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.
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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.