs thousands of dollars and can leave people questioning whether the investment is worthwhile.

There are approximately 20 multimedia boards located in various rooms throughout Stuyvesant, though they are not equally distributed among the school’s departments. “Some departments prefer to have rooms with SMART Boards and technology, more than other departments.” Principal Jie Zhang said.

“The social studies department has more smart boards than any

other department.” The justification for this allocation is that subjects in the humanities usually require more visual learning, whereas subjects such as math do not. Humanities subjects also consist of more interaction and involvement, and multimedia boards can facilitate both. Overall, the concentration of boards is greater in the language and history departments than in the math department.

When planning the purchasing and distribution of these boards, the administration considers the funding available as well as the demand from the various departments. SMART Boards are usually given to teachers who request them. However, the school is rarely able to fulfill all the requests at one time. Due to Stuyvesant’s wide variety of available electives, most of the funding provided by the Department of Education (DOE) goes towards running these courses instead of purchasing multimedia boards. “We don’t have the luxury to say ‘let’s just buy 30.’ So

whenever we have the money, we buy two here, three there,” Zhang said. Funding courses is priority, whereas purchasing boards is a luxury. The price of a board usually ranges from $3,000 to $5,000, which drastically limits the number that the school can afford.

Besides DOE-provided funding, multimedia boards can be installed on the basis of grants.

Stuyvesant has recently gained the approval of a $60,000 grant, which will be used to install 10 to 12 SMART Boards to be used this fall. In the past, some grants have been given to Stuyvesant and are still being given in small amounts through Annual Appeal Donation Forms, which allow individuals to donate money to the school. The Annual Appeal aims to raise $500 per student in Stuyvesant each year. Additionally, Stuyvesant depends on the money the Parents’ Association raises to enhance and improve the quality of education for all of its students, which can be used to fund technology like the interactive boards.

Social studies teacher Brenda Garcia is one of the many social studies teachers who uses multimedia boards in her teaching, and finds them to be an advantage. “I do my lessons with Powerpoint presentations, so that’s where I display my presentations. I use a lot of artwork in my lessons, so I like to use the writing feature to mark important spots on the images,” she said. Garcia also thinks that multimedia boards are more productive than chalkboards.

“With the [limited] time in class, and we have to share rooms and we only have five minutes between periods, so in the time it takes me to write the aim on the board, I can already set up the Powerpoint presentation.”

Junior Karen Akilah Marks, who has Global History and Spanish in classrooms with mul-

timedia boards, thinks that the technology can be a very useful tool. “It makes history more comprehensive when you have the media right there at your fingertips,” she said. “[Assistant Principal of World Languages] Ms. Ubieta uses the SMART Board to play audio exercises from our Spanish textbook, but also to play Spanish songs, folk poems, and show movies and clips of news broadcasts. She also uses the writing feature to write down the spelling and meaning of new vocabulary. In that case, the smart board helps with the full immersion aspect of foreign language.”

Some endorse interactive boards because they provide a good visual learning experience. “SMART Boards motivate students because it is a creative and engaging technology integrated into learning,” said freshman Monami Waki, who has a Global History in a classroom with a SMART Board. “Diagrams and graphs can be displayed on the board in a more efficient and clear manner that the teacher won’t be able to draw on a traditional black board.”

But some teachers, like math teacher Melissa Protass, prefer the traditional chalkboard. Protass has a SMART Board in her room but prefers not to use it. “Well I don’t know how to use it. I’ve never had any training,” she said. “At first we didn’t even have a computer in the room, and when we got one my lessons were already planned out [for the chalkboard].

Within Stuyvesant’s pool of multimedia boards, there has been a shift starting in 2013 to using only Promethean, one brand of board, rather than SMART, the similar and more widely-known board. The shift has occurred because the school wants variety in the technology that it uses, and to determine whether the Promethean technology is

in fact superior to the SMART equivalent. “We try to have a variety of different technology platforms,” Assistant Principal of Technology Services Edward Wong said. “We have both Mac computers and Windows computers, we wanted to even it out.”

Promethean Boards tend to be more expensive than SMART Boards. Although both boards have prices that range from $3,000 to $5,000, SMART Boards are often more towards the $3,000 price range whereas Promethean Boards are more towards the $5,000 price range.

There isn’t a significant difference between the two types of boards, though the Promethean Boards boast a few features that SMART boards do not have.

Some teachers, however, prefer the SMART boards to the Promethean board. Garcia uses both and prefers the SMART board.

“With the Promethean board you have to use a special kind of stylus, and when I want to use PowerPoint presentations I have to import them into its program.”

Spanish teacher Abigail Carpenter is one of the instructors whose preference is swayed by her familiarity with SMART boards. “I only have the Promethean for one class, so I’m more familiar with the SMART board. So I like it better, but I haven’t had much practice with the Promethean,” she said.

Though it is unclear exactly what course Stuyvesant will set itself on in purchasing new technology like interactive boards for classrooms, Zhang believes anything and everything done will be in service of a singular ultimate goal. “We have a lot of academic freedom for teachers, so instead of pushing down one method, it’s more important that the teaching and learning takes place,” she said.

By Jeremy Elkayam, and Hyun Jin Kim To the average Stuyvesant student, $1.25 is a very small amount of money. With $1.25, one can buy half of a ride on the subway or settle for a bag of potato chips or a few pieces of candy. Shockingly, many people around the world struggle to earn this amount of money every day. These people often do not have a home and many do not know when they will be able to have their next meal.

People making less than $1.25 a day are said to be living in extreme poverty, according to Dr. Donald Lee, a United Nations representative who was invited to Stuyvesant by history teachers Kerry Trainor and Michael Waxman to talk about worldwide poverty on Tuesday, May 27. Dr. Lee mentioned that although poverty is often based on income, it is not limited to that parameter. Poor health, lack of education, low standards of living, poor quality of work, and threats from both physical and psychological violence can all be factors qualifying an individual or a group as living in extreme poverty.

After he touched on the technical definitions, Dr. Lee engaged the audience by explaining a life of poverty. He mentioned that many poor

people with families have to make difficult decisions on a daily basis regarding how to allocate food and other necessities. Although parents are often willing to skip meals to feed their children, they must sustain themselves enough to continue working or searching for work.

Dr. Lee then mentioned that poverty puts families in a cycle of despair because the children of the poor cannot afford to receive proper education. Destitute children can get scarred emotionally from an early age after witnessing their parents being stigmatized by the labels of society, such as “lazy” and “dishonest.” Dr. Lee shared that these labels are often inaccurate and are bestowed unfairly upon the extremely unfortunate. Dr. Lee continued to present more shocking data, which included the fact that child mortality rates rest at the high mark of around 600 million deaths per year in developing third-world countries.

Dr. Lee then discussed a plan to decrease poverty and the conditions associated with it called the Millennium Development Goals, which was created by major world development institutions and many of the world’s countries. All 189 UN member-states as well as 23 international organizations agreed to help achieve these goals. The plan entailed

working towards a number of measurable targets, with the objective of achieving them by 2015. “These goals represent the major development challenges of our time,” Dr. Lee said.

The Millennium Development Goals aim to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and achieve universal primary education. Other goals included promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating diseases like AIDS. The initiative has largely been a success. Dr. Lee mentioned in particular that poverty rates have been reduced by half since the year 2000. By 2010, maternal mortality rates had decreased by 47 percent since 1990, and by 2012, deaths of children under five years old had been reduced to 6.6 million from 12.4 million in 1990.

Dr. Lee also talked about trying to engage girls and women in politics and decision making, and trying to make sure that they receive quality educations.

He reasoned that when women become more empowered within households, they try to direct more of the family’s resources and expenditure towards their children than do men.

Dr. Lee ended the discussion by talking about how students can help. He mentioned a number of websites where the general public can discuss

world development issues and vote on solutions, and that even now, students everywhere can speak out and sign petitions to help stop poverty. He also recommended saving up extra money to give to charity.

Dr. Lee encouraged people to talk to their friends and family about global poverty in order to spread the word. He even issued an open challenge to Stuyvesant students to organize an event for the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on October 17, 2014.

At the end of his lecture, Dr. Lee and Mr. Waxman opened up the floor for questions from the audience. One student asked why the aid has been less

effective, mentioning that some of today’s statistics fall short of the targets and goals set forth by the Millennium Development Goals. Dr. Lee’s response was that regional conflicts and civil wars within developing countries are currently hindering the world’s ability to do all it can to fight poverty.

For additional information on global issues of poverty and the Millenium Development Goals, Dr. Lee suggested that students visit his website at globalsocialchange.com and myworld2015.org to vote on solutions. In addition, students are encouraged to discuss these issues with friends and family and engage to affect change.

Courtesy of Ioana Solomon

UN Representative Discusses Ending Global Poverty

The Spectator â—? June 16, 2014

Page 6

News Bad Rap: The Asian American Minority in the Field of Music

By Jennifer Lee

A documentary named “Bad Rap,� featuring four Asian American rappers, was showcased at Stuyvesant on Monday, June 2.

After the film and the panel discussion between students, the director, and the featured rappers concluded, senior and panelist William Aung approached Salima Amina Koroma, the director of the film, and asked if Awkwafina, the only female rapper featured in the film, would give him a peck on the cheek.

When Koroma called Awkwafina over and asked if she would do it, she replied, “Sure!� Aung was elated, and immortalized the experience with a picture.

Koroma’s first documentary, “Bad Rap,� focuses on four Asian American rappers and their struggles with finding a foothold in media and mainstream pop culture. The four artists: Nora Lum (Awkwafina), Jonathan Park (Dumbfoundead), Rick Lee (Lyricks), and David Lee (Rekstizzy), were invited as guests to a panel afterwards. Although Dumbfoundead was unable to come due to appointments he had in California, many students said it was a very enjoyable experience.

The rappers were very casual and comfortable, swearing frequently and dressing down in baseball caps, tee shirts, and jeans in both the film and the panel.

Koroma selected these rappers because of their diverse representation of the struggles of Asian Americans in the music industry.

Over the course of the film, the camera focused on all four artists and their obstacles separately.

Rekstizzy, for example, often faced criticism for his shocking, outrageous approach to music.

This can be seen in his music video, “God Bless America,� in which he sprays ketchup and mustard on two women’s butts. Despite the controversy, he remained true to himself and continued with his absurd style, a decision Koroma saw as an attempt to actively break the Asian American stereotypes through defiance.

Koroma also considered Dumbfoundead an essential figure due to his rise in popularity in the music industry and his efforts to integrate Asian American artists into the American culture through efforts such as speaking on the radio as a representative of Asian artists.

Awkwafina, a female Asian American who made it in the music field, opened opportunities for discussions on the role of gender in the music industry and how Asian women are more marginalized in rap than Asian men. During the panel, a New York Magazine article about Awkwafina’s career called, “Can an Asian Woman Be Taken Seriously In Rap?� was mentioned.

In response to this, Awkwafina said she found it annoying that the media published an article that emphasized the stereotype that Asian females are not expected to rap. In addition to her unique position, Awkwafina also had a unique, nonchalant, and comical style in her rapping, as shown in her songs “My V@g� and “Mayor Bloomberg.�

Lastly, the film ended with Lyricks’s story as the stereotypical Asian American with parents of

high expectations, which allowed the film to address the cultural gap between Asian American teens and their Asian parents.

While Lyrick was helping his parents in their dry cleaning business, his mom spoke in Korean, with English subtitles, about how she had wanted him to major as a lawyer or doctor like many of their relatives, contrary to his dreams of becoming a successful rapper.

Despite the artists’ diverse stories, they are all often labeled as “Asian rappers,� although they are enriched in the American culture. Even though they are proud of their ethnicity, they mainly identified themselves as Americans and saw it unnecessary for the media to categorize them.

Many students understood and agreed with the rappers’ perspective. “I wouldn’t want to be identified like that either‌ Being raised and born here, you feel American, so why are we not recognized and discriminated?â€? junior Brian Tran said.

However, others such as Aung held a different opinion and deemed it important to recognize ethnicity as a part of identity. “It’s still necessary to be aware that they’re Asian American. I think they should take a new stride and know that whatever they do, they are representing Asian Americans to a larger audience‌ Race is always going to be a part of them,â€? Aung said.

Although the documentary was primarily focused on ethnicity, the artists addressed the role of gender in marketing. Towards one section of the film, Dumfoundead, who had spent many more years honing his rapping skills

than Awkwafina had, admitted that he was upset that she had been offered a record deal before he was just because she was more marketable as an Asian woman.

However, several students pointed at the artists’ style, not gender, as the factor to success. “Pointing to the fact that females are more marketable than guys is somewhat of a bad argument because on one hand, you see guys with really misogynistic values. On the other hand, we see someone funny, like Awkwafina.

Obviously, we’re going to prefer her over the other rappers,� sophomore Sophia Wang said.

Spanish teacher Milton Diaz organized the entire event as a part of the Ethics Initiative, a program he formed to encourage Stuyvesant students to reflect and investigate their education in a proactive way. He came across “Bad Rapâ€? when a friend, June Cross, who is a professor of documentary filming at Columbia University, invited him to watch some of his students’ films. “I was immediately struck that [“Bad Rapâ€?] was an Asian American world that needed to be explored‌ I thought to myself that the students would find a relationship and would feel drawn to this documentary, a documentary about identity and making it in America,â€? Diaz said. Several months after Diaz encountered Koroma’s film, he finally invited her to showcase her 45-minute work-inprogress product at Stuyvesant.

After the panel came to a close, many students reported that the documentary was really enjoyable and unique in its

own way. During the days following the show, many people researched these rappers’ music. “To be honest, I think Dumbfoundead rapped better than a lot of black rappers even though it’s stereotyped that black people dominate the rap world. He has really good lyrics though, and I‌ liked the tempo and the beat,â€? sophomore Anna Yang said.

When Koroma found out that many students were researching these rappers as a result of her documentary, she felt proud. “The fact that kids are going and looking up these rappers, I think that’s amazing‌ It’s good for Asian American kids to see that they can also do other things.

There will be challenges, but those options are there,� Koroma said.

Although Asian Americans are still a minority in the field of pop music, awareness is spreading. The article about Awkwafina’s career as a rapper, “Can an Asian Woman Be Taken Seriously In Rap?,â€? and new Asian American radio stations have brought attention to this issue. “Bad Rapâ€? has also brought attention to these barriers, starting off at Stuyvesant. With new elements to raise awareness, many people hope that there will be an increase in diversity in the music industry. “I think that this film is a huge success‌ it just shows the Asian Americans finally getting a foothold in media. This is finally going to have some precedence where Asian Americans come to the limelight,â€? said sophomore Jonathan Aung.

The Bi-Weekly Poll: Grades

By The News Department With report card season about to ensue, the Spectator News Department conducted a poll with the goal of discovering student attitudes toward their grades and the system as a whole. The poll was conducted through randomly sent e-mails, organized by OSIS number, containing the link to the poll. 281 students responded. Below are the four questions asked and the results.

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The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 7

Features

By Ariella Kahan There are three steps to being a perfect student announcer.

The first step is to make friends with the office secretaries, because when something goes wrong and you start panicking, they will be the ones to save you. The next step is to learn how to say the Pledge of Allegiance at the perfect speed; you must speak slow enough to annunciate, but fast enough to satisfy the third period teachers that want to start their lesson. The third and final step is to master the pronunciation of every name from every ethnicity because you never know when the next PSAL champion’s name will consist of three vowels followed by three consonants.

Once you master these steps, you are ready to learn the intricacies of the announcement system.

This will probably be the easiest step of all, because contrary to the expectations of many, the student announcer does not need to wear a headset, speak into a megaphone-like device, or even dial an eight-digit code. All the student announcer needs to do is pick up a telephone that looks like a normal landline and press the buttons “All Page” and “Push To Talk.” “It’s a microphone, not a high tech set up, just an ordinary telephone. I expected something very different and walked in there like, wow, it’s not even a headset,’” said senior Clay Walsh, the student announcer who preceded the current announcers, seniors Tahía Islam and Juliette Hainline.

During the first semester, Walsh announced beside senior Marie Frolich. Frolich loves announcing because, she “think[s] it’s awesome to be able to greet people with some happiness and make them smile by being super cheery,” she said in an email interview. However, in the beginning of second semester Frolich’s third period teacher requested that she stop announcing. “I had third period class and my teacher told me I couldn’t do it anymore because I couldn’t be late to class every day,” Frolich explained.

Though Walsh preferred an-

nouncing alongside Frolich, he has managed to do an exceptional job with the announcements while speaking alone. “I kinda found a sweet spot, a couple inches away from my mouth so that there was no back-feed or not too loud so that they’d be like ‘what’s he saying,’” he explained.

Walsh also created a routine in which he first took out a manila folder that contained the announcements and then sorted through the papers to find which announcements he had made the day before. Right after the start bell of third period rang, Walsh picked up the telephone and began announcing.

The manila folder generally holds forms that teachers fill out containing important notices or congratulations. For example, on Wednesday, June 4, the manila folder contained one typed up paragraph congratulating Stuyvesant’s team on its third place finish in the NYU Polytechnic “Inno-Vention” competition, a reminder to return books to the library, an advertisement for next year’s trip to Italy, and a laminated copy of the Pledge of Allegiance, among other notes.

Biology teacher Marissa Maggio also slipped in a packet containing environmental facts of the week that are supposed to be read every Tuesday. One of them read, “Every day in the US, we produce enough trash to equal the weight of the Empire State Building.”

Since the manila envelope is often brimming with long scripts, Walsh had to be conscious of how long the announcements were taking. “[It] got to the point where when someone gave me a long-winded announcement I was pretty good at trying to pin it down without compromising the message,” Walsh said. “I’ve heard funny anecdotes about teachers, not cursing at me, but just being ‘curse the announcements’ type of thing. It is just [that] we need to get down to business, and I was always positive about it and tried to keep the announcements as punctual and still eloquent and interesting as possible.”

In an effort to keep things interesting, Walsh often supplemented his findings in the manila folder with notices of sports teams’ achievement. As previous captain of the Boys Varsity Lacrosse team, captain of Junior-Varsity Football, and member of Varsity Football, Walsh is no stranger to Stuyvesant’s athletics and the frequently criticized lack of school spirit. “I wanted to try to make it a little more accessible and while it technically may not have been regulation, I was just like ‘If you have a score, tell me in person, give me a handwritten note,’” Walsh said. “It may not have been 100 percent in the rule book but I was just happy that I could help spread Stuy pride and that no one had any concerns.”

Far from anyone having concerns, Walsh got many positive reviews, which resulted in him remaining a student announcer for part of the second semester, despite the fact that the job was supposed to transfer halfway through the year. English teacher Julie Sheinman, who is in charge of selecting the student announcers said, “They were so good, [Walsh and Frolich], but the principal felt like it should be divided up.”

When selecting a student announcer, Sheinman thought that everyone interested in announcing was qualified and as a result the selection of an announcer was relatively simple. During the try-outs, prospective announcers just had to prove they were capable of speaking clearly and energetically. “We put out a notice, and not that many kids came. It was four to five kids so they were all good, so we said okay we’ll divide it up,” she explained.

However, not every single person is fit for being a student announcer. “There are just some people that you are more comfortable listening to in the morning, just like there are some people you would rather hear sing, or certain people you would rather have running on the track team or being on a sports team,” Walsh explained. He is very glad he got the job, and described it as “just one more experience at Stuy that [he] would never want to

Melanie Chow / The Spectator

A Look Behind the Megaphone

pass up on.”

Walsh, who has been very involved in the Stuyvesant Theater Community having starred in the Crucible and directed West Side Story, is especially fond of the “five minutes of fame” he got every morning as he read the announcements. “I definitely do enjoy it in some sort of weird way,” Walsh said, laughing. “It was funny when people would be like ‘hey I know you, you’re Clay Walsh you do the announcements’ or when I would get friend requests from people on Facebook I didn’t know and they were like ‘oh, I know you from the student announcing.’ It is always kinda flattering and sweet.”

Looking back on this year, Walsh remembers one morning announcement particularly vividly.

During suicide awareness week, Walsh heard of a student who had threatened to kill himself/herself over an anonymous Facebook page.

When he saw an announcement from the SPARK office regarding depression and suicide, he got very worked up emotionally. “I kinda deviated from the script and ended up giving my phone number over the announcements just saying, ‘If you want someone to call, I don’t need to know who you are ,just call me,’” Walsh said. “When the person who was threatening these things finally was found, and came forward…

I was really happy to see that they might be able to move on and work

on it. I’d put an inordinate amount of responsibility upon myself, like I was talking to them individually, so just knowing that they were safe was a really great feeling. That was definitely the part of being a student announcer that touched me the most individually.”

As such a passionate announcer, Walsh now has a small fan base in Social Studies teacher Eric Wisotsky’s class. “I know that in Mr. Wisotsky’s class they put up a picture of me next to the speaker, I was really flattered. It just meant that there was a level of involvement of me at the job and the announcements in general. I just hope that I did my job to the standard that everyone wanted, and I hope that I was fun to listen to,” Walsh explained.

Having been raised by a mother who is a playwright, Walsh is a natural performer and is thus content with students simply having an opinion of the student announcements each morning, even if the results aren’t positive. “I like the fact that everyone can walk out of their third-period class and have different opinions on my performance, on whether I was funny that morning, or patronizing that morning, or dumb that morning. I love to be involved in anything possible and if that means speaking through the loudspeakers or if that means being on the stage […] I love to put myself out in the world,” Walsh said.

Kimberlyn Cho / The Spectator

A Chat with Stuyvesant’s Head Cook, Khadija Eddahbi

Head cook Khadija Eddahbi is in charge of the food Stuyvesant students eat and strives to make meals that can be taken out easily.

By Danielle Eisenman Every day, nestled in between class after grueling class, students get a period to refuel, socialize, and possibly scribble down homework assignments or cram for tests. The cafeteria is a Mecca for this midday break, serving up a variety of food daily for the sake of your nourishment. But have you ever stopped to wonder exactly where it all comes from?

Who so artfully spreads the peanut butter and jelly on your sandwich? Who painstakingly arranges salad after salad? Who gives you all those extra mozzarella sticks, even when you don’t ask?

The kitchen staff—that’s who— and I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking to our school’s

head cook.

Khadija Eddahbi has been working in the school system for four years. Eddhabi is probably one of the cutest ladies I’ve ever encountered. She is a bit over five feet tall, with bright, hazel-colored eyes, rosy and round cheeks, and has a huge smile that she never seems to wipe off her face.

Eddhabi takes pride in what she does, assuming her authoritative position with a cheeky sense of dignity, smiling and showing me the ID card that’s clipped to her shirt, saying, “I am the head cook.”

She was more than eager to be interviewed and genuinely enthusiastic about talking to me.

She spoke excitedly and with a slight accent, punctuating everything she said with bubbly giggles.

Her eyes were lit up like beacons of happiness for the entire duration of our conversation. I got the impression that Eddhabi is an overwhelmingly positive person, extremely passionate about what she does for a living.

Stuyvesant students have proven on numerous occasions that they can be annoying.

Whether we’re getting kicked out of Barnes and Noble or Whole Foods or making insensitive comments about BMCC students, we have certainly proven to be irritating. This manifests itself in the cafeteria as well when we take 20 minutes to decide between pizza and chicken nuggets, take extra fruit ices, or try to get away with not paying for our food. However, Eddhabi isn’t particularly bothered by us. “Stuyvesant students,

I’ve noticed, are well-behaved.

Maybe it’s because they always are doing so many things. They are usually very polite,” she said.

She said this without any looming sense of sarcasm, only honest contentment.

We talked a bit about food. I began to ask her what her favorite lunch to eat as a child was, but she excitedly interrupted before I got a chance to finish the question, telling me that her favorite lunch to make for us at school is roasted chicken, beans, and rice. “Anything with rice, I love to make,” she said.

I asked about when she was a teenager, and instead found out that she has children of her own.

“I have two teenage girls and a preteen boy,” she explained.

Their lunch of choice is chicken tenders. Eddahbi seemed to be focusing on American foods, steering the conversation away from more exotic dishes.

Eddahbi talked about going out for cheeseburgers as a teenager with her friends. She said, “But my lunches were usually different. I went to school in Morocco.” She described Moroccan cuisine as usually including some type of meat, and lots of vegetables—“at least six different types of vegetables in every dish.” She offered a laundry list of spices, consisting of paprika, coriander, pepper, saffron, and cilantro, among others.

Her single favorite dish was couscous. “Semolina with meat, vegetables, and spices—that’s Moroccan food,” she said. Her mother made couscous for the

family once a week—every Friday.

“Friday is the day a lot of Muslims take a break. They go to prayer, then come back home, and couscous [is] the meal that they all eat,” she told me. “All of Morocco eats couscous on Friday.”

Eddhabi grew up in a large family, being the youngest of seven boys and three girls. Both of her parents worked—her father was in the jewelry business, her mother a beautician. While Eddhabi’s mother did most of the cooking, as she got older, Eddhabi began to make more and more meals for her family, especially during the summer. She knew from the start that she wanted to pursue a career in food. “I always knew I would,” she told me. “I love cooking. I love creating things for other people.”

When Eddhabi was a child, she was very active. She would play soccer, go swimming, and ride her bike, which is something she still does today. Her favorite place to bike is along the water in Bensonhurst, where she currently resides.

One of Eddhabi’s favorite pastimes was writing her pen pals.

“It was different then. There were no cell phones, no computers— we had to write letters,” she explained. Eddhabi wrote to people in different countries—she knows how to speak every Arabic dialect, French, English, and a bit of German and some Spanish. Arabic is what Eddhabi spoke at home, and she learned French in school.

Eddhabi picked up German when she moved to Germany to study the culinary arts. Her first job

there was at Disney World, where she cooked for the Epcot Restaurant. She loved going to school, and when I asked her what her favorite subject was, she bursted out, “Math!”

After meeting her husband in New York, she decided to move here, where she took a job doing what she loves—cooking.

She knows English from latenight talk shows and from being around the other cafeteria staffers, whom she has grown very close with. “We are like a family,” she told me. “We love to cook for each other.” According to Eddhabi, finals week is especially nice because the kitchen staff doesn’t have to work much, enabling them to have more fun with the food they make for one another.

Eddahbi usually eats the cafeteria food for lunch, which she considers to be “pretty good.” “Of course, it has to be good!” she said. “I eat it. The whole kitchen staff eats it!” Eddahbi used to eat everything she made for the school. “But now, I’m on a diet,” she chuckled. “I usually go with salad these days.”

As the weather gets warmer, Eddahbi wants to focus on making salads, sandwiches, or other meals students can simply grab and take with them outside. As the head cook, Eddahbi is obviously concerned with what is convenient for us as students and cares deeply about what will make us happiest. “You guys are such good kids,” she said. “and I just want to make things easy for you.”

The Spectator ● june 16, 2014

Page 8

Features A Modern Renaissance Woman vision,” Brown said. “I was always allowed to read as much as I wanted and anything I wanted to read.”

Her love for books did not diminish as she grew older, and in the sixth grade she fell in love with melodramatic epics such as “Gone with the Wind” and “Wuthering Heights.” Nearing adolescence, Brown’s literary tastes changed once again. “When I was twelve I wanted to read adult books and that wasn’t allowed in the library, and I told my mother that they’re not letting me take these books out. She went straight down there and she told them ‘you let my daughter read anything she wants’ and from that time on I was always reading adult books and other things that the librarian there didn’t approve of,” Brown said.

Growing up in the rural South in the 1960s and 70s was difficult for her family, as they were liberals living in a sea of conservative Southerners. “My mom never taught me to cook or sew and encouraged me to put off getting married and having children,” Brown said. Instead, her father wanted her to become an engineer since she was good at calculus.

Brown’s education, however, was difficult since she grew up while schools were beginning to be integrated. “We had two schools in town, one for white children and one for black children. The school board’s solution to forced integration was to separate the boys and girls for two years so that all girls went to the former ‘white’ school and all boys went to the former ‘black’ school,” Brown said. She remembers that as a result, her school received backlash. “[The school] regularly had bomb threats and spent a lot of time evacuating the building instead of going to classes. Many of my classmates’ parents sent them to Catholic schools which remained segregated, but my parents weren’t having any of that, and I happily went to school with all the girls,” she said.

After high school she left Louisiana and traveled to New York to work in the fashion business for seven years. As time went on, Brown’s career in fashion morphed into a career as a model. “When I was in Dallas, once somebody came up to me and told me ‘you’re tall and thin, you can probably work as a runway model, here’s the card to my agency,’” she said. Brown recalled being surprised. “It seemed really abrupt to me because I was voted the ugliest girl in my school when I was in ninth grade. I don’t

remember going from being very scrawny with stringy hair and bad skin to being considered attractive.” Brown felt out of place at first, but soon discovered that the agency genuinely wanted her.

While working in the fashion industry, Brown lived with a roommate on the Upper East Side and found life “alternately frenetic and boring.” Though she focused on showroom and runway work rather than photo shoots, she appeared in some well-known trade publications such as “Women’s Wear Daily.” Besides being employed in New York, Brown traveled to Milan to work in the fashion industry. “I wasn’t a blue-eyed blonde, and in Milan they appreciated a more exotic, less All-American-girl look,” Brown explained.

Her experiences working as a runway model didn’t last long. “I basically did that until I aged out of the business, and I was also starting to put on weight. I wasn’t very good at dieting, I mean I wasn’t going to starve myself so I [could] keep working,” she said, laughing. Still, she looks at her fashion period fondly. “The nicest designers I worked with were Giorgio St. Angelo and Bill Blass who were very gentlemanly and treated the models well.” Despite the kind designers, Brown found herself moving away from the fashion industry and towards a more academic profession. “I also worked for Michael Forrest modeling furs before I finally left to work at a law firm because I thought I wanted to go to law school,” she explained.

Brown was interested in starting a career as a paralegal, a professional who has the required education and experience to perform substantive legal work. She started to go to law school, but quickly realized that it didn’t fit her personality. In fact, she left the school three days after she enrolled, but continued her job as a paralegal for a few more years.

“The practice of the law may not have suited me. I am not a very diplomatic person,” she explained.

“But I did like working at the law firm. I made good money and I worked as much as I wanted to.”

With the lifestyle that her job as a paralegal could afford, Brown began to pursue other interests. “I was getting older and approaching the end of my twenties and thinking ‘is this what I want to do with my life?’” she recalled. “I always wanted to teach since I was very young and it just kept coming back. I was tutoring on the side, volunteering, and I realized that if I wanted to be happy I would just have to give up the money and go back to school and train to be a teacher.”

After earning her teaching degree, Brown began to work as an English teacher in Manhattan’s Martin Luther King, Jr. High School, but had a rough transition into her new career. “Many of the students came to school with so much baggage that it was hard to reach them, so it was frustrating and sad. That year I lost a student to leukemia, one to suicide, and my favorite student died at the Happy Land fire, so by the time the end of June came, I was totally freaked out,” Brown said.

Though Brown’s initial plan was to stop teaching, she changed her mind after a summer in which she thought deeply about her job. “[I] stopped thinking the world revolved around me and therefore I could solve every problem, and decided to try again by setting realistic goals for myself. It was a rude awakening to discover that it wasn’t ‘all about me,’ but a good lesson to learn, even at the age of 32,” she recalled.

Brown came back to the school in September and remained there for the next twenty-five years.

During this time the school’s librarian left abruptly and Brown took over the job part time while continuing to teach. She quickly fell in love with being a librarian.

“As a teacher you had thirty-four students in a class, five classes a day and you don’t always develop a one on one relationship with any of them no matter how much you desire to do that,” she said.

Brown believed that as a librarian she could connect with students better than as a teacher since students did not fear her as an authority figure in charge of their grades.

As a librarian, she particularly enjoyed recommending books.

“I have stayed in touch with a lot of students from my previous school where I was a librarian as well and they still email me asking me for recommendations,” Brown recalled wistfully. During the interview, she even had her email open in front of her so she could respond to questions or just chat with students new and old.

Another perk of being a librarian is that Brown “get[s] first dibs on all the books,” she said. “I love opening the boxes and getting new books even if it’s something I am not particularly interested in. I love being around books.”

Though Brown loves working as a librarian, for a time she wanted to pursue a doctorate in Art History, an inclination that led to her leaving MLK and eventually ending up at Stuyvesant. Brown stopped working at MLK because knew she would not be able to work full time while pursuing a doctorate, and instead decided

to work part time at a school for immigrants. “I loved it there because I was both a librarian and a teacher, but it was a small school and so emotionally and physically time-consuming that I couldn’t really study seriously. So I came to Stuy[vesant] and immediately re-enrolled in grad school, ended up hating it and dropped out the second year,” Brown explained.

Brown has enjoyed her experience at Stuyvesant, remarking that she loves how, “it’s okay to be a misfit in [Stuyvesant], and in fact you almost fit in better if you’re a little different.” However, she wishes she could play a more active role as the school’s librarian. “We can’t really do as much as we like to because we have to provide a space for students to study. It’s been really hard to balance,” she said.

Still, it was Brown’s desire to pursue other interests and not her wish to be a more involved librarian that pushed her to retire. “It’s the same thing as a teacher where you don’t have enough money and resources to run things the way you want to. I don’t have enough time to do what I wanted to do as a librarian,” she said. Her passion for art, in particular, led to her decision to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico next year. This decision was unexpected, as Brown never planned on leaving New York.

That only changed when Brown visited Santa Fe last sum

mer and fell in love with the beautiful mountains surrounding the small, yet culturally abundant city. “[When] we got off the plane, [my husband] just said ‘this is it.

We can live here,’” she said. Since the cost of living in Santa Fe is cheaper than that of New York, Brown will now have the opportunity to dive into various art projects. “I’ll go to the opera or some museums and I’d like to paint pictures and write bad poetry myself, maybe make bad films and do all those things those cliché things that older people do when they don’t have to work,” she explained.

Brown also wants to use her free time to travel the world and learn about other cultures. “I like to travel and that’s probably something I’d like to do more.

Another reason I don’t want to be in school is that I want to be available to travel in May or April or October if I want to,” she explained before mentioning her hatred for traveling in the summer.

Even though she plans on retiring, Brown still loves to teach.

As the interview concluded, she jokingly proposed going into a retiring career helping people do research. Although that plan may not come to fruition she mentions that “people tell me that ‘I am afraid that when I retire I’ll be bored,’ but I just worry if there’s enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do.”

Joy Yang / The Spectator

continued from page 1

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Page 9

The Spectator ●June 16, 2014

Page 10

Editorials Staff Editorial

The Spectator

Give Our Numbers Meaning The system by which Stuyvesant students are evaluated is an inaccurate measurement of student achievement.

It’s impossible for a number to summarize passion and work ethic; even subject mastery is difficult to gather so simplistically. The idea of grading itself seems incompatible with the learning process. We encourage students to be driven by external rewards and to create a place where stressing over single points on tests, and not necessarily learning, occurs.

Nevertheless, tenths of points on final averages are supposed to distinguish one student from another. Unfortunately, it seems as though that system is here to stay—so let’s give our numbers meaning.

When minute differences in grade-point averages are to determine (at least partially) our future paths, then we request that it be done right. If teachers are to assign point-values to students, they must implement a uniform and meaningful manner of doing so.

The purpose of a final grade in a course is simple: It’s supposed to reflect accurately a student’s mastery of the material. In order for a grade to fulfill that purpose, it must be determined in a way that’s transparent and objective.

Students should be able to understand why they received a final grade without talking to their teacher or to an Assistant Principal—in other words, the process of determining grades has to be clear and unbiased.

Transparency and objectivity are essential both for ensuring that a high grade correlates to, as closely as it may, subject

Students in a single course, graduating with the same Stuyvesant diploma, should attain the same Stuyvesant-level knowledge base— not just that which is determined by teacher X or teacher Y.

mastery. In addition, it gives students the liberty to freely express contrarian opinions in class without fearing that such action could have negative effects on their final grades.

In theory, grades are determined in a transparent fashion: departmental grading rubrics exist and can be viewed on the Stuyvesant website.

Problems arise, however, when individual teachers break from that rubric, as many do, and determine final grades for students based on their own sets of standards. When this occurs, multiple students taking what is nominally a single course end up, in reality, taking different courses, because the differences between material, as well as difficulty are so great that it becomes illogical to equate the different sections. Though a student with a teacher who grades more harshly may have put in far more work to earn his or her high grade, a student with a more lenient teacher is looked on equally by those reviewing the students’ transcripts.

Even though most students will have a variety of teachers—some who grade leniently and some that grade harshly— throughout their high-school career, there will always be students who fall on the extreme of either end, students who happen to have many teachers who grade harshly or many teachers who grade leniently. Simply put, this should never happen; all students must be given a fair opportunity to earn grades that reflect how hard they work and how talented they are. More importantly, however, is that students in a single course, graduating with the same Stuyvesant diploma, should attain the same Stuyvesant-level knowledge base—not just that which is determined by teacher X or teacher Y. Thus, grades must be determined in a way that’s standardized for all the sections of a course.

Though teachers can and should have unique ways of presenting information and engaging students, tests should be of uniform difficulty across all sections of a course.

For example, each section of freshman geometry should be administered a test of equal difficulty on each individual topic. It would be unfeasible for all teachers to give the same tests—the potential for students to share information about the tests with one another would compromise the integrity of the examinations.

But as curricula are being written before the academic year begins, Assistant Principals of each department could collaborate with teachers to come up with guidelines for exams that are relatively equal.

Another potential solution would be to take some of the precision out of the process of assigning grades. Were Stuyve-

F or the

The Stuyvesant High School Newspaper

“The Pulse of the Student Body” E D I TO R s

IN

C HIEF

Lev Akabas* Teresa Chen* N ews

We stress over the gap between a 95 and a 96, searching for what one has over the other—when in reality, that point might be determined by little more than luck.

sant to transition from its 100-point grading scale to the more traditional 4-point scale, students would be grouped in slightly larger categories according to achievement. Under a 4-point scale, individual classes could transition from assigning number grades to assigning letter grades, which would be averaged together and converted to a score on a scale from 1 to 4. The lettergrade system would prove a form of equalizer, as small discrepancies in level of teacher-difficulty would not be reflected as clearly in students’ grades. Another potential benefit of this system would be that it allows students to focus less on earning individual points, since those will not show up on any transcript, and potentially more on learning the subject material itself.

The unfortunate truth at Stuyvesant is that we come to school to be evaluated. We stress over the gap between a 95 and a 96, searching for what one has over the other—when in reality, that point might be determined by little more than luck.

By receiving grades that accurately display the knowledge we have acquired, as well as how hard we’ve worked, we are able to create a causal link between the learning process and the evaluation process, a link that has the capacity to reduce stress and prevent students from enduring a fouryear-long wild goose chase.

When a single point on our transcript matters, we deserve for it to have meaning.

R ecord

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The Spectator ● May 15, 2014

Page 11

Opinions Don’t Take Away Our SHSAT

By Coby Goldberg The political momentum behind eliminating the SHSAT as the sole admission criterion for New York’s specialized high schools is strong. Over the past year, newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio and State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver of Manhattan both publicly endorsed using other indicators as well to select students. Most recently, legislation has been introduced in the State Senate that would require the use of a “power score” system, taking into account applicants’ Grade Point Average, attendance, and state test scores in addition to SHSAT scores.

The legislation, introduced

by Senator Adriano Espaillat of Manhattan, Assemblyman Karim Camara of Brooklyn, and a number of other Democratic lawmakers, is of course well-intentioned. The unacceptably low numbers of Latino and African American students in the specialized high school system is troubling. It’s simply not healthy for our city to have these two major groups, which together make up 70 percent of the city’s public school students, hold only 12 percent

of the spots at these eight elite schools. But eliminating SHSAT-based admissions is not the answer.

It must be noted that I don’t argue this on my own behalf.

I was fortunate enough to be born into a family of sufficient means, and had I not been admitted to Stuyvesant, I would have had options open to me other than my district public school. However, contrary to what many critics of the SHSAT may say, this privilege is far from the norm at Stuyvesant, or at any of the other seven specialized high schools.

At Stuyvesant, 44 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch plans, according to School Report Card Data for 2011-2012. Although in New York as a whole, 70 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, these numbers are not uniform across the school system. Some schools have only a small percentage of low-income students; others have a disproportionate number, reaching 99 percent in many schools. Clearly, the specialized high schools do not, as many critics argue, significantly favor wealthy applicants.

In addition, many Stuyvesant

students are not just economically disadvantaged. More than three-quarters of Stuyvesant students are first or secondgeneration Americans whose families are struggling to earn their living and whose children are striving to get a solid education that will change their trajectory. Many of those immigrants are Asian-Americans.

Ironically, despite their touted ability to excel in academics, Asian-Americans still face challenges in obtaining equal access to higher education. Stuyvesant and the other specialized high schools represent one of the few pockets of our country’s education system in which these Asian Americans do not face any disadvantage due to their race.

Since 1990, Asian American enrollment rates at elite Ivy League institutions have remained steady at around 1520% of incoming students. This would be normal had the Asian American population grown at the same pace as other racial groups in the United States.

However, as noted in Ron Unz’s 2012 study “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” the population has been increasing rapidly.

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group, more than doubling since 1994 and increasing by 50% between 2000 and 2010. Their scholastic gains are also remarkable.

Asian Americans were 22% of Science Talent Search finalists in the 1980s and rose to 64% of finalists between 2010 and 2012. They made up less than 10% of U.S. Math Olympiad finalists in the 1980s and were 58% of finalists in the first 13 years of the 21st century. Their population growth, coupled with their ever-increasing scholastic prowess, makes it evident that they face discrimination in the college process. There is already such a large system that discriminates against Asian Americans. Why create another such system by eliminating an objective meritocracy?

However, while we should keep the test, we must strive to create a level playing field, by doing more to identify and cultivate talent in all communities.

As a city, let’s work to give everyone the opportunity to succeed. Let’s dramatically expand existing programs, such as the Discover Program, that works to help disadvantaged test takers

get a second chance at meeting the cut-off for Specialized High Schools. Let’s significantly increase funding for the Specialized High School Institute, a Department of Education program that provides test preparation for disadvantaged students with high report card grades and strong attendance records.

Let’s push excellent schools like Eleanor Roosevelt, Millennium, and Scholars’ Academy, who prioritize applicants from their respective districts, to accept more students from all over the city. Let’s do our best to support and strengthen mentoring programs such as StuyPrep and many other volunteer efforts.

New York lawmakers, while certainly well-meaning, will only be slamming another door in the face of hardworking Asian American students, many of them from immigrant families, by ending an admissions process that to those students represents one of the few systems that does not discriminate against them. In the name of those students, in the name of my classmates, I urge the State Senate and City Hall to keep the SHSAT.

Jessica Wu / The Spectator

It’s Time to Talk About Wheelchair Accessibility

By Danielle Eisenman How wheelchair-accessible would you say New York City is?

About five months ago, I would have assumed that it was perfectly accessible. This city is home to eight million people, and, according to a study done by the New York City Transportation Department, 380,000 of them have disabilities that make using public transportation particularly difficult. We can afford to build massive, glittering buildings—ramps and chairlifts should be no big deal. But unfortunately, there is an undeniable shortage of these types of accommodations in our city.

I didn’t put the reality of the situation into perspective until my friend Ruby was injured in a car accident. She uses a wheelchair now, and New York City’s lack of accessibility has become glaringly obvious. For the entirety of the disabled community, public transportation and commercial establishments are not accessible nearly as often as they should be. Even if they are, other problems tend to arise.

“Before I was in a wheelchair,” said Ruby, “and I had to walk up a step, I didn’t think anything of it. I was just going to the store. I was just taking the subway. There was no reason to acknowledge broken elevators or the absence of elevators. But

now, these things affect me so much.”

This doesn’t just happen every once in a while, either. Out of over 500 subway stations, Ruby can only use 99 of them.

It’s true that buses and taxis can be easily accessible, but buses aren’t particularly convenient, and cab prices are pretty steep.

Access-a-Ride is a wheelchairaccessible alternative to public transportation, but it is unreliable.

Even when chairlifts and elevators are available, they tend to be broken. Once, Ruby was taking the subway. She already was frustrated with the “totally ridiculous route” that took “more than twice as long” as it would have if all stations were accessible, but when she got to her destination, the elevator that was supposed to bring her to street level was out of order. She approached an MTA worker with her dilemma, and he offered to carry her. “Sure, that fixes the problem. But it’s degrading. It shouldn’t have to come down to some guy I don’t know having to carry me,” she said.

Chain stores that are part of bigger companies are usually accessible, but smaller restaurants and shops are much less frequently. This is especially difficult for Ruby because all of the neighborhoods where she spends her time—Williams-

burg (where she lives), the East Village, Chinatown, St. Mark’s Place, etc—are dominated by local businesses. She shouldn’t have to settle for IHOP and McDonald’s because her favorite hole-in-the-wall dumpling shop has a narrow doorway and a useless step.

Having to alter your subway route or swap overpriced lychee boba bubble tea with a McFlurry may not seem all that terrible. It is the frequency with which she is denied entry from these places that hits hard. Taking the subway or getting a bite to eat is constantly unnecessarily difficult.

To make sure she can enter a certain store or restaurant beforehand, Ruby usually checks online to see whether or not it is accessible. “Sometimes, websites like Yelp will say that [the establishment] is accessible,” she said, “but then, when I get there, it won’t be, or there’ll be some other issue.”

Even when the proper infrastructure is in place, sometimes employees don’t even know how to work the chairlifts.

Once, when she was at an Urban Outfitters, in order to get to the second floor, she needed to use a chairlift. But, “seven workers there tried to figure out how to operate it and gave up after a while,” she said. Their excuse was that they never had to use it before, as if telling Ruby she was a minority among their other customers helped the situation.

The city’s muddy priorities definitely contribute to the lack of accessibility. “People always say that adding elevators to train stations would be too expensive,” said Ruby, “and I understand that they aren’t cheap.

But, they’re working so hard to add Wi-Fi…” According to the MTA website, adding Wi-Fi will cost about $200 million. The New York Times says adding elevators would cost roughly $1 million a station, which is not

too cheap. However, adding ramps would cost less money, and not all stations need to be accessible.

While modifying pre-existing buildings and subway stations so that they can accommodate the disabled may be difficult, making sure that new buildings are equipped with ramps, chairlifts, and elevators won’t be particularly challenging. Without extra renovations, chairlifts only cost between $1000 and $5000.

Also, many accommodations, such as making aisles

“Public transportation and commercial establishments are not accessible nearly as often as they should be.

Even if they are, other problems tend to arise.”

wider and lowering products so they can be reached by people using mobility devices, cost little or no money at all. The American Disabilities Act says that 56% of accommodations cost absolutely nothing, 37% require a onetime cost (an average of $600), and a mere 4% require an ongoing annual cost.

I’d like to see a law that ensures that all public transporta-

tion and every commercial establishment is accessible, and that the employees are trained to work the machinery and to report broken machinery.

Ruby has asked establishments why they are not accessible before. The managers at Trash and Vaudville, Urban Outfitters, the Union Market, and a whole slew of other places all said the same thing—that there simply aren’t enough people in her situation to invest time and money into wheelchair-accessible accommodations. However, costly renovations would not be necessary if all buildings were built slightly differently in the first place so that they were already accessible.

One reason for the lack of accessibility is the lack of awareness of this issue. Ablebodied people, myself included, tend not to realize other peoples’ struggles. The truth is that there is an entire community of people that struggle daily with things that could be fixed with simple building accommodations.

Wheelchair accessibility is something that needs to be talked about. Awareness can be spread a variety of ways— with representation of disabled characters in popular media, articles in school newspapers— whatever it takes! People need to know about these issues.

Society needs to be more aware of the people who have disabilities, so that those who build every establishment and every transportation system know to include accommodations that make them wheelchair-accessible. These accommodations should be legally enforced, with inspectors to ensure that all machinery is working properly and that employees know how to work it.

New York City is a place for people from all walks of life. It should be accessible to everyone.

The Spectator ●June 16, 2014

Page 12

Opinions

Chiara Baker / The Spectator

The Gender Binary

By Samia Siddiqui “You can’t play with Hot Wheels” was something I was used to hearing as a child. It seemed ridiculous to me that cars were considered “boy toys.”

I was often alienated due to my preferences, which other children perceived as odd. The gender

identity I was forced to adopt at a young age made me severely uncomfortable, affected my personal social development, and made it difficult for me to adjust to school. Today, I identify as gender fluid—a gender identity that varies from day to day. It took years until I understood the reasons why most young children became

adamant about gendered toys: the gender binary. The gender binary is a social construct prevalent in most cultures throughout the ancient and modern world. A prescribed set of behaviors, ideals, and hopes are automatically assigned to a child, based on their biological sex.

Gender and sex, however, are not interchangeable terms. Gender refers to the state of being oriented male or female, and is socially defined. Sex refers to the sex organs one is born with and is defined based on biological anatomy. The view of gender as a binary, or a strict definition, of either male or female, is harmful to everyone. It often causes people to subconsciously make decisions based on the set of expectations that have been placed upon them as a result of their sex. The gender binary alienates those who identify as genderqueer, people who do not fit into it neatly. It is restricting and oppressive to almost everyone at one point or another, male or female.

As soon as a child’s sex is determined, the parents automatically lean toward which shades of color are assigned to that particular sex. Females are typically bought bright, mixed colors while males are bought primary colors that are often seen as more bold.

This is the first step towards preparing the child for establishment of their gender identity, which typically occurs between the ages of two and five. Its influence extends throughout our entire lives.

Advertising companies choose a gender demographic when marketing their toys. While this may seem like a harmless marketing technique, it extends further-these toys suggest gender roles, sending messages to children about how they are expected to act. Girls are encouraged to play with dolls and Easy-Bake Ovens, while boys are encouraged to experiment with Legos and play dress up in costumes of working men. In a child’s mind, the message is clear: girls’ appearances are important, and they should know how to dress their dolls (and consequently, themselves). Girls are expected to cook; boys are expected to work. Similarly, it sends boys the message that cooking is a “girl thing.” In this way, we are discouraging the cognitive potential of females and discouraging the talent of males in areas considered to be feminine.

A friend of mine quit ballet as a result of its being perceived as feminine. Such choices even extend to behavior. A man in a position of power is more likely to be respected for laying down the law while women are more likely to be perceived as bossy for the same conduct. While certain biological differences between the sexes exist, we exaggerate them. A woman is more likely to bond with her baby as a result of the release of oxytocin caused by breastfeeding.

However, a father releases oxytocin when he spends time with his infant. In divorce court, women are preferred over men to have

custody of the child. A woman is not always a better caretaker, but as a result of the gender binary, we tend to think that that is the case.

It can be troublesome for a child to be handed over to a mother who is not fit for the job.

Quite clearly, genderqueer people are most affected by the gender binary. In fact, having a gender identity other than male or female is considered a disorder, called Gender Dysphoria.

People who are naturally born with sex-related diseases such as Klinefelter Syndrome, a genetic disorder that consists of both female and male body traits, are highly encouraged to undergo surgery. What’s wrong with their natural bodies? They are forced to choose one of two sexes and one of two socially accepted gender identities.

A healthier way of categorizing gender is the gender spectrum, which emphasizes that gender should not be seen as a black or white concept, but rather as shades of grey. We are human, fluid rather than static and talented in various aspects, and the gender spectrum would better reflect our diversity as individuals.

It’s time we let go of this archaic social construct and focus on the wide array of gender identities that exist and, in the process, become more accepting of others, allowing people to pursue their talents regardless of whether or not they fit into traditional gender roles.

By Nalanda Sharadjaya Flashback to February 27, 2002, in a train station near a Muslim slum in a city in Gujarat (a state in western India). Hindu pilgrims and activists were on a train when a riot broke out in the station of the city of Godhra. According to the official reports, the train was set on fire, killing nearly 60 people.

Among the dead were Hindu pilgrims returning from a holy site. Soon, blame fell to Muslims, who remain a minority in Gujarat and in most of India.

Three days of political unrest ensued. Violent Hindu mobs targeted Muslim communities, destroying mosques and shrines and brutally murdering hundreds of people. Survivors of the attacks insisted that although they had looked to the police for help, most officials turned a blind eye and permitted the violence to continue.

The Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time was Narendra Modi, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which calls itself a right-wing Hindu nationalist organization. Its founders drew their inspiration from European fascist

groups like the Nazis during World War II. So it’s no surprise that instead of condemning the violence and urging Hindu rioters to calm down, Modi used words like “terrorists” and “cannibals” to describe the Muslim arsonists in Godhra. He also assured the mostly Hindu public that no one would “ever dream to commit such a heinous act” again (although he made no such promises to the Muslims who were being slaughtered just days later).

After the riots finally subsided, he claimed that his biggest regret wasn’t the fact that 800 Muslims died; rather, he felt he might have controlled the media better. This cavalier attitude led to speculation about his involvement with the violence, and although there are several different accounts, the general consensus is that, at the very least, he knew what was going on (namely, he was aware of the lack of involvement form the police) and did nothing about it.

Despite his controversial involvement in the Gujarat riots of 2002, Modi really did attempt to implement policies for development as Chief

Minister by starting initiatives to improve Gujarat’s infrastructure. During his campaign, he consistently promised to develop India while steering clear of his more controversial personal and religious prejudices, encompassing this idea in his “Toilets before temples” slogan.

In a country where things like running water and constant electricity aren’t readily available to the poor living in the appalling conditions of slums in otherwise well-developed cities, the idea of a Prime Minister who would be dedicated to developing its infrastructure attracted a lot of voters.

When he ran for Prime Minister of India this spring, Modi built his entire campaign on the promise that he would implement on a national scale the same infrastructure policies that he did in Gujarat. He called this the “Gujarat Model.”

But while it’s true that he’s improved infrastructure for the middle class (like improving roads and city buildings), the kind of Prime Minister India needs is someone who will cater to the basic demands of the Indian poor. Barely a quarter of Gujarati households have access to basic amenities like drinking water, electricity, and sanitation. Compared to Kerala (another Indian state)’s 71 percent, it’s difficult to argue that Modi has really made any notable improvement.

Other aspects of social development continue to demonstrate Modi’s lack of attention to the poor in terms of his policies. Female feticide and infanticide (the act of aborting a fetus or murdering a newborn baby because of its gender) are both extremely prevalent, and the female-to-male population ratio is quite a bit lower in Gujarat than in India overall. In a

report on the state of hunger in India, Gujarat ranked fourth from last, placing in the “alarming” category of severity and suggesting that its malnutrition rates are abnormally high.

Modi has done very little to address issues like these.

The most striking shortcoming of Modi’s rule in Gujarat is, indeed, his lack of attention to disadvantaged minorities and their struggle. Modi argues that politicians shouldn’t treat Muslims as if they need an extra hand, and the issue of poverty should be seen as an Indian one, instead of treating the Muslim poor and the Hindu poor separately. But while this sentiment seems to be inclusive, it’s really not. Even though a mandate on religious tolerance exists in the Indian Constitution, discrimination against Muslims still persists today. Muslims have been heavily discriminated against in recent times in India. Examples can be found in violent attacks like the Gujarat riots of 2002, but also in more subtle instances like being declined from a job position, or housing. Muslims are a clear minority in India, comprising of about 13 percent of its population, but they make up close to half of India’s poor.

Therefore, policies directed at the poor as a whole will be disproportionately helpful to Hindus (who do not face the same discrimination that Muslims do in the workforce).

Given his record of neglect when it came to the massacre of Muslims in his native state, and of lopsided funding for development (which benefited the middle class more than it did the poor), it’s hard to believe that on May 16, 2014, the same Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India by the second-widest margin

in an Indian election. And it’s harder still to fathom how some of his voters were actually Muslim. What could it have taken for a guy like Modi to win?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Indians had no alternatives. Perhaps they were fed-up. Modi’s strongest opponent, Rahul Gandhi, is the latest in a long line of politically influential family members who have, especially in recent years, done very little to improve the country. The Gandhi family’s strikingly low approval rate had the public looking for someone, anyone, who might bring a change to the current regime.

With his impressive public speaking skills, his authoritative demeanor, and the remarkable efficiency of his campaign, Modi was the perfect mold for that “anyone else.”

Narendra Modi has done little, if anything, to support the poor and the minorities. A candidate like that doesn’t deserve to be in office. However, despite these shocking concerns, we do know one thing: the largest democracy in the world came out in the past few weeks in droves and bestowed the fate of their country in Modi’s hands. Time will only tell whether the Indian people have really made a Faustian bargain.

Courtney Chiu / The Spectator

Danielle Eisenman / The Spectator

India’s Evolution: Descent With “Modi”-fication

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 13

Opinions

By Nicolette Hussain Strolling through the mall with a group of friends one Saturday night, I caught sight of, to say the least, an unusual poster.

We decided to take a closer look.

The ad featured what appeared to be a polaroid taken in a basement—of a half-naked 16-yearold girl on a bed with her legs spread apart, looking directly at the camera. The caption read in large bold lettering, “Now Open.”

A young girl, perhaps 12 years old, passed us with her mother.

“Mama, I want to look like her!” she exclaimed.

American Apparel, an American clothing manufacturer, distributor, and retailer based in Los Angeles, California, has made a name for itself running extremely controversial ads, largely at the instigation of founder and CEO Dov Charney. Charney prides his company on its model of sweatshop-free labor, fair wages, and refusal to outsource manufacturing. However, these seem to be the company’s only redeemable qualities when weighed against the number of scandals the company has accrued along the way.

Accusations of racial insensitivity, sexual harassment, and sexualization of children have

plagued American Apparel in the last decade alone. But according to American Apparel spokesperson Peter Schey, all the incidents have only strengthened the company and improved the lives of its roughly 10,000 employees, implying that the scandals themselves are a form of advertisement, serving to keep AA in the spotlight. Charney proclaims the lawsuits brought against him are actually a “testimony to [his] success,” attempts made by resentful competition to capitalize on the popularity of his company.

But Charney fails to realize that his success comes at the expense of running borderline pornographic imagery to a demographic of easily-influenced teenage girls. He neglects to acknowledge the consequences of labeling his advertisements of vulnerable women in provocative poses as, what he calls, “feminist.” Yes, feminist! American Apparel creative director Iris Alonzo, discussing the company’s recent “Made in Bangladesh” campaign, which features a completely topless Bangladeshi woman with the words “Made in Bangladesh” sprawled across her naked chest, claims American Apparel “celebrates women, diversity, healthy body image and female empowerment in [its] ads and in [the] company culture in general.” But head-on photographs of the crotches and chests of 16-year-old models do not empower them. Instead, they are sexualized and degraded, reduced to pretty objects displaying their bodies instead of their clothes.

Some may respond to claims of objectification by dismissing the advertisements as provocative and attention-grabbing. In response, I reached out to an American Apparel model, who wished to remain anonymous.

She did, however, shed light on how objectification can often pass unnoticed. She claimed that she did not have an opinion on

feminism, but did “guess [American Apparel can] portray girls as sexual creatures [in an] attempt to push the boundaries, to surprise people, reach a new level.”

When asked if she herself ever felt objectified, she responded in the negative, asserting she felt “promiscuous sometimes, but not really objectified.” Her comments are a perfect testimony to a greater culture of objectification.

Many women see ads like American Apparel’s as the norm. They allow companies to take advantage of the aspirations of young girls, who are told that their bodies are their only possessions of value and will lead to greater success in the modeling and entertainment industries. Instead of young girls hoping to one day become great thinkers and innovators, they see others their own age on billboards all over the city, clad in scanty clothes and dull expressions.

As a result, thousands of girls, whose ages run from 13 to 21, have responded to AA’s numerous calls to be the next big thing.

For instance, AA’s “Best Bottoms” campaign, which invited girls with the slogan ““Confident about the junk in your trunk?

Show us your assets! Post a photo of your booty’s best side for judgment. We’re looking for a brand new bum (the best in the world!) to be the new “face” for our always expanding intimates and briefs lines,” convinced 1,300 girls to send pictures of their behinds. Even more girls respond to American Apparel open calls, crowding local stores with lines extending for blocks.

American Apparel, like many companies before it, has realized that sex sells, and uses young girls to increase its already multimillion dollar profit margin. What makes AA different than companies like Victoria’s Secret, Hollister, and Abercrombie and Fitch, that also depend on the bodies of men and women to sell, is its visibly low standards. The mod-

els themselves are beautiful, but the fact that the pictures look like they were taken in a basement, the fact that the models look half-drunk and even in pain, the fact that campaigns like “Micro Mesh,” “Stirrup Socks,” “Pantytime,” “Tights,” and “Mini” almost always focus on the crotchets, behinds, and breasts of girls without faces—these are the reasons action must be taken. And indeed, some already have. For example, regulators like Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority have attempted to ban what it has called “sexually suggestive, gratuitous and flirtatious” ads that “sexualize models who appear to be children.”

Action must be taken on an individual level if we are to prevent girls, like the 12-year-old I

saw at the mall, from being told that what makes them beautiful is their bodies, not their intellect, personalities, or strength.

Of course, every girl should feel proud of her body type, and should feel comfortable wearing whatever she pleases. But parents, teachers, and friends must make an effort to tell girls they are beautiful for other reasons, too. We should, instead of valuing models for their bodies, value intelligent and respected women for their minds. Girls should be taught that they are worth more than what companies pay them to strip naked. And they should know that feminism is not a ploy for those same companies to sell their products but a chance to gain equal footing in the world and to reach new heights.

Zovinar Khrimian / The Spectator

Hayoung Ahn / The Spectator

American Appalling

By Alex Hirsch With the rise of social media, it seems like almost every company has its own Facebook page. And, it’s quite easy to simply “like” a favorite brand. However, few people would ever suspect that doing so could invalidate some of their legal rights in the event of a dispute. And yet, this is exactly what Cheerios and other General Mills companies have done: their new online policy, released last month, states that those who “like” their brands on Facebook are agreeing to waive their legal rights in favor of a corporate-run arbitration system, in the event of dispute.

This legal alternative bypasses the courts in favor of a private arbitration company’s ruling: essentially a privatized legal system. Frighteningly, more companies, including popular digital-storage brand Dropbox, are considering the same policies for those buying their products, as well. And that’s still not all: companies are including arbitration clauses in employment contracts, thus removing legal rights for workers who are wrongfully terminated or otherwise abused by their employer. Incredibly, this trend threatens to replace the American legal system with arbitration, wherever corporations are involved.

However, the reliability of arbitration is bleak. The arbitration process, in which a panel of arbitrators takes the place of a judge or jury by hearing the complaints of the consumer weighed against the defense of the corporation involved, has several inherent, concerning biases. The arbitration panel, for one, is hired by the corporation that would be accused in a dispute, thus discarding the objectivity of a trial. Arbitration firms even assign bigger cases - with higher pay - more frequently to arbiters who tend to rule in favor of corporations, creating a dangerous and continuous cycle of false justice.

This means that plaintiffs are at a disadvantage from the very start. Thus, it’s no surprise that research group Public Citizen found that consumers win their total asking amount through arbitration in just four to seven percent of their cases.

Furthermore, this system contractually waives the option of pursuing class-action lawsuits, frequently used when scores of consumers hold the same claim against a single corporation. It’s effectiveness in protecting consumers and providing swift justice to a large amount of people is a crucial component of our justice system. Class-action lawsuits ensure that a group of consumers can make the same case, which

becomes difficult when it’s every plaintiff for themselves.

Thus, removing this option in favor of a system honoring just one claim at a time is a considerable obstacle to consumer rights, and even interferes with the ability to set up a fund for those who have won a case due to the separate payouts, further complicating the process of compensation. Even more concerning are the fees charged to those making a claim. The National Consumer Law Center reports that filing a claim alone usually costs over $250, which is then followed up by further charges for various legal motions, which piles on to the initial cost. Not only is arbitration unfair, but expensive, too.

As several firms increasingly force these new policies upon consumers and employees using contractual clauses, more corporations are slowly following along, and introducing their own. ABC News found recently that 20 percent of employers already use them, and that number is gradually increasing. This trend has caught he courts’ attention, who are now taking notice, but despite their opportunity, they have disturbingly ruled consistently in favor of corporate interest. Despite the negative implications of consumers’ rights to sue being replaced with a cheap, inferior alternative, the courts are legal-

izing a system which reduces corporate liability. Even the Supreme Court has allowed this concerning trend to continue, by ruling that arbitration has become a reliable mainstay of the American justice system and that arbitration should be available when deemed necessary.

Beyond objectivity, another important element of the legal system would be removed by arbitration: deterrence against wrongdoing. The courts, for the most part, award generous payouts when a consumer or employee falls victim to a company’s mistakes. But because arbitration generally awards lower compensation, usually around half of what a consumer requests, corporations and employers are able to exercise greater freedom, knowing that their liability has been limited by the system. Allowing corporations to make significant mistakes without undesirable punishments shifts the balance of legal power away from consumers. Therefore, we may be inadvertently welcoming a new era of consumer susceptibility to the errors that companies inevitably make - without the comfort of knowing that they may be held accountable.

As arbitration suddenly makes an intimidating appearance in replacing the American legal system, it is crucial that

Nicole Rosengurt/ The Spectator

Where’s My Trial?

our government reexamines the consequences. The removal of both objectivity and holding companies accountable for their actions is a major obstacle to our pursuit of justice. The courts must also change course by ruling these arbitration clauses illegal in the interest of consumer rights, and likewise, that Congress limit arbitration’s usage.

As companies collect judicial power, consumers need to fight for their legal rights. Allowing such a dangerous trend to continue will only leave us helpless against the inevitable mistakes of corporate America.

Page 14

The Spectator ●June 16, 2014

Opinions

Anne Duncan / The Spectator

Kodsi Column: A Real Union

By Daniel Kodsi Here’s a brief recap of last year’s general election: a candidate, Jack Cahn, wins with a whopping majority and then is disqualified based on the Board of Election’s threestrike system: one strike for badmouthing his opponent, one for using Student Union resources, and one for putting up too many posters on some of the school’s bulletin boards.

All the claims are disputed, but in the end, the Board of Election’s decision is upheld, and this year we end up with an inactive Student Union and a president, Eddie Zilberbrand, who rarely speaks at SLT meetings.

Since then, out of the 16 bullet-points on The Spectator’s wishlist in Issue 1 of the year, which included such outrageous demands such as “[f ]reedom to enter the school before the warning bell during

lunch periods” and “[a]ccess to the library during the entire period, instead of just 15 minutes after the start bell,” only two have been even partially fulfilled: the dress code was made more relaxed and juniors (but not underclassmen) were granted out to lunch privileges during frees.

Though school policy might not be, I was sure one thing would be different this year: the Board of Elections would at least be competent.

There would be no glaring errors in the elections’ management and the board would remain inconspicuous. I was proved wrong. On the first day of elections, incorrect results were posted with the wrong winners declared in the senior and junior caucus elections and a tie in the SU election, when in fact Keiran Carpen and Jonathan Aung had edged out Gabriel Rosen and Justin Kong by a slim margin. The

most egregious mistake was in the senior caucus election, where the original results overstated the number of votes that went to the ticket of Adam DeHovitz and Sanam Bhatia by more than 220.

I am certain the Board of Election had no malicious intent, and believe Board chairman Shazif Shaikh, who told me, Arts and Entertainment Editor Shahruz Ghaemi and Editor in Chief Teresa Chen that there had been no tampering involved. But that doesn’t matter. Its legitimacy has been compromised a second year in a row. For an organization that effectively has the sole responsibility of counting votes, to so drastically miscount the election results and then not to realize they were wrong before they were posted is a grievous error.

What this shows above all (because, to be fair, the technical error only affected the lives of a few dozen, and only for a few hours) is the serious need to move beyond Stuyvesant’s representative institutions.

We have an inactive Student Union and a poorly run Board of Elections. Thousands upon thousands of us will spend four years of our lives at this school. It is our responsibility to both ourselves and to future years’ classes to defend student rights, and if the bodies set up for us to do that aren’t working, we need to find other methods of standing up for ourselves.

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Looking back at the last year, I have begun to see that the greater issue at play is mass apathy. The vast majority of students did not vote in the recent general election for the Student Union campaign.

After The Spectator’s endorsements came out, a few of my friends messaged me asking why we had endorsed Rosen and Kong over Carpen and Aung. Pointing to both our blurb on Carpen and our Issue 14 editorial, I summarized what had been the Editorial Board’s rationale: the SU hadn’t done anything all year.

To my shock and dismay, I received the near unanimous response “but what were they supposed to have done?” We have grown to expect nothing, and until we actively make a stand as a student body, it is clear that nothing will be done.

The principle behind a union, which is ostensibly what the Student Union is, is that though each of us alone might be forced to cave to the administration, standing together we are unbreakable.

This lesson has gone forgotten, with only faint vestiges stirring: a candidate for SU president promising to involve major publications if administrators refuse to cooperate, the student newspaper publishing an occasional op-ed or editorial. No wonder we ended up with a Board of Elections that barely functions.

This year is almost at an end. To be perfectly honest, I don’t foresee much progress, regardless of which ticket was elected. At this point, the Student Union is little more than a vehicle for getting election winners into top colleges and for the administration to humor the student body. It fulfills its allocated functions, such as management of funds, but it is not a real organization for reform. Let’s move past it. It was more than two years ago that former Opinions editor Daniel Solomon called for us to “turn our tea and scones or coffee and muffins into political statements, openly walking past the scanners and not [let] anyone tread on us.”

And yet, we still smuggle our hot drinks into the school in the pockets of our coats. We have taken no action in these two years. If the administration won’t cease its policies and the Student Union isn’t functioning, next year we must change our response. Walk in with food and drink held in hand. Collaborate with your classmates and stand against onerous and rote homework assignments.

Demand an explanation from the security guards instead of letting them brusquely order you off the half-floor. Reclaim the fifth floor as a place to do work during frees. If we all band together to form a real union, one that actually stands strong, then next year we will see change.

The Spectator â—? June 16, 2014

Food

By The Art Department

Page 15

The Spectator â—? June 16, 2014

Page 16

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The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 17

Arts and Entertainment Food

Sabrina Huang / The Spectator

Critic’s Notebook: Bright Lights, Big City, Expensive Tastes

Over 40 restaurants participated in Taste of Times Square, an annual outdoor food and music festival held on June 2.

By Shahruz Ghaemi with additional reporting by Daniel Kodsi You could almost be forgiven for passing by Taste of Times Square without noticing it. Wandering musicians, street food vendors, and throngs of people in the middle of the road—nothing new. (What do you mean pedes-

trians don’t always have the right of way?) But this is actually a onetime bonanza of restaurants and eateries from the Times Square district showcasing their wares, both for self-promotion and as a symbol of this international mecca. Green-and-white-themed tents stretch for three blocks, huddling away from the blistering sun beneath flashing signs and bill-

boards for Idina Menzel’s new play “If/Then.”

Your correspondents actually showed up slightly before opening time at 5:00 on Monday June 2, which let us have a good look at the festival before the crowds started arriving in force. It was an underwhelming initial impression. The first booth on our journey, operated by the notorious rock-and-

roll-themed tourist trap chain Hard Rock Café, was still busy setting up. The only discernable aroma in the air was not food, as we hoped, but rather the charcoal being burnt down at the Applebee’s booth. Moreover, although festival admission was advertised as “free,” our lunch was not, in fact, on the house. “Taste tickets” sold for $1 each were required to purchase food (usually in the 2-4 ticket range for, as we noticed, rather small proportions).

We sent up prayers when we reached My Belly’s Playlist, the first booth with actual food. Their Chicken Pestolata was a crunchy sandwich with a melt-in-yourmouth taste that turned out to be among the highlights of our time at Taste of Time Square. The unique ingredients in addition to chicken cutlets and pesto sauce --- zucchini, parsley, red onion, and almond --- were conveniently displayed on their table like a cornucopia. The zucchini in particular added a filling springiness to a sandwich that is usually just chunks of chicken.

Also of note was Mexican restaurant Toloache’s Tacos Al Pastor, made with what seemed to be roasted pork, onions, parsley, a spicy salsa, and, curiously enough, pineapple. The salsa and the pineapple, at once spicy and sweet, were both extremely bold flavors that clashed well. The Sub with Sausage, Onion, and Pepper from Becco, an Italian joint, was nowhere near as pleasing. Although it was the largest portion of food we received throughout the whole festival, the sausage was plain, the onion mushy, and the peppers

downright soggy.

The festival wasn’t just about food, though—various musicians played throughout the tents. We passed by the delightfully hipster Baby Soda Jazz Band featuring bassist Peter Ford’s string box bass.

It’s exactly what it sounds like; a broomstick stuck into a wooden box with one string. Meanwhile, longtime subway performer StreetMule pulled out an Australian didgeridoo (similar to the vuvuzela). According to his website (and as we can confirm), he “harnesses the city’s vibrant energy in a tribal soundscape.”

We finished off the walking tour by sitting down listening to the George Gee Swing Orchestra (their jazz was nothing particularly special) with a plate of of French restaurant Le Rivage’s Bread Pudding. Although the pudding, topped with raspberry sauce and custard, looked to be typically dense, the dessert was actually astonishingly light and not too sweet at all; the raspberry and custard blend floated on the tastebuds.

By the end of our stay, we had spent around $40, though we were divided as to whether or not we received enough food to be considered “full.” Struggling to the exit through impossibly dense crowds, we decided that it was a good thing we arrived so early. If experienced at the right time, Taste of Times Square offers mostly great food and interesting live music, albeit for prices that will certainly make some students wince. Put on annually, it is just one more event New Yorkers should check out (alone or with someone else) during the bright days of summer.

By Liana Chow I have no memory of my family fleeing from our home two blocks from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

My mother was dropping off my older brother at the elementary school across the street from Stuyvesant when the first plane struck. Though my brother would write stories and poems about his grief, I was just a toddler and too young to remember the event. However, as I grew, 9/11 was always a ghost around me. In my neighborhood, there remained the fires and the construction site as reminders of the nearly 3,000 people killed that day. But the newly opened 9/11 Memorial Museum brought the trauma directly to me; it gave me an unforgettable experience that played through my head for days after my visit.

Located deep underground and only 10 minutes from Stuyvesant, the Museum tells the story of the terrorist plane attacks on the World Trade Center. It displays artifacts such as mangled chunks of the buildings, videos and photos documenting the event, and quilts and pieces of writing that people have made to memorialize all that was lost. Though the individual artifacts are clearly illuminated, the Memorial Museum is shrouded in darkness.

The most searing part of the museum is how vividly each victim’s story is told. A large room called “In Memoriam” is lined on every side with faces in colorful rows that seem to stretch forever. The sheer mass of 2,983 faces of victims is devastating enough.

Even more tragic is the zooming in on each of the individuals.

Using the touchscreen tables, visitors can enlarge the photos onto giant screens in an inner

chamber—a poignant remembrance of any one of the victims.

These tributes are recordings by relatives and friends, accompanied by photos and videos. This is a gentle sharing of grief.

A huge wall covered in blue squares, called, “Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning,” separates the Museum from the repository for unidentified remains of those who died. Artist Spencer Finch painted a different but stunning and cloudless shade of blue onto 2,983 squares, one for each person killed, which together form a huge and powerful paper mosaic of life right before the attack.

Despite the color variations, a visitor can envision him or herself under the pure sky that day.

In the exhibit called ‘September 11, 2001,’ the day of 9/11 is experienced all over again in terrifying detail.

In the exhibit called “September 11, 2001,” the day of 9/11 is experienced all over again in terrifying detail. Two multi-media timelines run parallel along the walls. The timeline “In the

Air” includes panicked quotes such as “I don’t know, I think we’re getting hijacked,” as well as the movements of the hijacked planes targeting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “On the Ground” chronicles how long it took President George W. Bush to react to the news of the plane crashes, when the towers fell, and who came to help.

On the walls along the timelines play videos, one of a man who jerks up as a plane collides with one of the towers and he sees it explode; visitors flinch when he does. Other screens display television stations stopping mid-interview to show the smoking, crumbling Twin Towers. Pictures from above and below show how the smoke cloud obliterated that perfect blue sky and left the neighborhood in darkness. As my father looked at a diagram of boats summoned to Battery Park City for rescues, he outlined the path of the random tugboat that he handed me up onto so we could escape the dust and debris-filled neighborhood.

Witnesses can relate themselves to the wide-scale pictures that the exhibit shows. A giant photograph taken from the north shows Stuyvesant High School, small in the foreground, under the burning top of the huge North Tower. (For additional coverage of this tragic day, read The Spectator’s commemorative magazine online, published by students who fled Stuyvesant into the dust cloud on 9/11. The issue was so moving that The New York Times distributed it throughout the tri-state area.)

The museum’s large underground space—called the Center Passage—reveals rusty metal squares on the floor that are remnants of the box columns that anchored the Twin Towers in bedrock. Like the much larger

Carol Deng / The Spectator

Memorial An Underground Museum With Grief on Display

The 9/11 Memorial Museum opened to the public on May 21.

square footprints of the Twin Towers, the box column remnants are outlines of monumental lost structures. On a crushed staircase from the World Trade Center, the ghosts of the people running down the steps are almost palpable. A chunk of the North Tower’s antenna is reminiscent of an enormous felled tree trunk with its branches gone awry. Until this antenna was destroyed, it transmitted television signals across New York City. A fire truck crippled on 9/11 sits in the Center Passage as well.

So what survived? The Foundation Hall has the giant slurry wall towering over one side of it.

The wall was built underground, when the Twin Towers were first built, to keep the Hudson River water out of the construction site. Museum visitors can see it in its original place, having done its job in the attack’s aftermath.

The destroyed objects can eventually be replaced or rebuilt with time, money, and work.

The film “Rebirth at Ground

Zero” is a hopeful demonstration of this. The dusty chasm, which a speaker in the video refers to as “a big wound down there,” transforms over years of time-lapse snapshots into a shimmering glass tower. Right next to the museum, One World Trade Center reaches 104 stories and now blends into the sky.

But the people can’t be replaced. Anyone who visits the Museum doesn’t fail to grieve for them, especially staring into the depths of the massive fountains that mark the Twin Tower footprints and that are bordered with names of the victims. There are often roses left on top of the carved names by people who lost loved ones as symbols of mourning. After leaving the museum, even visitors who weren’t in the line of destruction will share in their heartbreak.

Admission to the 9/11 Memorial Museum, 180 Greenwich Street, is $15 for students but free on Tuesday evenings through online reservations.

Page 18

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Arts and Entertainment Summer Calendar

Theater

Killing It, Heathers Style

By Emma McIntosh

• Experience free music, theater, and comedy throughout the city as part of SummerStage (June 3 – Aug 24).

• Spike Lee’s “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” will be shown as part of the American Black Film Festival (June 19 – 22).

• Governor’s Island is open all week for the first time since 2004. Explore the island on foot or bike (bring your own or borrow one for free). Round-trip ferry rides for $2.

• Go catch-and-release fishing at Central Park’s Harlem Meer with free fishing poles and bait.

• Neil Patrick Harris will play the titular transgender rock musician in the musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” until Aug 20, when he will be replaced

by Andrew Rannells.

• Cheer for your favorite soccer team during the World Cup (June 12 – July 13). Keep an eye out for Brazil’s darling player, the 22-year old forward Neymar.

• Enjoy the U.S. Open Tennis Championship (Aug 25 – Sept 8), played right here in NYC. • Visit HBO’s Bryant Park Summer Film Festival for free, opening with “Saturday Night Fever” (June 16 – Aug 18).

• Lower Manhattan will once again host the River to River Festival with music, food, and crazy hair at South Street Seaport (June 22).

A remake of the 1988 film “Heathers” starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater, “Heathers: The Musical” adds an—if not lighthearted—enjoyable twist to the wonderfully disturbing storyline. Veronica Sawyer (Barrett Wilbert Weed), who finds her way into a friendship with the Heathers—Heather Chandler (Jessica Keenan Wynn), Heather Duke (Alice Lee), and Heather McNamara (Elle McLemore)—the most popular girls at Westerberg High School, soon realizes that their clique might not be where she belongs. When Veronica gets kicked out of the group, she begins to spend time with the mysterious and downright sexy JD (Ryan McCartan), who adds some excitement to her life, but soon begins to pull her down a darker path so now her “teen angst bullshit has a body count.”

The movie seamlessly transitions between the lighthearted teen comedy that is expected of it and the gut-wrenching thriller it turns out to be. Its success, in a way, set the stage for other films, such as “Mean Girls,” that used the high school experience and projected it onto the screen, no matter how unconventional the version. Slater and Ryder took hold of JD and Veronica’s seemingly stereotypical high school relationship and ran with it, warping it into the almost Bonnie and Clydeesque relationship that can be seen as the film progresses.

Veronica’s realization that JD is bad news comes a little too late, and she is sucked into his psychopathic world.

This off-Broadway production at New World Stages is a superb adaptation of the iconic movie, but with a little more singing and dancing. Although a fan of the movie might be hesitant to trust that a musical version could be anything loyal to the original (its storyline is significantly darker than that of most musicals), “Heathers: The Musical” manages to stay true to the film—even incorporating a few direct quotes—and only further supports them with its captivating soundtrack. Lauren O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy, who are responsible for the book, music, and lyrics, have created a show that can often somehow

be hilarious but shudder-worthy at the same time.

The adaptation of such a film into a musical was risky, but the score truly proves itself as outstanding. Each song on the soundtrack is perfectly sculpted to enhance both the situation and the personality of the character(s) singing. For instance, when the Heathers sing together, like in the rousingly sassy song “Candy Store,” they’re in perfect harmony as they try to coax Veronica into doing their bidding, and each movement, each hip sway, is synchronized. In contrast, the duets between JD and Veronica never sound quite as cohesive.

complete without the fantastic cast. Each Heather brings her own flair to the show (Wynn’s effortless charisma and attitude onstage is particularly admirable as her character coolly comments on Veronica’s actions even after her death, peering over her shoulder with amusement), and all of the other actors are strong performers with impressive voices, but none are able to surpass McCartan and Weed. Not only is their chemistry together exhilarating to watch, but they succeed at portraying their respective characters individually, too. Veronica’s refusal of the cookie-cutter popular girl is evident through

Although a fan of the movie might be hesitant to trust that a musical version could be anything like loyal to the original, “Heathers: The Musical” manages to stay true to the plot and themes present in the film—even incorporating a few direct quotes—and only further supports them with its captivating soundtrack.

At times dissonant and off-putting, these numbers are a fair representation of how destructive and wrong their relationship is. The lyrics, too, create accurate images of the characters. In one of the first songs he sings to introduce himself, called “Freeze Your Brain,” JD seems to be perfectly innocent.

He sings about 7/11 Slurpees and confides in Veronica about his family history, but there’s something not quite right beneath the surface. Suggesting that the now smitten Veronica try a Slurpee, he sings, “freeze your brain … fight pain with more pain,” at first glance a meaningless lyric. But as we begin to understand JD’s character to a greater extent, we realize that fighting pain with pain is not a metaphor to him at all.

But the show would not be

Weed’s somewhat awkward movements about the stage, her inappropriately placed chuckles, as well as her singing voice. She sings with a clear, full sound that is significantly deeper and thicker than that of most of the women in the show.

Some of Weed’s notes can easily be mistaken for yelling or for straying from the right key, and yes, this can be distracting or make her singing difficult to listen to. With each and every note she sings, however,Veronica’s off-beat personality and desperation are fully palpable and, in many ways, these perceived imperfections in her vocal performance can be seen as a fully realistic portrayal of the character and her feelings. J.D., unlike Veronica who struggles to decide her loyalties, is determined and strong, set on

getting what he wants through whatever means possible. McCartan’s presence onstage is seamlessly scary and sexy. His moods can be changed with the flip of a switch—one moment he’s crooning to Veronica about how much he loves her, and the next he’s bellowing alongside a strong drum beat, planning to blow up their high school. He pulls the audience in just as his character pulls in Veronica— she falls hard for his mysterious demeanor, but can’t quite extract herself from his grasp once she knows how messed up he really is.

The performances in and of themselves are enhanced by what is going on around them. Aesthetically, “Heathers: The Musical” simply pops.

The lead females’ brightly colored costumes closely inspired by those from the movie—red for Heather Chandler, green for Heather Duke, yellow for Heather McNamara, and blue for Veronica—not only make it easy to keep track of who’s who but also create wonderfully picturesque tableaus onstage.

The lighting, too, accentuates each individual scene. Beginning with brilliant solids that highlight each of the costumes, the stage slowly descends into something darker, dimmer, and foggier, much like the tone of the show does. In addition, clever choices in staging— particularly near the start of the show—freeze many of the characters while we follow the thoughts of another. For instance, as Veronica watches JD beat up some other guys at school, they all stop right where they are except for her, creating an often humorous picture of precariously posed actors with generally overly expressive faces. During this brief time period, she sings “Fight for Me,” assessing the scene before her and letting the audience in on her first impressions of JD. “Heathers: The Musical” is a conglomerate of almost anything one could imagine being in a show about high school— cliques, parties, bullying, murder, 7/11 Slurpees, psychopaths with mommy issues. And although it may seem like a lot to take in, the final product is a hysterically dark piece of theater that doesn’t cease to enthrall its audiences.

• Or go down to DUMBO in Brooklyn to see movies screened right by the East River (July 10 – Aug 28).

• Line up for free Shakespeare in the Park productions of “Much Ado About Nothing” (June 3 – July 6) and “King Lear” (July 22 – Aug 17) at Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre.

• A Pete and Toshi Seeger memorial concert honoring the late singer-filmmaker duo will take place in the Damrosch Park Bandshell (July 20).

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Anna Khey / The Spectator

• Madison Square Park will feature the Mad. Sq. Music: Oval Lawn Series concerts for free (June 28 – Sept 6). There’s a Shake Shack, too.

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 19

Arts and Entertainment Movie

Yuchen Jin / The Spectator

Another X-Men Movie, And Still Going Strong

By Jenny Jiang with additional reporting by Joseph Han The first scene of “X-Men: Days of Future Past” is immediately action-packed—Sentinels, futuristic robots designed to target and destroy mutants, are shown battling the mutants, seemingly the last few standing.

Because of this mutant genocide, Wolverine (whose real name is Logan), played by Hugh Jackman, has to travel back to 1973 to prevent the real cause of the Sentinels’ destruction: Mystique’s capture. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is a shapeshifter who is the key to the robots’ power to adapt to each of the mutant’s powers. Time travel here is complicated; traveling to the past means jumping into one’s former body and forcing

the past and present mind to collide, and Logan is the only one physically up to the task.

Occasionally, Logan’s future knowledge catches up to his past self, leading to flashbacks from some of the past movies and giving viewers some context. “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” which contains a clash of the casts of “X-Men: First Class” and the first three X-Men movies, features almost all of the characters in the aforementioned movies, though many of them have been reduced to smaller roles.

I always expect the actors to faithfully portray their characters, but every time I see them in action, I am repeatedly awestruck. The cast’s smooth interactions with each other make the movie more memorable, and they really bring out the themes

in the movie, such as knowing one’s purpose in life. Lawrence, for example, clearly illustrates the identity crisis Mystique is having, on whether she should follow Charles’s path or Magneto’s path more closely. Charles grew up with her and was one of her best friends, while Magneto had more radical thoughts and held greater admiration for her mutant abilities. Lawrence easily shows the frustrated side of Mystique as well as her struggle with her choice, sometimes rejecting both of their opinions altogether or alternating between the two.

I was confused, however, by new characters like Blink and Bishop. They were a couple of mutants in the brief fighting scenes against the Sentinels and were heavily advertised before the movie premiere, but none of them played a major role in the movie. Though this was a little disappointing to fans anticipating their involvement in the film, these minor characters do not deter from the plot of the film. X-Men movies always contain a few laughs, and in one particular scene, a minor character named Quicksilver, with the power of super speed, is featured as he helps Magneto escape from prison. Played by Evan Peters, this last-minute addition to the movie adds great comedic relief, probably becoming the funniest scene ever in the X-Men movies. The song “Time in a Bottle” plays in the background, and aptly cap-

tures Quicksilver’s lighthearted personality and his ease with using his powers.

For the audience of people who might be watching an XMen movie for the first time, it will be hard to follow what’s happening for the first half of the movie. First, the mutants and their special abilities might not be familiar. One might accidentally confuse Sunspot with the Human Torch from Fantastic 4, for example. However, new viewers will eventually catch up, at least to the general idea behind mutants in a mostly human world, because they can try to understand the movie’s storyline. Second, the backgrounds of the characters seem to be missing important parts, which is confusing, but can be disregarded, as the plot itself is more important. Still, the action-filled scenes and complex characters may help the first time viewer gain interest in watching these movies.

Every X-Men movie has its moments of confusion or continuity issues, that really only long-time fans would question, but these films stray far from the comic book storylines, so uncertainty among those familiar with the comics is understandable. Perhaps the sequel to the movie will answer questions or clear up any potential inconsistencies. In fact, the next movie in the X-Men franchise is predicted to be coming out on May 27, 2016, and is called “X-Men: Apocalypse.”

Comic

Dillon Wu / The Spectator

Zero Year: A New Beginning

By Geoffrey Luu The origin of DC Comics’ flagship hero Batman has been retold many times since his creation 75 years ago. Whether it was through comics, film, or television, most people have been exposed to the basics of the hero’s beginning, including the murder of his parents and his vow to rid Gotham City of crime. In June 2013, DC decided it was time to once again update the classic story; writer Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo were tasked with giving their year-long take on the rewritten early days of the Dark Knight.

Snyder and Capullo’s 12issue saga, “Zero Year,” is split into three distinct arcs: “Secret City,” “Dark City,” and “Savage City.” The first of the three chronicles the events immediately following the return of billionaire orphan Bruce Wayne to his home in Gotham City.

Having spent years after the murder of his parents abroad to train his mind and body, Wayne feels he is ready to begin a war on Gotham’s criminal under-

world, starting with the mysterious Red Hood Gang. In “Dark City,” Bruce, having adopted the Batman persona near the end of the previous arc, is now a fugitive from the Gotham police and faces the task of evading the authorities while stopping a new enemy: the Riddler, who aims to cause a city-wide blackout and assume total control of Gotham. The story is concluded in “Savage City,” in which Gotham has fallen into ruin under the Riddler’s authority and Batman must work with police lieutenant Jim Gordon to outsmart the Riddler and free Gotham.

Though “Zero Year” seems reminiscent of the 1986 Frank Miller story “Batman: Year One,” often cited as the greatest Batman tale of all, the two origin stories could not be more different. The four-part “Year One” places great emphasis on specific significant moments that lead Bruce to become Batman, including his parents’ murder, his failed first attempt at crime-fighting, and a pivotal scene in which a bat crashes through his window and inspires Bruce to create the Batman identity. These moments are among the most widely known and oft-repeated in retellings of Batman’s origin, and they form the main similarities between “Year One” and “Zero Year.” It is not surprising that Snyder reuses them in “Zero Year,” though he approaches them from a different angle: assuming that readers are already somewhat familiar with the murder, Snyder offers only brief glimpses of it, instead focusing on its aftermath and effect on Bruce’s psyche, usually through his flashbacks and nightmares.

In addition, more of Bruce’s precostumed crime fighting and his experience with the bat are

shown. This alternate presentation of Bruce’s development and journey towards becoming a hero gives us greater insight into his character, allowing us to understand and connect with him to a greater extent than with Miller’s version of the character. Snyder’s choices of the Red Hood Gang and the Riddler as the major villains of “Zero Year” are also very effective, since they are a perfect bridge between Batman’s commonplace underworld enemies and the infamous and eccentric members of his rogues’ gallery, including the chemically altered Joker and the shape shifting Clayface.

Snyder’s writing actually surpasses Miller’s in terms of dialogue and relationships between characters. While Miller’s “Year One” provides a short and streamlined, yet still powerful, story, the added page count of “Zero Year” allows for lengthy but gripping interactions between Batman and those around him. The Red Hood Leader’s first meeting with Batman and the two scenes in which Batman and the Riddler question and analyze each other through riddles and cryptic hints are some of the best moments in “Zero Year.” Unfortunately, its plot hits some minor snags that impact the story’s pacing. Moments like our introduction to the first Batmobile are fun and exciting, but feel somewhat out of place because they don’t amount to much. The Batmobile has not been shown or mentioned since the first issue of “Dark City.” Still, most of Snyder’s narrative is solid, and it benefits greatly from artwork

by Greg Capullo and the colorist known by the pseudonym FCO Plascencia.

Capullo’s design for the young Batman’s costume is an

interesting combination of elements seen throughout Batman’s history: his purple wristlength gloves are identical to the pair worn by the character in his first appearance in 1939, while the design of his cowl mirrors the one seen in the 1990s “Batman: The Animated Series.” Suit design is not the only element of “Zero Year” to pay tribute to Batman’s early stories. Entire panels and pages are made to resemble iconic images from some of the character’s best known tales. The rest of the visuals are equally impressive, with Capullo delivering jaw-dropping action scenes often without any dialogue. Plascencia’s colors enhance the look of the series, especially in distinguishing between Bruce’s flashbacks and the present day.

While the flashbacks have a faded and weathered look resembling early color films, present day scenes are characterized by a wide range of bright, vibrant colors to show a newer city and a younger hero.

Snyder and Capullo’s “Zero Year” plays out exactly as a modern Batman origin story should: it successfully adds many new elements to the traditional story while also paying tribute to earlier versions, taking inspiration from 75 years’ worth of history. Despite the occasional snag in pacing, Snyder’s story and writing are fantastic, providing us with more insight into the mind of Batman than many writers did before him, while Capullo and Plascencia’s art never fails to impress. At 12 issues and over 460 pages in length, “Zero Year” may seem excessively long but serves as an excellent entry point for new readers interested in knowing more about Batman, and for longtime fans looking for a new spin on a decades-old tale.

Summer Calendar • The Mostly Mozart classical music festival will premiere with an Inuit-influenced piece (July 25 – Aug 23).

• Missed JProm? Visit the 1942 Grand Banks schooner “Sherman Zwicker” for free at Pier 25 (June 15 – Oct 31).

• The Celebrate Brooklyn festival includes dance and music concerts at the Prospect Park Bandshell (June 4 – Aug 9).

• Pride Week starts with a screening of “The Wizard of Oz” and ends with a concert and dance party (June 24 – 29).

• 120 dragon-boat racing teams will compete at the J=Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (Aug 9 – 10).

• See blues legends live at the Lowdown Hudson Blues Festival at Brookfield Place Plaza, right by Stuy (July 16 – 17).

• BAM will be hosting their own R&B festival at MetroTech Center in Brooklyn (June 5 – Aug 7).

• Take a trip to Coney Island for electronic music and a Mad Decent Block Party (8/9).

• Catch the exhibitions of Roberto Coughi, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Camille Henrot, which all depart the New Museum on June 29. Keep an eye out for new exhibitions as well!

• See the satiric work of postwar German artist Sigmar Polke at the MoMA (through Aug 3).

• Decode beautiful works of Chinese calligraphy by Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang at the Met (through Aug 17).

• There will be plenty of summer action movies and sequels to choose from this year, including “How to Train Your Dragon 2,” “22 Jump Street,” “Transformers 4,” and the “Godzilla” reboot. Certainly don’t watch them for brain food.

• The Spectator’s Lev Akabas calls “A Million Ways to Die In the West” juvenile but especially hilarious.

• Coney Island’s new rollercoaster, the Thunderbolt, includes five types of inversions, including one designed to simulate weightlessness.

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The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 20

Arts and Entertainment Crossword

What We’ll Miss (Or Not) About Stuy

By Shahruz Ghaemi Some of you are going off to college. Some are preparing for summer jobs and internships. While you lounge in the sun, here’s something to remind you how much you love the halls of Stuy (most of you will be back in two months anyway). If you’re leaving us forever, keep the rest of us in your prayers; we’ll need them. Send an email to speccrosswords@ gmail.com to suggest a theme for the first crossword of next year!

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DOWN

ACROSS 2. A purportedly illegitimate deli that is much more popular than the original 4. Once got into a food cart war with a Korean food cart seemingly named “Gangnam Style” 6. Located behind one of the 9. Downs, a place to store alcohol, campaign materials, and also our student representatives (allegedly, though unconfirmed) 7. When you’re not talking to your friends here, you’re using the textbooks or computers. Seniors, please don’t forget to return all checked out books.

10. They help you avoid having to walk

up two flights of stairs, also responsible for the most soul crushing moments of your day.

12. Like 2 Across, more popular (with underclassmen) than a proper floor as a social watering hole; the ____ floor 14. Once a month, students show off their talents here. May feature teacher appearances.

15. Tests that you really, really, really shouldn’t have cheated on.

16. School demonym that, despite efforts to the contrary, would make an unintimidating name for the Track Team.

1. You shuffle across this dreaded passage each morning; the _______ Bridge 3. Dean who may have amassed the world’s largest collection of confiscated basketballs and longboards, also a Spanish teacher; Sr. _____ .

5. Our school traditionally excels in this competition (see our 11 _____ Semifinalists) 6. We all know the order --- seniors first, juniors second --- oh wait… Over a month of hard work on this is relieved in one crazy night that I will do my best to forget for the rest of my life.

8. First, second, and third floors all have one, with the second floor _____ perpet-

ually populated by seniors.

9. These are prime locker real estate; juniors and freshmen don’t get one of these.

11. The organization responsible for bringing you your friends in strange roles performing in front of their parents and you (if you decide to show up), but hey, they have a popcorn machine!

13. When you’re forced to take tests while still having class every day even though 15 Across merit an entire week-plus off school; ____ week.

16. Legend has it that the first freshman who finds the eleventh floor ____ will be automatically sworn in as SU President.

Playlist

Beach Tunes “The Only Reason” 5 Seconds of Summer Pop

“Summersong” The Decembrists Indie Rock

“Tallulah”

By Allo Darlin Folk

“Straight Up and Down” The Brian Jonestown Massacre Rock

“Summertime Clothes”

By Animal Collective Synth Pop

“Summerboy” Lady GaGa Pop

“Good Vibrations”

By The Beach Boys Classic Rock

“Love is Easy” McFly Pop

“Vamos a La Playa”

By Loona Electro/Dance

“Say You Like Me” We the Kings Pop Punk

“Mango Mangue” Charlie Parker Jazz

“Love Me” Stooshe Electronic Pop

“The Tide is High” Blondie New Wave

KenKen

By Lev Akabas Fill in the grid with numbers 1 through 6. Do not repeat a number in any row or column.

In each heavily outlined set of squares, the numbers must combine, in any order, to produce the target number in the top left corner using the operation indicated. This puzzle has several correct solutions.

If you finish the puzzle, send a picture of your completed grid to stuyspeckenken@ gmail.com, and if you are the first student to complete the puzzle, you’ll get your name mentioned in the next issue of The Spectator.

Issue 15 Winners (tie): Eric Liao, Jan Wojcik

3÷

5+

40 ×

24 ×

6×

40 ×

4+

6

2-

15 +

8+

4-

4

11 +

1-

36 ×

1

The Spectator â&#x2014;? June 16, 2014

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Page 21

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 22

Humor These articles are works of fiction. All quotes are libel and slander.

Programming Anxieties: What Class to Teach?

By Adam DeHovitz and Brenda Lu When the deadline for class selections approached, the teachers of Stuyvesant High School took their questions to Facebook.

“Should I choose lunch duty as an elective?”

—Roja Flowers, Spanish teacher

aimlessly. But there are no tests. If you are fine with doing nothing, then I would recommend taking it,” replied Lynn Queenie, a teacher who had lunch duty last semester.

Other questions met with negative responses. “If I’m bad at math but can’t get out of the department, what class should I teach?” asked mathematics teacher Dr. Daniel Green, who later followed up with another post: “Is there a departmental final for pre-calculus? Do I need to give one? Can I just put down my opinion of each student for the final exam grade?” After receiving a stern warning from group administrator and Assistant Principal of Mathematics Maryann Ferrara, Dr. Green deleted his posts.

Some questions were seen as downright obnoxious. “Does teaching AP Euro or AP World look better for when they choose departmental Assistant Principals?” “wut are the requirements for becoming an AP?” and “I need to become an

AP so I go on to be a principal someday” were all posts by social studies teacher Alex Hao. Despite being “seen” by more than 30 people, his posts did not receive any comments or likes.

Concerns about things that didn’t have to do with class selections were also raised. “What office hours should I choose if I don’t want to talk with my students?” asked social studies teacher Jack Howitz in a post to the ‘Dear Incoming Stuyvesant Teachers of 2018 … WE HAVE ADVICE!(the serious group)’ Facebook group. While over 15 teachers contributed, a comment by English teacher Jonathan Henry— stating that “when I had 3rd and 4th period for office hours last year, only one student managed to schedule a meeting with me”— received the most likes.

There were also conversations about the quality of classes. “I would 100% recommend that you teach Advanced Placement (AP) Biology. Stu-

dents self-study a lot, which means you don’t actually have to teach,” posted biology teacher Dr. Gary Who, who is wellknown for having over 80% of his students receive a 5 on the AP Biology exam in 2013.

Biology teacher Anne Oh, however, shared a different experience with AP Bio. “If you want to teach this class, be aware that you will be teaching and be bombarded with millions of why and how questions,” she commented.

As expected, many of the classes are extremely hard to get into. “Is it too late to teach BC Calc or preferably Honors BC Calc?” mathematics teacher Dave Richardson said in a post.

“You’ll get waitlisted. I begged on my knees to Ferrara but she told me to come back over the summer,” social studies teacher Allison Shepard responded.

“Don’t even bother trying,” computer science teacher John QQ commented.

Not every teacher, however, enjoyed the endless stream

of questions. Seeking to consolidate information, technical drawing teacher Goliath Watson attempted to create two Facebook documents, one of which was designed to detail class curriculums, and the other was intended to describe what certain students were like. Despite Watson’s best efforts, which included pinning the document and posting frequently, ultimately only three teachers contributed.

After receiving their schedules, many teachers were upset that they didn’t get the students they wanted and flooded into the theater after school to request program changes. Both “I want” and “I need” changes were accepted, but some teachers had to wait on line for up to three hours before they were allowed on stage to see their guidance counselors. Seniors Jack and David Cahn monitored traffic flow to and from the stage, calling up three or four teachers at a time while making sure nobody cut the lines.

Anne Duncan / The Spectator

“Should I choose lunch duty as an elective?” asked Spanish teacher Roja Flowers in ‘Group for stuyvesant teachers ONLY. click to join.’ Within minutes, her post received over 60 comments. “I wouldn’t recommend it unless you want to stress yourself out—the noise, the food, and the sheer number of students make it all very overwhelming,” English teacher Maria Brownie commented.

“That elective is an utter waste of time. You literally do nothing but wander around

Juniors Stressed by Creative, Fun Assignment

By Sumaita Mahmood and Wasif Zaman Speaking the word “challenge” to Stuyvesant High School juniors usually results in many snickers, perpetual eyerolls, and the occasional case of dysentery. But on Tuesday, May 27, juniors, from the most clueless to the most diligent, ran amok. Fresh from a three-day weekend, they were exposed to the most daunting challenge of their lives: complete a “fun” and “creative” assignment.

“When Mr. Ku told my class about the assignment my Pokemon cards literally exploded from my hand,” junior Stanley Lau said.

“My Pokemon cards literally exploded from my hand!”–junior Stanley Lau The assignment itself entailed constructing the function f(x)=sin2x out of cardboard and making the graph look as “creative” and “colorful” as possible.

For many students at Stuyvesant High School, this

does not compute. But math teacher Richard Ku’s intentions were simple: give them the rare miracle of an easy grade.

“The assignment is as simple as freshman geometry,” Ku said. Ku made it clear in Chinese, Spanish, Bengali, Arabic, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Siberian, Swahili, Bantu, and Slovakian that he wanted a graph of a simple equation depicted creatively. Yet, the idea of decorating an equation was bizarre to them.

“I really don’t get this,” Ku said. “I mean, it’s not like I asked them to set up an integral for the circumference of an ellipse with semi-major axis a=4 and semi-minor axis a=0.632 and force them to simplify it—hey, wait, where are you going?”

Junior Melissa Wang was caught rummaging through art teacher Leslie Bernstein’s closet, looking for “anything colorful.” “I was getting really desperate,” Wang said. “I was trying to find these things, but I don’t know what they’re called.” She held up a crayola crayon. “I’ve heard tales that this instrument can somehow make things look more colorful—hey!” Bernstein snatched the crayon out of her hand.

The guidance counselors declined to comment after the office flooded with exasperated juniors during eighth period lunch.

“I’ve never seen such uninspired, emotionally disturbed people in my life,” Ku said. “I didn’t ask them to paint the Mona Lisa!”

Camp Stuy Deserted After JProm “Sea Sickness”

By Daniel Goynatsky The Junior Semiformal, or JProm, is a maritime event for juniors to dance, eat, and have a good time. After a night of good music, “seltzer”, and nonstop dancing, many juniors were worn out and tired. As many of the attending Big Sibs knew, Camp Stuy Part I was the following day, so they couldn’t get too wild. The “litness” of JProm was to be kept between that of a Mr. Chew math test and Electric Zoo. After the crazy night, many juniors were incapable of attending Camp Stuy Part I due to a mysterious and convenient outbreak of “sea sickness.” The infected experienced many symptoms, such as headaches, nausea, and regret over 3 a.m. texts to their ex-girlfriends.

All but two Big Sibs that attended JProm did not go to Camp Stuy. The two students were Charlie Zhen and Caroline Kim. “My mom called me and told me that I had to be home by my curfew, 10 o’clock— classic Mom,” said Zhen, who requested the boat dock by his house so that he would be able to swim home.

“I felt great this morning. I guess I just have a really good tolerance,” said Kim, whose friends reportedly did not have the heart to tell her root beer is non-alcoholic.

The virus was somehow able

to overpower the incredible immune systems of stressed out high school students and infect everyone else on the boat. “OH MY GOD, they played all my favorite songs, I loved all of them, I loved everyone there, I love YOU,” said Big Sib Chair Franco Caputo, who was writing a detailed entry of everything that happened to him that night in his diary.

Moreover, a strange side effect of the virus was the constant desire to party and refer to everybody you know as “bro.”

After JProm ended, many students were forced off the boat, as they refused to leave. And even after they were removed from the vessel, some didn’t realize that they were no longer on the boat and continued to party and swerve around while holding on to their equally “seasick” friends for support.

“Oh man, after we got off the first boat onto the second boat, that’s when the real party started,” junior Ervin Flores said.

“I was caught in a flash mob and next thing I knew I was drinking “seltzer”, more than I ever have before, and dancing pretty well if I say so myself,” junior Owen Smith said. Smith then went on to mumble every other word of “Womanizer” by Britney Spears to no one in particular.

Even though security was really tight, and Assistant Principal of Security Brian Moran

was overseeing the entire trip, the virus was somehow able to spread. “I guess quarantining everyone together wasn’t a solid idea,” said Moran, who was also affected by the virus and didn’t show up to school the following day either.

Other teachers and chaperones began to notice signs of a “sea sickness.” “When I was in high school, I got ‘sea sick’ all the time, but after taking a health class, I realized that my actions were not safe,” said Health teacher Barbara Garber, who was on her feet and dancing the entire time. “I did enjoy the healthy snacks this fine cruise had to offer,” she added.

The next day, when Zhen and Kim showed up at Camp Stuy they were immediately met with 53 confused faces of the sophomore Big Sibs who had no idea what to do. “Surprisingly, everything ran smoothly for the first fifteen minutes,” said sophomore Dimitar Novakov. Zhen and Kim quickly took the helm of the ship of the incoming freshmen, with the sophomore Big Sibs running the poop deck.

The Friday after JProm, when the majority of juniors returned, the lost and found box on the second floor was completely full, and almost capsizing. It contained 42 shirts, 14 pairs of pants, 9 shoes, and a “Turn Down for What” button.

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 23

Humor The Man Who Rings the Bells: An Exclusive Interview of bells. During my senior year, I was accepted at Mines, and years later I received my B.S. in Campanology, majoring in advanced bell-ringing,” Lipshitz says.

“What did you do upon graduating?” Goynatsky asks.

“I struggled with finding a job related to bell-ringing, so for five

***

“I made eight figures a year. It was a lot of money, but sadly not enough to fuel my drug addiction.”

—Marty Lipshitz

Some time has now passed, and Goynatsky and Lipshitz are sitting at the top of the bell tower—nonchalantly sipping from cans of chocolate-flavored vending-machine soda.

“How did you become a bellringer?” Goynatsky asks.

“Well, one day when I was a junior at the Bronx High School of Science, I received an e-mail from the Colorado School of Mines that urged me to apply. I researched the institution, and I discovered that it had a small but promising undergraduate major in Campanology, the study

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years I worked in a private equity firm in China. I made eight figures a year. It was a lot of money, but sadly not enough to fuel my drug addiction,” Lipshitz says.

Goynatsky is visibly confused.

He stops drinking, placing the can on the table next to him.

“How did you wind up at Stuyvesant?” Goynatsky asks.

Lipshitz is quiet.

“Are you okay?” Goynatsky asks.

Suddenly and without warning, Lipshitz breaks into a teenage girl-styled cry. He continues for at least 30 minutes while Goynatsky sits in bewildered silence. *** Wojcik, noticing the clock says 9:00 a.m. while he is still in his first period class, is very confused. He turns to his classmate.

“Is something up with the bells today? I thought we had a regular schedule,” he says.

His classmate shrugs. *** Lipshitz glances at the clock.

“OH, CRAP,” he exclaims. “I gotta ring the bells!”

“Is something up with the bells today? I thought we had a regular schedule.”

—Jan Wojcik, freshman

*** And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the bell system is so messed up.

PHOTO

Fluids

Yueer Niu/ The Spectator

It is 7:55 a.m., and as the warning bell sounds, freshman Jan Wojcik realizes that he is going to be late to class. He plunges through the west staircase, forcibly pushing junior WenHao Du out of his way, and sprints until he reaches the entrance of the 10th floor hallway. He never realized it before, but the staircase continues up another flight.

What exactly dwells beyond this point of no return?

The Spectator Humor Department is determined to find out.

It is 7:59 a.m., and Wojcik is happily seated in his Art Appreciation class. Unbeknownst to virtually the entire student body, junior and humor department member Daniel Goynatsky has entered the 11th floor bell tower.

It is 8:00 a.m. Goynatsky is taken off guard. The most intense reverberation he has ever heard bursts into his unsuspecting eardrums. He shrieks in pain for 2.5 seconds and collapses to the floor in anguish. Then, he hears footsteps.

“Who goes there?” asks the individual.

Goynatsky looks up, and he

is greeted with the image of a disheveled old man, who vaguely resembles Mr. Lack and smells like the Stuyvesant Rowing Club after a hard afternoon of…rowing.

“Who are you?” inquires Goynatsky, slowly standing up.

“I’m Marty Lipshitz,” answers the individual in a thick Brooklyn accent.

“What are you doing in Stuyvesant?” asks Goynatsky, staring perplexedly at the man.

“I operate the bells here!”

Due to removal of urinals from school bathrooms, students are now encouraged to empty their fluids in the cafeteria instead.

COMIC

Bonny Truong / The Spectator

By Fish Milnikiewicz

Page 24

The Spectator â&#x2014;? June 16, 2014

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The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 25

Sports Boys’ Baseball

Boys’ Lacrosse

By Louis Susser The Hitmen, the 32nd seed for the playoffs, fell short to the top seeded Monroe Eagles in an unfavorable matchup, losing 21-0 in the first round. The Hitmen scrimmaged the Eagles on the Saturday before their playoff game, lost only by three points, and were confident that they could have another similarly competitive game. Their confidence, however, after only two innings of play, quickly diminished.

The Hitmen entered the game with a strategy to catch the Eagles off-balance by swapping mixed-velocity pitchers every two innings. This gameplan proved to be unsuccessful early on. Sophomore Nathan Chandler, the Hitmen’s ace on the mound, gave up nine runs in the first two innings, including a grand slam sailing over 380 feet. “Their lineup was extremely talented and there was not much we could have done differently,” Chandler said. “Our strategy was a good idea, however [it] was not well executed when put into action.”

The Eagles continued to mercilessly battle and rally off the Hitmen’s subsequent pitchers, despite their tremendous lead. “The pitchers threw strikes. The Monroe players were just very aggressive and were able to adjust very well to different pitchers,” coach John Carlesi said. The four pitchers who came into the game after Chandler gave up a combined 12 more runs in two innings, and the game ended after five innings by the mercy rule.

In addition to the Hitmen’s inability to defend against the Eagles’ superb batting lineup, they also could not create any momentum offensively. The Hitmen were held to two hits on 15 at-bats and struck out

eight times against the Eagles’ starting pitcher, Dariel Checo.

“After the first two innings, we lost that fire and confidence we entered the game with,” senior and co-captain Timothy Diep said.

Looking past the crushing defeat, Carlesi was most relieved that the Hitmen clinched a playoff berth after last year’s disappointing season without a playoff appearance for the first time in 17 years. Carlesi described this season’s performance as a success. “The players’ goal in the fall was to redeem themselves from last year’s season, and they did just that.”

Looking ahead to next season, the Hitmen will be losing over a dozen seniors, and will need leadership from their small group of five returning juniors: Demos Sfakianakis, Matthew Cook, Austin Lee, Aaron Mortenson, and Eric Morgenstern. Since the Hitmen are going to have a very young team compared to the past two years, leadership by these five Hitmen will be crucial. “We need to come back and get a higher playoffs seed. The juniors need to step up and lead us to a good season,” Chandler said.

Demos Sfakianakis and the rising seniors are ready to take on the challenge to lead a young squad. ”We are eager to see how the incoming varsity players from JV can conribute to the team,” Sfakianakis said.

Carlesi, who will be taking a handful of players from the sunior varsity team, is excited to mold them into stronger and more focused varsity players, as the difference in level of play between junior varsity and varsity baseball is huge. “I am hoping the upcoming sophomores who want to play varsity understand that,” Carlesi said. “Varsity is a totally different game.”

Key Departures Could Plague Peglegs

By Tahmid Khandaker The Peglegs have finally seemed to turn the tide in boys’ lacrosse. Dealing with years of mediocrity and losing records, they finally managed to transform themselves into a formidable team, finishing second in the Bowl Division with an impressive 9-3 record. Determined to continue and build on their success, the Peglegs have high aspirations for next season.

“We’re really confident that we’ll win the division,” junior midfielder Richard Zhou said during the pre-season. Even though the Peglegs did not dethrone 11-0 Eagle Academy, they took a giant leap forward from last year’s sixth place finish. Though the Peglegs faced lesser competition in this year’s newly formed Bowl Division, the team also developed a consistent offensive gameplan: give the ball to senior Noah Kramer.

Even though the offense was often one-dimensional since Kramer possessed the ball the majority of the time, it was effective as the All-American athlete scored a league-leading 100 goals on 179 shots, an improvement from his previous season’s 51 goals. “We have a consistent offensive system which has led to direct results. Our trust and belief in the system has allowed for not only Noah but also our key attackers to shine,” junior midfielder Terry Zhao said.

The Peglegs emphasize passing quickly and efficiently.

As defenses adjusted by double and triple teaming Kramer, others learned to step up, finally developing an all around offensive threat. “Our ball movement has become better than I’ve ever seen it. Everyone was catching and throwing well enough to shift the defense and create easy opportunities for shots,” Kramer said. Seniors Matthew Dalton and Aron Lam stepped up to share the offensive load, contributing 21 and eight goals, respectively. With a strategy revolving around a flurry of successive passes in the midfield and finally a pass to Kramer who often “faked out

Jake Brimberg / The Spectator

Hitmen Fall Short to Top-Seeded Eagles

A Stuyvesant player rolls the crease.

the defenders to get an open shot,” senior goalkeeper Robert Melamed said, the Peglegs reached double digits in nine of their 12 games, compared to six out of 14 last season.

The Peglegs’ defense also proved to be a key component of their game-plan throughout the season. Melamed was a “brick wall in the goal,” Kramer said, as he had 76 saves in the regular season and 10 in the playoffs. The defense was solidified by senior Clay Walsh, who had 53 groundballs in the season. While the Peglegs’ primary threat was their offense, the defense showed sparks of potential, especially during two games in which they held their opponents scoreless.

Though Kramer, Walsh, Melamed, Lam, and Dalton are leaving, the remaining Peglegs are confident in their system and in themselves to fill the void left by the seniors. “It will be tough and we know that, but we always stress the importance of having the next man up when someone is injured or in this case when people are leaving,” Zhao said.

As for the huge offensive gap to fill with Kramer’s departure, the team believes that up-andcoming stars will be able to be make up for the scoring. “Everyone is really going to have to share the load next year. All the sophomores like Luke, Dante,

Jake, and Andrew are going to have to step up the scoring,” Kramer said. These returning Peglegs will have to share the offensive burden. “[Sophomore] Laolu Ogunaike has a lot of potential. He is super athletic and learns quickly,” Kramer said. Ogunnaike was instrumental as a midfielder with offensive and defensive capabilities, scoring eight goals and picking up 56 ground balls.

Sophomore Andrew Kratsios, the third leading scorer on the team, had eight goals and sophomore Dnte Del Priore had five. Though their combined 21 goals are well short of Kramer’s 100, the underclassmen received fewer scoring opportunities, which is sure to change next year.

As for defense, the returning players still have long way to go to fill the void left by Walsh, who amassed more ground balls than juniors Mark Norwich and Nick Romanoff and freshman Winston Venderbush only had a combined 32 groundballs.

“Over the past season we’ve begun to see this dream and hope [of winning the Bowl division],” junior Johnny Zhang said. After setting lofty expectations, the Peglegs have their work cut out for them. Replacing the leading goal-scorer in the city, as well as several other key seniors, will not prove to be an easy task.

Why The Mets Will Reach The Promise Land Soon

By Jason Lee “Breaking ball, struck him out, and the Cardinals have won the pennant!” FOX’s commentator Joe Buck exclaimed on October 19, 2006. That was the last time Mets fans had an exciting team to root for. Eight years later, the Mets fans are still desperately searching for anything to cheer about, only to find a team that is young, inexperienced, and lacking an identity. The team has been disappointing ever since its loss in the 2006 National League Championship Series (NLCS), and the Mets entered the 2014 season after four consecutive losing seasons. However, Mets general manager Sandy Alderson is undaunted by the team’s unsuccessful history, and publicly announced his target of 90 wins this season. The Mets have been criticized again for their rough start to the 2014 season, and though 2014 may be another wasted season, there are many reasons to believe in the Mets.

For the past five years, it’s always around this time of year that the Mets begin their descent from early season success. The Mets had success in the early part of the season,

starting with a 15-11 record, but have gone 14-25 since. The Mets are not known for their hitting, and this is the first of their problems. The team’s 0.234 batting average is second to last in the league. The team is also among the bottom three in the league in on base percentage, slugging percentage, and home runs.

One of their major problems is shortstop Ruben Tejada, who currently has a horrid 0.223 batting average. Tejada has been given many opportunities, but has only gone downhill since his rookie season. The Mets have made it clear that he isn’t the future solution at shortstop, and are waiting for their minor league prospect Wilmer Flores to develop.

Their outfield situation is not much better either. With the exception of Juan Lagares, all three outfielders have batting averages below 0.230. Even though they provide power to the lineup, their contributions are not going to work in a ballpark where it is difficult to hit a home run. Citi Field, the home of the Mets, is over 400 feet to the fences in center field, though the average for ballparks is around 370.

The Mets can survive with

their lackluster batting average because of their stellar starting pitching, but it is their bullpen that has been the main cause of more than five of their losses this season. The biggest issue with their bullpen is the absence of a closer. Their former closer, Bobby Parnell, had his season end with Tommy John Surgery. Jose Valverde, the current closer, has been erratic and is far from his dominant 2011 form, when he led the league in saves. The Mets are still looking for answers to the closer position and are now giving Jenrry Mejia a shot. If the Mets are to compete, they have to find answers to the bullpen and the shortstop positions.

The team’s starters fueled the Mets’ hot start this year, despite not having all-star pitching phenomenon Matt Harvey, who is out this season with Tommy John Surgery. The Mets have traded many valuable pieces from previous years, such as Carlos Beltran and R.A. Dickey, for pitching prospects that are making their way to the majors this year. Jacob DeGrom and Rafael Montero recently made their debuts, in which they pitched well, and their number one prospect, Noah Synderguard, is to make his de-

but in another month. Synderguard has been dominant in the minors and has a curveball that Terry Collins, the manager of the Mets, calls “a hook from hell.” If the Mets do have success this season, it will be due to their starting pitching, which is what the team prides itself on. Their farm system is ranked among the top in Major League Baseball. They have a surplus of starting pitchers, and need to find ways to remedy this for the better of the organization, as they only need five starting pitchers for the rotation. They moved Mejia to the closer role, but still have Jon Niese, Dillon Gee, and offseason acquisition Bartolo Colon as surplus starting pitchers.

Frankly, the Mets aren’t in a position to make a deep playoff run this year, but they will be in the race, if not at the top, next year. A pitching rotation next season including Harvey, Synderguard, Wheeler, Montero, and DeGrom will arguably be the best in baseball.

These pitchers have the electric pitches that have wowed and will continue to wow the fans in the future. The Mets need major upgrades in the bullpen and offense. The Mets should try to trade Niese, Gee, and Co-

lon for a new shortstop, some prospects, and maybe a new closer like Huston Street of the San Diego Padres.

The Mets’ fans are tired of hearing the “next season” spiel, and they said that 2015 would be the year that they make a deep playoff run. Expectations are higher than ever, and the Mets need to bolster their offense in order to provide run support for the young pitchers.

They have the strongest pitching rookies in all of baseball, and are almost sure to have the most formidable starting rotation next year when Harvey returns from injury. The Mets should not, however, focus on what is superb; rather, they should focus on the current problems they have and see how their excess of pitchers can enable them to grab some key offensive players and prospects who the Mets passed on after seeing teams win the World Series with dominant starting pitching. Many baseball fans don’t see the Mets rising to fame soon, and they will surely be surprised next season. If you’re a Mets fan, just hold on for another 11 months, when the Mets will begin their march to bringing the World Series back to Queens.

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 26

Sports Girls’ Softball

Boys’ Golf

Abrupt Ending to a Strong Season

By Ari Hatzimemos

On a warm Tuesday afternoon at Bergen Beach, the Renegades’ season ended in a tough but hardfought loss against John Browne.

The 2-0 defeat prevented them from moving past the first round of playoffs. Though the season came to an abrupt halt, the Renegades still had a successful season. They went 10-6 and improved in many areas of the game, such as hitting.

However, they failed to focus on fundamentals such as bunting and advancing base runners, and this shortcoming was their undoing.

The Renegades started off the season on fire. Through the first eight games, they were 7-1. The team even beat one of their longtime rivals, Beacon, by a whopping 15-5 score. This hot streak came to an unexpected halt, however, when spring break came. “We started off 7-1, but what hurt us was spring break. It was too much of a lay-off. We practiced a little bit, but we were on a roll going into spring break and it was hard coming back after that,” coach Vincent Miller said. In the second half of the season, the team descended to a 3-5 record. While the offensive production remained practically the same, their defense worsened.

Before spring break they averaged surrendering 4.25 runs per game, which went up to 5.2 after the break. This one run difference may not seem so drastic, but it can be the difference between winning and losing a crucial game.

One of the most difficult things that the Renegades have to deal with next season is the loss of their two co-captains, including senior Marie Frolich, their ace pitcher.

Over the last two seasons, Frolich won 22 games for the team as the only pitcher to win a game during that time period. “The team has some new players coming in next year so I’m sure they will be fine. The group of girls that make up the team is so dedicated and

always wanting to learn more and get better, so I think they will be great next season,” Frolich said.

The Renegades are also losing senior center-fielder and co-captain, Julia Witkowski, who has been on the team for four years and has played a major part role since she was a freshman. The Renegades, fortunately, have many talented juniors on the team, such as Megan Mullaney, Deanna Taylor, and Lauren Sobota, but replacing their captains will be a huge hurdle.

This season, the Renegades have played especially strong offense. They averaged 8.6 runs per game and had 8 games in which they scored over 10 runs. This is a whole run over last year’s average of 7.5. This season, the Renegades dominated by getting a lot of singles. They have no one player who only hits homeruns or triples, but everyone has the ability to knock a single up the middle. This consistency in the lineup is what accounts for all the runs they have scored this season. They have struggled, however, with playing “small ball,” which is using simple tactics, such as bunting and stealing bases, to get runners around the bases. “We need to improve on our base running skills and our bunting. A few times where we have needed to put down a sacrifice bunt we haven’t been able to. We need to be able to advance our base runners,” Miller said. Because of this, the Renegades have stranded a lot of runners in scoring position this season.

Though the Renegades won ten games this year and played a great season, they still have a lot of holes to fill. Most importantly, they need to find a replacement pitcher for Frolich. All in all, the Renegades have been a close-knit team all year that will do its best to maintain that next year. “I love my team. We really are like one big family, so it’s really great playing here,” Frolich said.

Eagles Fly Closer to Their Goal

By Erica Chio During the Eagles’ quest to repeat as PSAL championship, their road to success increased in difficulty. After winning in the first round against Grand Street Campus, the Eagles proceeded to battle it out with Tottenville on Thursday, May 29. Though the Eagles were victorious, the matchup proved that the road to championships was only getting progressively harder.

The Eagles won 4-1, resulting in their first game that didn’t end with a 5-0 finish for the team. First starter, sophomore Neil Vyas, usually dominant in his matches, surprisingly lost to Tottenville’s Dominick Yu. For Vyas, it was a bad day and he was unable to hit routine shots. Furthermore, Yu putted very well, as Vyas lost the first hole because of Yu’s par putt.

Yu’s spot-on putting also won him the third hole as Vyas struggled in the bunker. But Vyas still fought back on the fifth and sixth hole, where Vyas scored a birdie because he made a 35-foot putt.

On the seventh hole, however, Vyas hit a bad tee shot, followed by two other bad shots that ultimately cost him the hole and the match. “I liked how [Vyas] fought until the very end, but he just couldn’t come back from such a big deficit against one of the top players in the PSAL,” coach Emilio Nieves said.

But Vyas is planning to cut down on mistakes at the next match, encompassing “better course management [and], not trying to put myself out of the hole right after the tee shot,” Vyas said.

The four other Eagles, however, won their matches comfortably and confidently. “Our whole

starting five outperformed their [first starter] at individuals,” junior and fourth starter Thomas Perskin said. Junior and third starter Neil Basu and Perskin were both able to win by three holes. Basu tied four holes with his opponent, and won all the other holes, ensuring his victory.

Perskin won his match, although he didn’t play as well as he wanted to, stating that it was a bad day for him.

“Our whole starting five outperformed their [first starter] at individuals.”

—Thomas Perskin, junior

For second starter, freshman Nicholas Ng, his match was a success because he felt that he played well enough to beat his opponent by four holes. Though it was windy, which may have caused the ball go off course at times, Ng still hit the ball decently. “I made good decisions on the course and that’s all I can ask of myself when I’m playing,” Ng said. Furthermore, the first hole set the whole rhythm for Ng, as he outdrove his opponent and almost reached the green on a par 5 hole in two strokes. Ng alsos hit a nice wedge into the green on the sixth hole that essentially sealed his win.

But the most dominant performer was the fifth starter, junior Kenny Zheng, who crushed his opponent in the first five holes, effectively ending his match with the biggest lead possible in a nine-hole match. Zheng was confident about the match because he was familiar with the course, Marine Park Golf Course, since he had played there last season. He managed to hit well out of obstacles such as bunkers and tall grass. His drives were also impressive, as he drove the ball 270 feet only a foot left of the fairway on the sixth hole.

The Eagles, who looked like a force to be reckoned with, lost 3-2 in the championship match against Staten Island Tech, on Thursday, June 5. Yet, this was Nieves’ third season making it to at least the semi-finals, and his second in a row. So close to winning the city title yet again, the Eagles are fortunate that all of their starters will be returning next year, so they have the opportunity to spend the off-season preparing for revenge.

Rocky Lam / The Spectator

In Front of the Home Crowd

By Daniel Gutman In just a few days, the 2014 World Cup in Brazil will be kicking off. Teams from all over the globe will be travelling to the South American country in hopes of wowing the world stage and getting their hands on the coveted trophy. The host country, Brazil, along with fellow South American Argentina, and European squads from Germany, Italy, and Belgium, are considered the main contenders for the Coppa del Mondo. Brazil last got their hands on the coveted trophy in 2002, with a squad boasting legendary players like Ronaldinho Gaucho and Ricardo Kaka. Twelve years later, a reinvigorated and young Brazil side looks poised to capture its record sixth World Cup trophy.

Location The location and climate

where the World Cup is taking place will be a huge factor in deciding who walks away with the trophy. It is the reason why South American teams, Brazil and Argentina, are considered the undisputed favorites despite not having a better roster than some of the European teams in the competition. The climate will be a huge detriment to teams such as England, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, which are accustomed to cool temperatures. Players will be forced to adapt to the sweltering and humid Brazilian summer within days, while for the South American countries, the climate is home. The climate means that national teams bringing older players will restrict those veteran players to playing less than the full 90 minutes. The climate will leave even the youngest and fittest players exhausted after a full match of running, and those players in the twilight of their careers will be most affected.

Key players like Andrea Pirlo (Italy), Miroslav Klose (Germany), Patrice Evra (France), and Steven Gerrard (England) will probably will be restricted to a single half’s worth of playing time in any given match.

Meanwhile, the young Brazilian team, having few squad members over 30, is acclimated to the heat and knows how to play well despite it.

will be a huge psychological boost for Brazil. Teams from outside of South America have never won the tournament on South American soil in any of the five tournaments held there, and for a reason. Brazil’s fans will be roaring behind their team and making themselves an intimidating force against all other teams. Facing a wall of passionate Brazilian fans is not something many teams want to do, as fans have been known to turn matches around solely based on their support of a given team. Brazil is also under pressure to redeem the poor organization of the tournament.

Unfinished stadiums, worker deaths, and protests are but a few of the numerous problems that occurred while building the venues for the tournament.

Brazil’s team has to show, not only for FIFA, but also for its own people, that all the work was put in for good reason.

Brazilians have not been happy with holding the World Cup, stating that allocating so much money for stadiums that will be used at full capacity for only a few weeks is embarrassing considering the poverty and other deep underlying issues riddling the nation. The home team will thus have a greater incentive to win, since victory would mean that the stadium building, at the expense of the people, was not for nothing.

Home Field Advantage and Pressure

Injuries

The home field advantage

Brazil is going into the tournament as one of the only pre-

mier teams without an injury to a major player. Italy’s usually reliable central midfielder, Riccardo Montolivo, is out with a fractured tibia, Germany lost midfielders Sven and Lars Bender to leg problems, and Colombia’s star striker and only major scorer Ramadel Falcao was injured playing for his club side. Brazil, however, is putting forth a full roster and will not have to change tactics so close to the tournament’s start due to injuries.

The Squad Injuries or no injuries, Brazil is still bringing one of the strongest, if not the strongest overall team to the World Cup. Its players are some of the best in the world in their positions, and most starters have played together for the national team many times (15 of the players named to the World Cup roster were also featured on Brazil’s 2013 victorious Confederations Cup team). With speedy and technically gifted players like Neymar and Hulk on the wings, a solid core consisting of Thiago Silva, Dante, Ramires and Fernandinho, three of whom won league titles for their club sides, and a clean nononsense finisher in Fred, who scored 17 goals in 31 matches for Brazil, Brazil will have virtually no weak points going into the tournament. I expect them to play a 4-2-3-1 formation and emphasize a fast-paced attacking game, which Brazil is adept at playing.

Provided the squad isn’t hit with a sudden wave of injuries, there is no excuse for the trophy not to be held by Brazil at the closing of the tournament.

The Bottom Line Anything but bringing home the trophy will be viewed as a failure by the Brazilian Football Federation, Brazil’s fans, and would cause a great deal of controversy within the country.

But provided the squad isn’t hit with a sudden wave of injuries, there is no excuse for the trophy not to be held by Brazil at the closing of the tournament.

Despite the fact that this Brazil side is viewed as one of the weakest in Brazil’s history, the team will be looking to show the world that even a “weak” Brazil is stronger than everyone else.

The Spectator ● June 16, 2014

Page 27

Sports An Accidental Champion of Physical Education

By Ariella Kahan continued from page 1

I like sports, and I had no idea what to do, so I said, right now, I’ll be a Physical Education major, so I got to pre-register and the rest is history,” Barth explained. Though Barth initially chose to major in Physical Education to escape from the long lines, he ended up sticking with this major through graduation.

After leaving Queens College, Barth coached basketball at Aviation High School while teaching at a middle school on the Lower East Side. While one of Barth’s colleagues from the middle school was refereeing a basketball game, he chatted with the other referee and happened to bring up Barth’s name.

“He said, ‘Oh there’s a young guy at my school coaching at Aviation High School, and his name is Larry Barth.’ And the other referee said ‘Barth? Did he go to Springfield Gardens High School? I had a couple of Barths in Springfield Gardens High School.’ And the first guy said, ‘Well, I know he is from Queens,’ and the second guy said, ‘Tell him to call me!’”

As it turned out, the second

referee was Michael Moskowitz, chair of the Physical Education department at Stuyvesant. When Barth came to talk to Moskowitz, Moskowitz asked Barth if he would like to teach at Stuyvesant, and Barth replied with an enthusiastic “Of course!” One year later, in September of 1984, Moskowitz called Barth into his office for a second time. “[Moscowitz] said, these are his exact words, ‘I heard you got married over the summer.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I just got married two weeks ago.’ He said, ‘Congratulations, I got you a present!’ And I said, ‘Mr. Moskowitz, that wasn’t necessary. You didn’t have to get me a present,’ and he said, ‘Well, I got you into Stuyvesant.

Report here tomorrow.’”

Barth reported here the next day, and the day after that, and continued to report back to Stuyvesant for 5,400 more days. One of the most memorable of these days was when one of Barth’s past students visited him. “He is a captain in the army and he is a doctor so he’s been on the front lines, he’s been around the world, and it was good to catch up to him.

We went over to Gee Whiz for lunch and we just spoke,” Barth explained. “We were pretty close when he was here; his Dad

was dying and he was on the football team and I drove him home from a game once because his Dad lived in Jamaica, and his Dad was ill and was on his deathbed, and I drove him to the airport. And he said, ‘So how are your boys?’ and I said, ‘I have a Jewish accountant and a Jewish attorney’—well, I didn’t necessarily say Jewish. And he said, ‘Well, you also have a doctor too as a son.’”

Perhaps Barth’s ability to connect so well with students and colleagues stems from his laid back attitude. “You can be serious; there are a lot of times to be serious, but there are also a lot of times to have fun and laugh. So as long as you do your work and do what you’re supposed to do, why not laugh. You don’t have to be serious your whole life,” Barth explained wisely. This point of view surfaces in his physical education classes, where he emphasizes that if his students fulfill a few basic requirements, they will succeed in and enjoy his class.

At the beginning of each semester he tells his students, “As long as you’re here, you’re on time, and you’re prepared, then you’re going to have a great time, you’re going to learn a new skill, [and] you’re going to get your exercise,” Barth said.

Girls’ Badminton

Jessica Wu / The Spectator

only a minimum number of people from the team attended games. Since they lacked organization and leadership during practices, they hope to work as a team to create more techniquebased practices and a greater cohesiveness between all the team members and Francis.

2014 marked the inauguration of badminton as a PSAL sport. Though the season started off rough for the Peglegs, as they lost their first three games against Brooklyn Tech, Seward Park, and John Dewey, they bounced back and ended the season with a 4-6 record.

This year was the first time that many players on the team had joined a sports team at Stuyvesant.

Consequently, many players were confused and did not know the official rules. In addition, many players on the team had never considered badminton as a competitive sport before joining the team. Due to the lack of experience in playing badminton competitively as a sport, many players had difficulties keeping up with stronger opponents.

Coach Hugh Francis proved to be of great assistance to the team, even though it was clear practice when he was unable to hit the birdie several times, that he did not have a strong background on how to play badminton. However, he helped the team significantly by reading about the rules online and ed-

Barth will continue to, like his students, have a great time, learn a new skill, and exercise next year when he retires. “I’ll learn how to relax, take up golf and tennis, continue rollerblading, and continue to work in the camp in the summer, a day camp in Long Island,” Barth said. “And go on vacations,” he added.

Barth knows leaving will be bittersweet, as he will greatly miss his friends among the

faculty and the students who have “[kept] him young all these years.” However, having worked for the public school system for a grand total of thirty-five years, Barth certainly deserves a respite. “It’ll be good to have some time off, although I’m a hyper person and I never thought of having time off and talking about relaxing, but there comes a point in your life when you start to think about those things,” he said.

Girls’ Handball

No Luck the First Time

By Sabrina Huang

“You can be serious, there are a lot of times to be serious, but there is also a lot of times to have fun and laugh.

So as long as you do your work and do what you’re supposed to do, why not laugh. You don’t have to be serious your whole life.”

—Lawrence Barth, Assistant Principal of Physical Education

ucating the team on the sport during an early practice.

The team’s best player, sophomore Jialin Ke, had been put in the first singles position since the start of the season.

However, due to an unfortunate sprained ankle early in the season, the Peglegs were challenged by the change in the lineup, and lost games that they felt should have been easy for them to win. About a week after the injury on Thursday, May 1, Ke fell again on the same ankle, sprained it, and consequently lost another match. Therefore, the entire team lineup was shifted and sophomore Susan Wu moved up to play the first singles match and faced more challenging opponents.

Though the Peglegs did not made the playoffs as they had hoped, they plan to improve their team dynamic and coordinate team spirit in hopes of making playoffs next year. They hope to support and cheer for one another at games, something they had failed to do consistently at all games during the season.

They also hope to improve dedication as many players had low practice attendance and

“I believe that with more experience and a better ability to anticipate different types of players, I will be able to score more wins for the team.”

— Susan Wu, sophomore

“I believe that with [the] experience [from this season] and a better ability to anticipate different types of players, I will be able to score more wins for the team,” Wu said.

Since this season marked the first time many players played badminton as a sport competitively, the Peglegs plan on using this experience to their benefit next year.

“Success relies completely on previous experience,” Ke said.

Furies Wind Down for the Season

By May Chen “Don’t keep score, just keep scoring.”

This saying from coach Eric Witsotsky, is well-known to the Furies. Though they faced with a few setbacks in the beginning of the season, such as figuring out positions and doubles pairs, the Furies managed to pull through with a successful regular season, ending with a season record of 9-1. The Furies, however, exited early from the post-season, falling in the first round.

Losing second singles and first doubles from the previous season left a gap of talent and experience on the team. Many of the players chosen to replace the seniors did not have a position previously, which caused the split of previous doubles partners. As a result, the Furies’ doubles partners have performed weaker this season.

However, the newcomers such as freshmen Joanne Chung and Vicky Huang have been welcome additions to the team, with their constant enthusiasm and excitement fueling practices and matches. “The newcomers have a lot of motivation and enthusiasm. They stay late for practices and plan unofficial practices,” junior Karen Huang said.

For the Furies, falling short in playoffs did not overshadow the nearly undefeated regular season. The triumphant streak was expected by most players as the team tends to perform well in the Manhattan Division, which lacks challenging opponents. On the other hand, for the past few years, the Furies have consistently beaten Bronx Science, which made their 5-0 loss this season a disappointment. “It just feels terrible to lose to people that we love to

beat,” junior Hannah Yep said.

Team unity has proved to be an important factor to the success of the team. Despite a lack of practices this season, the Furies were able to become even closer this season through unofficial outdoor practices.

A closer bond fostered a more comfortable and enjoyable environment, which proved to be useful during matches. “I think our greatest strength is the bond our team has. We’re pretty close and we encourage each other to do better, and always helping each other out,” Yep said.

On the other hand, the team has had issues with coordination between doubles pairs.

Without sufficient practice, the pairs weren’t used to playing together and often failed to cover each other on court.

Despite close bonds, the team must carry that chemistry onto the court.

Despite a successful regular season, the team failed to meet playoff expectation. In recent years, the team has only failed to advance to the third round of playoffs once, but this year, they failed to move past the first round. The Furies had never previously played against New Dorp, their playoff opponent, which added to the pressure and anxiety on the team.

“We were playing at courts we usually don’t play at and a team we’ve never played against before,” senior and cap-tain Ida Huang said.

The team plans to combat the playoff situation next year by holding practices in environments more similar to the playoff environment, which may help them deal with the pressure better. The Furies hope to put the early playoff exit behind them and return to form next season.

June 16, 2014

Page 28

The Spectator SpoRts Boys’ Table Tennis

By Anthony Cheang Much like a hard fought war, the battle in table tennis is not finished in one battle or shot, but rather, a hard fought rally between two opponents, both fighting for an advantage, before delivering a single decisive blow. Stuyvesant’s boys’ table tennis team fought and skirmished in all their matches this season, picking up decisive victories against less talented schools, such as FDR, and also losing some critical matches to Brooklyn Tech early on in the season. However, the team persevered, came together as a whole, and ultimately delivered the decisive blow in the finals to win the championship against a team they had struggles with in the regular season: Brooklyn Tech.

The game started with first singles, in which freshman Pei Yuan Wang destroyed Brooklyn Tech’s Joshua Park, sweeping the game 3-0. However, this was followed by an equally devastating sweep in the second singles match-up, with Brooklyn Tech’s Ludovic Freithofnig sweeping freshman William Yao 3-0, tying the score 1-1. It was a tough loss for Stuyvesant. Throughout the match, Freithofnig roared with approval every time a point was scored, and to add to that, the Brooklyn Tech bench went ab-

solutely insane. Yao had trouble keeping the ball on the table as the game started to slip away.

Ultimately, the advantage shifted back to Stuyvesant in third singles, with sophomore David Song decisively defeating Brooklyn Tech’s Harry Chen, giving Stuyvesant a 2-1 lead. The match was never in danger, as David Song simply outplayed Harry Chen, scoring shot after shot past Brooklyn Tech’s Harry Chen, who was simply too slow to keep up with Song’s pace. “I think that’s our strongest suit: our one, two, three singles,” coach Bernard Feigenbaum said.

The singles campaign gave Stuyvesant the lead going into the final two games, but the lead would not last for long; Brooklyn Tech came back in second doubles, winning with a sweep. Sophmores Chun Chieh Chou and Albert Lee simply could not get into their groove, playing sluggishly and making simple mistakes. They simply were not in sync, losing 3-0, and specifically, losing by five, 10, and seven points in the three sets, respectively. This brought the entire match to a climax, as both benches from Stuy and Tech were cheering with all their might in the decisive game of first doubles.

Senior Alan Baranov and freshman Eric Amstislavsky

A Family of Vipers The Vipers began this season by adjusting to the loss of their previous captains, Norine Chan(’13), Teresa Huang(’13), and Christina Zeng (’13), all of whom were starters. This year, seniors Marlena Lui and Katherine Oh were the captains of foil and epee, respectively. The duo was essential to the Vipers’ team dynamic as they helped new fencers feel comfortable and improved returning fencers’ form and technique during practices. “[The captains] were critical enough [to] motivate us to perform better. They were very attentive to our flaws and always offered advice on how to improve,” junior Tiffany Chan said.

This season featured not only a shake-up in leadership but also a shake-up in the fencing division. Traditional fencing powerhouse such as Hunter College High School and Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School fenced alongside the Vipers in the 2012-2013 season in the Division B League. This year, these schools were moved to the Division C League, leaving Stuyvesant with relatively inferior competitors.

A 6-0 regular season record allowed the Vipers to claim the third seed in the playoffs and a bye to the second round of playoffs against sixth seeded Bronx Science. The Vipers were victorious with a tight 45-41 win. In the third round of playoffs, however, the Vipers were unable to defeat their higherseeded opponents and lost 45-32. Despite an aggravating loss, the Vipers gained a lot of skills, including how to deal with stress in big games. A great learning experience for newcomers, including sophomore

onship, going to Stuyvesant.

Amid all the celebration about this season, having a young core, with their singles composing of two freshmen and one sophomore, Stuyvesant looks to create a dynasty. With the critical game being first doubles this year, senior Alan Baranov is leaving the team, opening questions regarding to who will replace him. “I believe Kevin Li, currently a junior, will replace Alan Baranov. He is very hardworking, and is also training and actively playing,” sophomore David Song said.

No matter what the answer is, Stuyvesant has all the tools to repeat this year’s success.

The core players are young, and getting better every year. “As a

player, I think about improving my backhand and my footwork,” Song said.

Yao, the only singles loss Stuyvesant suffered in the game, is also looking to improve over the summer as well.

“I’m going to improve by having a more consistent two-winged offense,” Yao said. Many of the players on the team are looking to improve during the offseason, so Stuyvesant will only get better next year. As Baranov leaves, a key emotional backbone of the team also leaves with him. To make up for his absence, Baranov advises his team to “keep the energy high, keep the confidence high, and keep motivated.”

Boys’ Handball

Girls’ Fencing

By Joshua Zhu

faced their biggest game of the season: win, and be champions, or lose, and settle for silver. The match started intensely, with a very close set, going into deuce, both pairs rallying furiously, until a decisive smash from the Brooklyn Tech side gave them the first set 12-10. However, Stuyvesant, fueled by the emotion of Senior Alan Baranov, came back furiously with two consecutive set victories, giving them a 2-1 set lead for the match. “They caught us off guard, but we always come home with the W.” Baranov said. Brooklyn Tech, however, refused to go away, as they came back to win a critical fourth set, tying the score at 2-2. The entire season came down to 11 points: the final set of the entire season. Stuyvesant would not disappoint, as they surged out to a 9-4 lead in the set. The tone was completely different than the beginning of the match, and was capped off by a roaring smash from Baranov, sending the ball flying all the way to the spectators, much to the Stuyvesant bench’s unbridled approval. Running on fumes from the surge, Baranov and Amstislavsky finished the set, ultimately winning 11-7.

As soon as the final point was scored, the entire bench rushed the table, and celebrated the first PSAL table tennis champi-

Yi Zhu / The Spectator

Stuyvesant Wins First Ever Table Tennis Championship

Ha Young Ahn, was a strongpoint of this year’s team.

“Even though this was only my first year on the team, I feel like our progress this year made us increase our competitive nature and determination to succeed, as a team. I really can’t wait for next year, when I can get more opportunities to be a more active player on the team in terms of games and tournaments,” Ahn said.

The fact that newer members are so enthusiastic to compete clearly demonstrates how veteran members have helped their less experienced teammates. In fact, the support that the Vipers offered each other was something that several members stressed, including Ahn. “I was surprised that the team was able to bond quickly in such a short period of time.

The most rewarding aspect of joining the team this year was being a part of such a close-knit family,” Ahn said.

As the Vipers look forward to next season, they should feel nothing but optimism. The gap being left by the graduating seniors will not take as much effort to fill as previous years, and several starters will be returning, hardened by the experiences of this season. Juniors Tiffany Chan and Seonmin Chung were voted, in a team dinner, to replace Lui and Oh as captains, and the Vipers expect nothing but the best from them.

Looking forward to next season, Chan said, “Hopefully tryouts go well enough so we have a talented crop of [incomers]. [But] the thing about our team is that we’re like a family, so it won’t just be me and Sara [Chung] pushing the rest of the team. We’ll support each other.”

Dragons Look to Recover and Reload

By Jeffrey Zheng Finishing undefeated in the regular season and clinching the sixth seed in the city, the Dragons accomplished only the bare minimum of what they expected. Having easily breezed through their first round playoff game, the Dragons seemed to be in good shape. However, they were surprisingly upset by 11th-seeded James Madison (9-3), ending their season.

“The team really didn’t play to the best of their ability against James Madison. They got really nervous and really intimidated so it was really disappointing for them and for me,” coach Robert Sandler said.

Nervousness is expected of a team comprising mostly juniors who did not play much last year. Though this year’s co-captains, juniors Young Kim and Marco Liu, had a good amount of experience last year, they played more of a supporting roles as Cody Tong (’14) and Alexander Bu (’14) were two of the strongest players in the city and had commanding leadership skills. This year’s team only had two senior starters and one of them, Wilson Li, had an elbow injury for the majority of the season. This lack of leadership, experience, and skill was what separated the 2014 team and the 2013 team, as the later progressed to the semifinals while the former exited in the second round.

“Obviously [this year’s players] are not as good. Last year, we had a superstar singles play-

er in Cody and another strong player in Alex. Those were our two captains and the heart and soul of our team,” Sandler said.

While the Dragons look to win the championship every year, and rarely accomplish that elusive feat, many of the players believed that they could have easily beaten James Madison and possibly even advanced to the semifinals. This playoff defeat will provide some of the Dragons with much needed experience. This year was the first time that juniors Wilson Luo, Eddie Wang, Dylan Li and Daniel Wu played in the playoffs.

The less experienced players will now have an idea of how high their intensity level has to be in order to succeed in the playoffs.

Though consisting mostly of juniors, Stuyvesant will still have to deal with the loss of Wilson Li and senior and second doubles player Long Yip. “Losing Wilson will affect the fire power of our singles since he was great when healthy. Marco and I will really need to step things up for next season to cope for the losses,” Kim said.

However, the other captain had a completely different view on the departure of the two seniors. “I don’t really think Long and Wilson really had big impacts on the team this year, especially since Wilson was injured for most of it,” Liu said.

Next year, the Dragons’ lineup will feature Kim, Liu and Dylan Li as first, second and third singles, respectively. With the

talent and now the experience under their belts after this season, the Dragons will just need to put it all together against the tougher opponents.

“Next year I think they have a lot more potential. Marco’s the one I have the most faith in. He takes it the most seriously and is the most dedicated. I think there’s a dedication issue. I understand that Stuy kids have a lot of school work but we’re never going to be able to take it to the next level until we have a team that’s fully dedicated,” Sandler said.

The Dragons certainly have the pieces to become a contender next year. This season was more of a rebuilding year for them. The fact that the starters for the top teams such as Francis Lewis and Midwood are mostly seniors means the competition that Dragons will face next year will not be as experienced as the competition from this year. However, dedication will be a key factor in their success, and as a junior at Stuyvesant, there is little free time to put too much dedication into anything. Fortunately, by the time the handball season comes around next year, most of the starters will be nearly be done with schoolwork and be able to focus solely on handball. The Dragons have strong talented core led by Kim and Liu. If they put in the work and effort, there is no doubt they will be one of the elite teams next year.

“We will become the champions,” junior Daniel Wu said.