Commentary Bible in the curriculum? Page 2
Features Fake Halloween in pics Page 3
Arts Mac Miller: Grow Up! Page 5
Community There’s life after WMA Page 6
Sports 200 is magic Page 8
Wilbraham & Monson Academy
TLAS
A
Volume IV, Issue 2
By NICOLE ROBITAILLE ‘12 Staff Writer As the fall trimester came to a close, students at Wilbraham & Monson Academy flooded the Founders Theater to watch the dance program perform their final show on Thursday, November 10th at 6:30pm. In past years, the dance performances have taken place in the Jane McNamara Kelly Athletic Center in the dance room. However, with a new instructor, Ms. Melissa O’Grady came a change of scenery and production values, and the girls took the stage in Founders Theater with lighting and arena seating this year. The seats filled up quickly, and the dance group performed before a standing room only crowd with many students sitting on the floor for a better view. According to Issa Best, “People were lining up outside the doors of Fisk just to get a seat.” The twelve girls danced
The Global School ®
November 28, 2011
Let’s Dance!
to artists like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance and Adele. While the first two selections were songs O’Grady has been waiting to choreograph, Take It All by Adele was a combination taught in class that the girls liked so much they wanted to put it in the show. To put together the costumes, the girls discussed the tone and imagery with each song and everyone brought in clothes that they thought would work well as costumes. After laying all the clothes on the floor they created each other’s costumes piece by piece. Ms. O’Grady is no stranger
to the area. After growing up in the Sixteen Acres section of Springfield, O’Grady received her early training from the New England Dance Conservatory and was a member of their company New England Dance Theater. She continued her studies in Pennsylvania at the University of Arts in Philadelphia. Upon graduating, O’Grady took her career to New York City where she continued to study dance at Dance New Amsterdam in addition to dancing for a company and performing in venues all around the city. Then, O’Grady and her husband moved back to Massachusetts to start a family. While some girls have been dancing all their lives, others are novices time. Among the more experienced dancers were Stephanie and Kristin Reeves. The dance group also included: Ashley Impri-
Wilbraham, MA 01095
ano, Robin Dillon, Wen Yi Zhang, Ying Zhang, Yingxue (Yessica) Song, Lin-Hua Chen, Tae Young (Vivian) Youn, YaeHee Oh, Hyun Jung (Stephanie) Ji, and Isabel Geiss. Steph Reeves, commented, “There were lots of different types of dancers involved in the performance, but after a trimester of hard work I think we pulled together something we can be proud of.” The wide variety of dance training and abilities also proved to be a challenge for the performance for Ms. O’Grady. “It is challenging to teach a class that is difficult enough for the ones with experience but not too hard for the ones without experience so they learn and don’t get discouraged,”she noted. Another challenge, O’Grady said, was the time frame. In the dance world, ten weeks of practice time is really too short to pull together a performance. Ms. O’Grady said, based on her experience this fall, she plans to make the spring performance even bigger and better.
The Wright Stuff on the Arab Spring By TERESA KENNEDY ‘12 Co-Editor-In-Chief This year as part of the Springfield Public Forum, Wilbraham & Monson Academy travelled en masse to Symphony Hall on Wednesday evening Nov. 9 to hear journalist Robin Wright talk about the issues surrounding the Arab Spring democracy movement. Wright has written a book about her experiences covering the Middle East this past year, entitled Rock the Casbah. Wright began her talk with a story about how she became a journalist. She grew up in a family of three girls with a football-loving father. For this reason, she said, as a joke, she joined the newspaper at University of Michigan…as a sports writer. She says she became the first female sports editor of a college newspaper in the country. During a career that has spanned five decades, Wright bylined for the Washington Post and the New York Times. Over that
time period, she has traveled to 140 countries as a journalist, focusing mainly on the Arab world. Her first assignment in the Middle East began on October 6, 1973, which happened to be the day the fourth war in the Middle East erupted. She has been reporting on the Arab world and its “hold out [against] the democratic tide” ever since. Wright said she did not originally intend to write about the Arab Spring; her first idea was to write a book on the decade following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. However, by coincidence, she stumbled upon the Arab Spring and discovered the “extraordinary array of change” there and so began Rock the Casbah. The agents of change are what Wright called a “counter jihad.” Among these change agents is demographics: there has been a population boom in the last two generations of babies born in the Middle East. Secondly, for the first time, literacy is widespread in the region, meaning that Middle
Easterners now have the ability to know what is happening beyond their villages and even their countries. Additionally, there has been a boom in women’s education. In Saudi Arabia, one of the most heavily Islamic countries, sixtyfour percent of women now attend college. The fourth main change in the Middle East is the availability of technology. There are now more satellite television stations that reach Middle Easterners, providing different perspectives on world events, rather than only one government perspective. Wright says that people are ex-
hausted with the tactics of extremism and terrorism, along with “rigid religious ideologies” in place, One of Wright’s main points is about the “new martyrdom” that is sweeping the Middle East. She gave the example of Mohammed Bouazizi, the man who began the revolution in Tunisia by setting himself on fire in protest of the corrupt government that had taken his livelihood because he refused to pay bribes. In Egypt, not long after, a blogger was killed by government officials for speaking out; the officials framed him as a drug dealer who had overdosed. She also pointed out the role rap music has played in the Arab Spring. Cultural changes
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