The Black & White Vol. 58 Issue 3 by The Black & White

the

B&W

Print Editor-in-Chief Alex Robinson

Print Managing Editor Max London

Print Managing Editor Katie Hanson

Print Production Heads Noah Grill Joey Sola-Sole

cover photo illustration by JACKY LOCOCO, cover photo by CHARLIE SAGNER

theblackandwhite.net Online Editor-in-Chief Dana Herrnstadt Online Managing Editors Ally Navarrete, Anna Yuan Online Production Head Alex Silber Print Production Assistants Samantha Levine, Jacky Lococo, Sam Nickerson, Sam Rubin, Eva Sola-Sole Online Production Assistant Kyle Crichton Multimedia Editors Jack Gonzalez, Jack Middleton Multimedia Interns Lexi Fleck, Bella Grumet Photo Directors Annabel Redisch, Kurumi Sato Photo Assistants Charlie Sagner, Joey Sussman Webmasters Eva Ginns, Jonathan Young Communications and Social Media Directors Isabelle van Nieuwkoop, José Wray Yearbook Liaison Anna Labarca Puzzles Editors Kaya Ginsky, Mathilde Lambert Business Managers Khanya Dalton, Min Yeung Business Assistant Shivani Sawant Traffic Manager Zoe Chyatte The Black & White is an open forum for student views from Walt Whitman High School, 7100 Whittier Blvd., Bethesda, MD, 20817. The Black & White’s website is www.theblackandwhite.net. The B&W magazine is published six times a year. Signed opinion pieces reflect the positions of individual staff members and not necessarily the opinion of Walt Whitman High School or Montgomery County Public Schools. Unsigned editorial pieces reflect the opinion of the newspaper. All content in the paper is reviewed to ensure that it meets the highest level of legal and ethical standards with respect to the material as libelous, obscene or invasive of privacy. All corrections are posted on the website.

Print Copy Editor Meera Dahiya Online Copy Editor Hirari Sato Sports and Style Editors Sara Azimi, Aditi Gujaran, Bennett Solomon Metro Editors Blake Layman, David Villani Perspective Editors Mateo Gutierrez, Emma Iturregui, Clara Koritz Hawkes Education Editors Zara Ali, Danny Donoso Sports and Style Writers Ella Adams, Andrew Eagle, Mia Friedman, Anna Kulbashny, Matthew Mande, James Marzolf, Afsoon Movahed, Eli Putnam, Gabe Schaner, Meera Shroff, Reuben Stoll, Ben Stricker, Eve Titlebaum Metro Writers Lexi Fleck, Celina Fratzscher, Sammy Heberlee, Christian Hill, Emily London, Jocie Mintz, Jesse Rider, Ben Waldman Perspective Writers Holly Adams, Bella Brody, Bella Grumet, Chloe Lesser, Eva Levy, Heather Wang Education Writers Ben Baisinger-Rosen, Taylor Haber, Bella Learn, Jack McGuire, Jaclyn Morgan, Sam Mulford, Lincoln Polan, Eleanor Taylor, Sarah Tong, Ethan Wagner Editorial Board Khanya Dalton, Jack Gonzalez, Taylor Haber, Emma Iturregui, Clara Koritz Hawkes, Chloe Lesser, Emily London, Jack McGuire, Ben Stricker, Eleanor Taylor, David Villani, José Wray Adviser Ryan Derenberger

Recent awards include the 2019 Gold Crown, 2018 and 2017 CSPA Hybrid Silver Crowns, 2013 CSPA Gold Medalist and 2012 NSPA Online Pacemaker. The Black & White encourages readers to submit opinions on relevant topics in the form of letters to the editor, which must be signed to be printed. Anonymity can be granted on request. The Black & White reserves the right to edit letters for content and space. Letters to the editor may be emailed to theblackandwhiteonline@gmail.com. Annual mail subscriptions cost $35 ($120 for four-year subscription) and can be purchased through the online school store.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS Divorce and teen pregnancy aren’t topics that student journalists usually tackle, but that didn’t deter the 1983 staff of The Spectrum, the student newspaper of Hazelwood East High School in St. Louis, Missouri. The students diligently reported on the heavy topics, but as they were sending the paper to the printer, their principal abruptly cut the stories without their knowledge. The Hazelwood students protested what they believed to be an infringement of their First Amendment rights and brought the case to the district court. After opposing decisions in the district court and the court of appeals, the case landed in the Supreme Court. A 5–3 ruling in favor of the school found that school-sponsored student publications were lawfully subject to censorship by administrators. To this day, the landmark decision of Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier is highly contested and has sparked continuing debate on the issues of student journalists’ freedoms and censorship. To combat this problematic legacy, the Student Press Law Center named January 29 “Student Press Freedom Day” to raise awareness for student press rights.

The symbolism of this day is increasingly important; around the world, freedom of the media has been declining in the past decade, Freedom House, a non-governmental research institute, reported. Financial burdens, declining readership or censorship threats have impacted almost every media outlet, and we must reckon with what the rights and role of journalism should be in the 2020s. Like the Hazelwood students, we strive to take on sensitive topics that matter. Our magazine highlights significant cultural and political shifts in our communities. In this issue, our writers reported on the ongoing impeachment trial and the growing trend of students abusing Maryland’s legalization of medical marijuana. As a school newspaper, we also have a responsibility to connect readers with our community and share lighter stories that are just as important as articles that cover sensitive topics. With this in mind, the following pages include stories of a student artist who specializes in painting cars and one writer’s experience exercising with the crew team for a week. When students recognize their peers in our articles, they feel a sense of familiarity

in the news, affirming their connection with the media and inspiring them to consume news from other outlets. Like always, we are incredibly grateful for our skilled, trusting adviser Ryan Derenberger, who believes in our capabilities and gives us freedom as a student-run publication to cover the topics we choose, both heavy and light. Additionally, our capable writers, thoughtful editors and innovative production team have made the process of covering a wide range of topics possible. We are grateful that Maryland is one of 14 states with “New Voices” laws that protect the freedom of speech for student journalists, but in 36 states, there are still no such laws in place. Journalism and media coverage starts with students. When student reporters feel their voices are restricted, peers will feel less connected to the stories they read. At the most basic level, students deserve honest, complete coverage. By celebrating the efforts of the Hazelwood reporters, while actively fighting to change the precedent the Supreme Court ruling set, we hope to help solidify a new standard for the freedoms of student press.

Katie Hanson Managing Editor

Max London Managing Editor

Alex Robinson Editor-in-Chief photo by CHARLIE SAGNER

CONTE Table of

This painting, titled “Neck and Neck” is junior Nicholas Pyle’s depiction of an Alfa Romeo 8c and a Mercedes Benz SSK racing against eachother. Completed during last August, the painting was featured in Glen Echo’s Labor Day Art Show and inspired Nicholas’ car theme for AP Studio Art this school year. Photo courtesy NICHOLAS PYLE.

ENTS 6

Student artist chases talent through painting cars

Girls take on the outdoors and gender norms in Scouts

uary 2020

High school curriculums wrongfully ignore Native American history

Students and teachers react to the historic impeachment

Students manipulate Maryland medical marijuana legalization

A writer’s perspective on being Iranian-American and Zoroastrian

Hebrew school teacher honors lives lost in Holocaust in unique way

Issue 3, Febr

Writers connect with their identity, extended family through lineage tracing

Staff editorial: addressing OneWhitman’s pitfalls and potential

From district lines to sidelines, economic disparities remain prominent

Gay Straight Alliance brings pride and support to community

One writer’s week with the crew team pulls him (and his muscles) in more than one direction

New Year’s resolution: finish the crossword 5

ALL REVVED UP

JUNIOR NICHOLAS PYLE DRIVES CREATIVITY BY PAINTING CARS BY BEN STRICKER

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On a freezing Saturday afternoon in the middle of December, I’m bundled up in the middle of the woods, trying to stay warm. Next to me, junior Nicholas Pyle is standing with his completely blank masonite board, visualizing the landscape I’ve come to watch him paint. Only 90 minutes later, dozens of differently colored, temperate paints gather in layers upon layers of strokes to form the scenery surrounding us. He was so focused when painting his landscape that he forgot his gloves were in his pants pocket — all while I’m shivering in my parka. When Nicholas began this landscape painting, he sketched an outline of the surrounding forest — trees, the creek, a bridge, large rocks and the trail — with his favorite green half-broken paintbrush on the masonite board. With each stroke that followed, I noticed how Nicholas held his paintbrush unevenly, splattering the paint onto the board. At first, it was hard to tell what he was painting as the murky blobs spread across the surface of the board. But as the final brush strokes landed, the elements and colors of his landscape came together as one; an imag of the densely wooded area with

the rocky banks of the Cabin John Creek and the one-lane bridge on McArthur Blvd cutting through it all appeared suddenly. “My paintings don’t really look like what I’m painting until I’m done,” Nicholas said. “They don’t look how they should look at first, but I eventually pull it together for the final product.” As a student artist, Nicholas said that he isn’t very different from others like him in terms of execution or skill — but his imagination is unique. He sees everything in the world in a different color than it appears naturally, he said. When Nicholas looks at the white walls in the Whitman hallways, he sees their base colors, but he also sees the shadows and colors they create. To the casual observer, the walls appear white with grey shadows, but Nicholas sees peachy pink and even some green. The colors, he says, “compliment each other” to create an overall effect. Nicholas has used this vivid imagination to compete in various art shows and earn free admission to an art summer program at the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan last summer. He was one of only 15 students internationally who was accepted into this prestigious program. Nicholas and the other students in the program spent three weeks designing “abstract” cars. Nicholas said it was special to meet others his age who were also passionate about visual art and car design, another focus for him. “He’s been drawing and painting since the first time I met him way back in first grade,” junior Finn Martin said. “The times when he isn’t at school or hanging out with his friends, he’ll be painting.” Nicholas’ interest in art was always closely tied to an obsession with cars. He first became interested in cars at age four when his uncle brought him car magazines to read, like Car and Driver, Road and Track and Autoweek. As early as preschool, Nicholas could name every type of car, his mother, Alexandra Freeman said. Nicholas’ love for cars soon grew into an appreciation for their artistic design, he said. Around the same time he started to be interested in cars, he would frequently play a game on paper in which he had to customize and design a car, adding different accessories to the car like exterior color, tires, spoilers and a hood scoop. Because of Nicholas’ interest in cars, his father, also a car enthusiast, bought an orange 1971 MG MGB, a “classic” British car, to teach Nicholas more about how cars worked. Nicholas’ family loved the old-fash-

ioned car so much that they later bought another near half-century old car: a blue 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. The inside of the car is small and cramped, but Nicholas still loves taking family rides in it. “When people look at a car, they don’t see the technical specifications of the car,” Nicholas said. “They see the overall shape of the car, which makes the design a really important aspect.” Excited by Nicholas’ interest in art and drawing, Alexandra signed him up when he was 12 for painting classes at the Yellow Barn, an art gallery and studio in Glen Echo. At the Yellow Barn, he began to develop his art skills in earnest, Nicholas said. As his skills started to become more refined around the age of 13, Nicholas began taking on commissioned paintings, normally selling the art for between $100 and $150. A coworker of Alexandra’s who has known Nicholas since he was a little boy, Dick Darnell, bought the first painting that Nicholas ever sold, “Cuban Blue,” for around $100. Darnell said people always gravitate toward the painting, which is hung up in his home, and ask him about it. “Even this painting, an earlier one of his, is incredible and has so much detail,” Darnell said. “As an artist, I think he is in the line of some of the great painters. He has a gift that is rare in my opinion.” Now, Nicholas takes figure painting classes where he focuses on painting people. He also interns at the Yellow Barn a few days a week, helping to set up and prepare for the various art shows that occur there throughout the year. Around a dozen people have now commissioned paintings from Nicholas through email or mutual friends, and he even has a website for potential customers to browse through some of his work. Once strictly a car painter, Nicholas now paints portraits of animals like customers’ dogs, something that is frequently requested. In addition to painting different subjects, Nicholas now also enjoys painting in a variety of settings, especially outdoors. He recently completed an art workshop in Frederick where he had to paint cows, making it the first time he painted something that wasn’t still. “It’s so nice painting outside,” Nicholas said. “All you think about is painting and nothing else. I can forget about school and all of my other problems.” Outside of school, Nicholas tries to paint outdoors at least once a week, normally at the Cabin John Creek or near the Potomac River, and typically paints cars inside once or twice a week. When he paints, he never finds himself nervous or confused, he just dives right

in, he said. “It’s one of the reasons why I like painting, because I don’t have to think to get myself ready,” Nicholas said. “It’s not as much thinking; it’s a different sort of logic.” Nicholas finds inspiration from the creative community of artists at Whitman, he said. He likes looking at students’ artwork in the cases hanging up around the school to see different styles of paintings, he said. Having completed other introductory courses, Nicholas now takes AP Studio Art. There, students develop a portfolio of 15 to 20 paintings throughout the year related to a theme, art teacher Rob Burgess said. When Nicholas was picking a theme, vintage racing immediately came to mind as a way to illustrate the “drama,” “danger” and “romance” of racing from the 1930s to the late 1960s, Nicholas said. “This class is a very nice break, and you use a different side of your brain when you’re painting,” Nicholas said. “You don’t think logically, you think conceptually while you paint, unlike most of my other classes at school.” Last year, Nicholas painted his 1971 MG MGB on a canvas for the Whitman Festival of the Arts show, astonishing and exciting everyone who came, Burgess said. It was one of his best paintings, Nicholas said, and it took him a week to finish, with over half a dozen hours of intense, concentrated focus. The painting was the largest one he has ever made; its 36 inch by 48 inch canvas dwarfs the size of the masonite boards and canvases that he normally paints on. “He’s developed in terms of becoming much more independent, and you can see more of a creative push now behind his work,” Burgess said. “He’s gone from mere representationalism to conceptualism and pushing himself to abstraction. When he’s in here, he’s all business; he works bell to bell. That’s a great thing for me as a teacher to know that there’s a student who is completely absorbed in what they’re doing.” In the future, Nicholas wants to go into automotive design. He’s looking at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, and the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, two of the few schools that offer strong design programs for cars, he said. Nicholas believes that art is based on creating emotions, something that car design is centered on as well, he said. Because he’s passionate about art and cars, the incorporation of both makes automotive design the perfect profession for him, he said. “Automotive design is still art, it’s just not painting,” Nicholas said. “It’s painting in a different sense.”

From top to bottom: The Pyle’s 1971 Volkswagen Beetle, along with their 1971 MG MGB, are cars that junior Nicholas Pyle enjoys taking rides in with his family; This painting is of a Ford GT40 racing in the 1966 Le Mans, a race considered one of the most prestigous automobile races in the world; Nicholas paints a landscape painting; Nicholas’ painting is from an art workshop he took in Frederick, MD, where he painted cows on a farm. Photos courtesy NICHOLAS PYLE.

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Troop Four: A look inside one of the first all-girl Scout troops by Holly Adams

At first sight, the girls hard at work in a church basement on a Monday night look like they’re preparing for a zombie apocalypse. Scattered on the floor are mess kits, hundreds of feet of rope, first-aid kits and other wilderness survival supplies. This is Troop Four, one of the first all-female Scout troops preparing for their upcoming camping trip by following the Boy Scouts’ 110-year-old motto: Be Prepared. As of Feb. 1, 2019, The Boy Scouts of America, now rebranded as Scouts BSA, allows girls from ages 11 to 17 to join. They also have the opportunity to earn Scouting’s highest rank, Eagle Scout. This change came after years of requests from families of girls who wished to join Boy Scouts but weren’t

allowed. The decision was controversial; many people from both the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts communities criticized it, favoring the traditional, gender-exclusive set up. However, several girls in the Bethesda area were excited to become scouts. With the help of Whitman parent Jen Khovananth as their scoutmaster, they formed Troop Four, now the largest all-girl troop in the Potomac scouting district. Khovananth created Troop Four three days after the historic February decision. The diverse group of over 20 girls, from different backgrounds, ages and schools, gathers in the basement of Concord Saint Andrew’s Church every Monday night. Each meeting, they

work on learning all the survival skills they will need in their next adventure, like knot-tying and fire skills. They scribble notes on a dry-erase board with reminders to bring plenty of socks, to wear layers and to be able to recognize the signs of hypothermia for their January camping trip, “Klondike.” There, over 800 BSA scouts, boys and girls, gather for a weekend of wilderness survival-skills competitions and camping. The girls in Troop Four are determined and adventurous girls who are real “go-getters,” Khovananth said. She’s having trouble keeping up with them because they’re so eager to learn and take on new challenges, she said. “They’re amazing to watch,” Khova-

Troop Four poses during their camping trip to Antietam National Battlefield in December right before being able to light lumineers on the battlefield. Photo courtesy JEN KHOVANANTH.

nanth said. “They don’t stop. If they have a challenge, they just go right into it, and they embrace it. They lean in, and they create plans on how to overcome the challenge.” Their first campout in March was “freezing” with around 50 mph winds, Khovananth said. Despite the treacherous conditions and lack of camping experience among the group, all of the girls came, stayed the whole weekend and went to the following meeting that Monday. Not only did they spend the entire weekend camping in the cold, working on their knife and woodworking skills, but they smiled and laughed while doing it, Khovananth said. Sophomore Merin Thomas joined Scouts BSA this summer in addition to Girl Scouts, and said she has noticed how dedicated and passionate everyone in Troop Four is. Since Scouts BSA has only recently allowed girls in, all of the girls in Troop Four appreciate the opportunity much more, Thomas said. “We have a lot of really dedicated people,” Thomas said. “A lot of the time you see in Boy Scouts that people are in it because their parents make them do it, and they don’t really enjoy it. But everyone who’s there has some sort of passion for it, which I think is really cool.” Senior Eliza Clegg’s family has a long lineage of Eagle Scouts, and she decided once the February 2019 decision came out that she wanted to be the first female Eagle Scout in her family. Patricia Clegg, Eliza’s mother, said that Eliza had always wanted to be a scout, like her brother, so her and her mother were very excited that the decision from Scouts BSA allowed their whole family to be involved. Eliza, who Khovananth said exemplified scout spirit, has been the Senior Patrol Leader — the highest ranked student leader in the troop, responsible for overall troop operations — since the troop began, and her

Troop four has lunch after conquering a 1,000 foot summit at Catoctin Mountain Park during their October campout. Photo courtesy JEN KHOVANANTH.

mother is a troop leader for Troop Four. Girls can take on leadership positions within the troop since organization happens on a peer-to-peer basis. The program allows the girls to lead meetings and activities with assistance from adult leaders, whereas in Girl Scouts leadership comes primarily from adult leaders. The independence of Scouts BSA appealed to sophomores Lauren Tan and Sarah Price, who joined last year. Eliza said Scouts BSA has allowed her to experience new things, giving her opportunities to ski and canoe, neither of which she had done before. Before becoming a scout, Eliza had never stepped foot on a boat, she said. “[Scouts] taught me leadership skills and how to talk to people because I am a very shy and anxious person,” Eliza said. “It takes me out of my comfort zone and makes me communicate better.” Unlike Eliza, Tan never expected she would become a scout. But when her friend introduced her to the program, she decided that joining could push her to do things she normally wouldn’t do, and she signed up. “I’m wearing a Whitman music jacket; I’m like a theatre kid,” Tan said. “ I don’t do outdoor things. But this pushes me out of my comfort zone.” While Scouts BSA troops aren’t coed, Troop Four has created a partnership with a boys troop, Troop 233, who meets in the same church that they do. The boys troop has been very accepting of them, Khovananth said, and the troops have gone on many “family campouts” together as brother and sister troops. T. Reid Lewis, the Scoutmaster of Troop 233, has supported the decision to include girls in Boy Scouts for a while, as he always wanted his daughter to have the same opportunities in Scouts BSA as his son had. Lewis said he was very excited to work with Scoutmaster Khovananth to help create Troop Four

and build a partnership between Troop Four and his own troop. “I felt like the girls didn’t have the same opportunity as boys, and that’s not supposed to be the way things are anymore,” Reid said. “Everyone is supposed to have the same opportunities.” The system of merit badges gives the girls in Scouts BSA an opportunity to discover new activities and passions. Scouts earn badges after demonstrating expertise in disciplines ranging from animal science and shotgun shooting to astronomy and game design. The aim of these badges is to introduce scouts to new activities that may later connect them to a certain career path. When scouts earn 21 merit badges — 13 are mandatory, and the rest are for fun — they’re eligible to become Eagle Scouts. Meeting the high standards set for each badge requires a large time commitment to ensure that the scout receiving each badge is genuinely knowledgeable about the activity they’re mastering. Thomas joined Scouts BSA in addition to Girl Scouts because Scouts BSA does more camping and wilderness training. Thomas is working on her Gold Award in Girl Scouts as well as advancing to Star, Life and then the Eagle rank in Scouts BSA. Each program offers different opportunities. It’s “the best of both worlds,” she said. Although Scouts BSA is a big time commitment, with campouts taking up entire weekends, for Tan, it’s more than worth it, she said. For Price, this large time commitment and unique group of girls has created an irreplaceable community. “I don’t really know what I would do without it at this point,” Price said. “It’s only been two months, but I don’t know how I would live without it.”

STAMP OUT HATE: Local Hebrew school teacher raises Holocaust awareness through collecting millions of stamps by Jocie Mintz

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When Hebrew school teacher Richard Sloane announced that he would collect 11 million canceled stamps, even his mother thought he was crazy. Though canceled stamps are worthless to an average stamp collector, since they have been used once and can never be used again, they’re invaluable to Sloane. He started his stamp collection in early 2017 with one goal: to collect individual stamps to represent each victim of the Holocaust. “As soon as you say 11 million stamps, people’s eyes pop out of their heads,” Sloane said. “But if 11 million seems like a lot of stamps, why don’t people have that same extreme reaction when they hear about the 11 million deaths in the Holocaust?” Since 2017, Sloane has collected millions of stamps from students, teachers and stamp collectors all over the world and is currently looking for a meaningful way to display them. Sloane has reached his 11 million stamp goal through a recent partnership with the American Philatelic Society, a nonprofit organization for stamp collectors, but has no intention of stopping. He wants to collect stamps that represent the victims of every hate-fueled act of violence that has resulted in death. Teaching at Temple Emanuel, a synagogue in Kensington, Sloane felt that his students had become numb to frequent tragedies, such as school shootings and hate crimes. Sloane believes his students’ desensitization to upsetting headlines stems from a detachment to historical hate crimes and genocides, he said. To find a way for students to respond thoughtfully and meaningfully to what he calls a “tsunami of bad news,” Sloane created an awareness campaign about the Holocaust. He was inspired by the documentary “Paperclips,” in which public school students undertook a project of similar magnitude and collected six million paperclips to represent the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. After realizing that his students had trouble visualizing the tremendous number of deaths during the Holocaust, Sloane sought out a way to help his students understand the full impact of the Holocaust. His project, titled STAMP IT!, encourages his students to bring canceled stamps to class. “Each canceled stamp represents a canceled life,” Sloane said. “It’s a beautiful metaphor too. Stamping out hate and stamping out discrimination. Stamping in love and compassion.” Junior Miriam Saletan was one of Sloane’s students the year he started the project at Temple Emanuel. She and her classmates helped Sloane collect and count the canceled stamps. The class set up a donation box in the lobby of the synagogue and reached out to a few other congregations within the area, including Congregation Har Shalom in Potomac and Congregation Beth El

in Bethesda. At first, Saletan was doubtful that Sloane could even reach one million stamps. But at the end of the school year, the project began to gain momentum. More than just students started to donate, and Sloane began receiving packages in the mail full of stamps. Saletan said she walked away with a change in perspective. “I learned a lot because I got a visualization of the sheer number of deaths,” Saletan said. “Even holding those stamps puts everything into context. It showed me the impact of literally holding a life in your hands.” Saletan was both shocked and proud when she discovered Sloane had reached his goal of collecting 11 million stamps, she said. Reaching this goal didn’t happen overnight. Until early 2019, Sloane had been publicizing his project largely by himself. He worked with local synagogues to collect the stamps and would infrequently receive packages from stamp collectors who heard about his project through an email Listserv. He had yet to reach one million stamps. “Here’s where the story gets good,” Sloane said. One of Sloane’s many update emails was “mysteriously” forwarded to Scott English, Sloane said. English is the executive director of the American Philatelic Society. “It was amazing,” Sloane said. “I couldn’t think of a more perfect time to get on board with the project. Before, I was just fumbling around until something stuck, but having Scott English on board was a game changer.” English believes that the ultimate goal in stamp collecting is historical preservation. The only way to combat hate and ignorance is with history and the truth — and stamps are a powerful reminder of history, he said. “A stamp isn’t just a stamp,” English said. “It represents me making a connection with you and making a connection with the world. That’s why I wanted to get involved: building the community and education.” As executive director of the APS, English could have easily given Sloane an extra 10 million stamps and the whole project would have been over. But Sloane felt that having just one primary donor defeated the purpose of the project. He still wanted to find ways to involve as many people as possible, he said. Ultimately, Sloane declined the offer of receiving the remaining 10 million stamps he needed from the APS. He and English decided together that a fitting number for the APS to donate was 1.5 million stamps to represent the number of children that were murdered in the Holocaust. “It’s an immediate connection to the people — the kids — that Sloane helps out,” English said. “It shows children under 18 that they are part of this group. People just like them had their lives stripped away.” When English delivered the 1.5 million stamps to Sloane’s Hebrew school class, the room became silent, and the kids were incredibly touched, English said. “I hit them with the number and told them what it represented,” English said. “It got dead silent in the room. I didn’t expect that. There was a moment of reflection where they seemed to realize that this wasn’t just about a group of people they couldn’t associate with.” The APS still contributes to STAMP IT! by continually publicizing the project to its members, encouraging them to donate any canceled stamps they receive with their mail. In 2019, Sloane pitched the idea of creating a “Stamp Out Hate” class at Congregation Beth El’s Hebrew school. The Hebrew school now offers Sloane’s class, an elective aimed at engaging teenagers in Holocaust education and awareness, to seventh through tenth grade students.

In the Stamp Out Hate class, Sloane keeps a massive bin on his desk with thousands of stamps that his students have collected. His favorite part of the job, he said, is his conversations with students. “This is why God put me on this Earth: to connect with teenagers and to help them learn about the world and themselves,” Sloane said. Sloane’s students appreciate his lively personality and are diligent in helping collect the stamps. Every Tuesday, the class meets for an hour to discuss the state of the project and the concept of hate itself. His students, Sloane said, always amaze him with their insights and worldviews. The stamps he collects now represent current hate crimes and acts of violence. He collected 11 stamps from one student, for example, to represent the lives taken at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. Sloane hopes that through his continued collection and his classroom discussions, he can teach his students that hate will always exist and cannot be ignored. He believes he has made a tangible impact on how his students perceive hateful acts in the world, he said. “Mr. Sloane has really showed me on a personal level what impact the littlest things have,” said Rory Marlin, an eighth grade student at Pyle Middle School and student at Beth El Hebrew School. “I never thought that just bringing in stamps to class could make the world a better place.” His students appreciate their weekly opportunity to talk about how they can impact the world around them. There is no other place where they can reflect on hate in the world as deeply and personally, Marlin said. “It’s so easy to get the millions of tragedies and hate crimes confused,” said Daniel Farber, a student of Sloane’s and freshman at Georgetown Day School. “But if you are just holding, say, six stamps to represent the six lives taken in the recent New Jersey deli shooting, then the tragedy suddenly becomes a lot more real.” At the end of one of Sloane’s recent classes, he sat his students in a circle and made them go around and say one thing that made them passionate. One girl said her pets, one student said family, and nobody was surprised when Sloane said his stamp project. His passion was the driving force for creating the class and spreading awareness, he said. “You can easily be passionate about the things that make us feel good and happy,” Sloane said. “But what we are doing for the stamp project is impossible to be happy about. It’s so depressing. We shouldn’t have to even do this horrific project, but it needs to be done. We need to be passionate about this.”

“As soon as you say 11 million stamps, people’s eyes pop out of their heads, but if 11 million seems like a lot of stamps, why don’t people have that same extreme reaction when they hear about the 11 million deaths in the Holocaust?” - Richard Sloane

Save your canceled stamps from envelopes, ads and magazines to contribute to the project. Address for donations: Richard Sloane STAMP IT! Project Congregation Beth El 8215 Old Georgetown Rd Bethesda, MD 20814

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FAMILY TREES REVEAL NEW REALITY: STUDENTS UNCOVER THE PAST

BY MIA FRIEDMAN AND SAMMY HEBERLEE

As cousins, our shared love for the Pittsburgh Steelers and family trips to Springer’s Ice Cream helped to form our identities. But while we have cheered at Heinz Field and enjoyed chocolate peanut butter ice cream on our trips, we have often overlooked our family history — a fundamental component of our identities. It’s something we didn’t even think of exploring until an opportunity fell in our laps. That opportunity came when Ohio resident Heather Rose — a complete stranger at the time — contacted our great uncle Arnie Gordon nearly six months ago. A distant relative, she had been researching her family lineage for about 20 years. The only way she could fully understand hers was to trace all of the Gordon ancestors from a small town named Vasilishok. At the beginning of World War II, Vasilishok was a town of only 2,500 residents under the alternating occupation of Poland, Russia and Germany. It’s now part of modern day Belarus, a small country sandwiched between Poland and Russia. Vasilishok is unknown to most people, but it’s one of the hundreds of Jewish towns that ceased to exist after Nazi occupation. To our family, it’s our ancestral homeland. Though the town still exists in name and location, all the people who used to live there are now gone, and the only remaining proof of the old Jewish town’s existence is a small memorial. To find the start of our family line, Rose compiled every scrap of documentation connected to our family history, including tax records from the area of Vasilishok, census records, immigration reports and birth, death, marriage and cemetery records. She was able to trace the Gordon family lineage to nine generations before us, back to the mid1700s, when a man named Aria Gordon was born, our oldest known ancestor. Aria was born in Vasilishok, where he raised his four sons, one of whom was Shlioma Gordon. Shlioma fathered Dov, Dov fathered Soloman — generations passed, and a sprawling family tree was born.

In 1941, Nazis marshalled every Jew in Vasilishok, which at the time was almost entirely Jewish, and forced them into a ghetto. Then, on May 10, 1942, Nazis led everyone in the ghetto, including three of Soloman’s children and 21 of our other ancestors, to a park in the middle of the day and shot them all, throwing their dead bodies into a pit that functioned as a mass grave.

TAKING THE TIME TO CONNECT WITH PARTS OF YOUR CULTURE YOU’RE ALREADY FAMILIAR WITH ALLOWS YOU TO EXPAND YOUR IDENTITY AND GAIN A DIVERSE PERSPECTIVE. Forty years before the May 10 massacre, though, four of Soloman’s seven children immigrated to Newport News, Virginia. Charles Gordon, one of the four brothers who immigrated, is our great-great-grandfather. That, we learned, is just our immediate family line; Aria, Shlioma and Dov all had other children, as well. They started families, which slowly diverged from our specific family line and became unknown, distant relatives. We now know that we are only one line of an enormous family tree branching back to 1700s Russia. There are six total lines of Gor-

dons who immigrated to the U.S. and settled across the country, in Newport News, where our family is from, New York City, Boston, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Norfolk. This summer, Rose made a Facebook group titled “Gordon Family Descendants.” As person after person joined, the group connected us to a growing network of distant relatives living all across the country. People introduced themselves and explained how they fit into our family tree. We discovered several families with kids our age living in the D.C. area, even someone who graduated from John F. Kennedy High School in Montgomery County. The group now has 44 members. For us, Rose’s research redefined the meaning of family. When most people recall their family tree, they think of their parents, grandparents and sometimes great-grandparents. Though lineage tracing has become increasingly common — over 26 million people have taken at-home genetic tests, according to the MIT Technology Review — Rose’s efforts are still relatively unique. Most people don’t have the time, resources or attention necessary to dissect over 300 years of history on their own. The new information about our ancestry established deeper connections to several parts of our identity. As Jews, we already felt a religious connection to the Holocaust. In Hebrew school and in the process of becoming b’not mitzvah, we frequently took time to reflect on the lasting impact of the Holocaust on our religion and culture. But prior to Rose contacting us, we lacked deeper levels of passion and emotion when we discussed the

topic. Now, a personal connection links us to the horrific events of the Holocaust in a way that simply being a Jew or reading about it never could. The Nazis didn’t just kill our people — they killed our family. On our trip to Israel over winter break, we visited Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. The information in the museum was similar to the exhibits available at the Holocaust Museum in D.C., but having been to both, we could tell that our feelings were different in Israel. Maybe it was the view of Jerusalem at the museum’s exit and the pride we felt to be in Israel surrounded by Jews that made our trip to the museum uniquely special. But it also might have been that we could now associate ourselves directly with the part of the museum that discussed Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi killing units that wiped out entire communities in Poland and the Soviet Union. Not everyone needs to discover an entire family tree to explore their history or feel connected to their heritage. Simply learning which countries you originate from or taking the time to connect with parts of your culture you’re already familiar with allows you to expand your identity and gain a diverse perspective. Last spring, junior Lisa Ota traced her lineage using 23andMe, a service that uses DNA samples to reveal participants’ ethnic breakdowns. Despite the service’s $99 cost for its basic package, consumers receive a comprehensive report of where their DNA is from and how it affects their facial features, taste, smell and other traits.

Our great-great grandfather, Charles Gordon, stands next to his four brothers at their tailor shop in Newport News, Virginia after immigrating to America. Charles was a “very private man,” our great-uncle Arnie Gordon said.

Houses lined the streets of Grodno Street in early 1900s Vasilishok. “It is possible our family name, ‘Gordon’, came from the name of the street that cut through the center of town in Vasilishok,” our great-uncle Arnie Gordon said.

Ota knew her mom is Japanese and her dad is a mix of Japanese and Irish, so she had expected her results would be a mix of those two ethnicities. When she got her results back, though, she was astounded by how many ethnicities were present in her genetic makeup. She found out that she was not only Japanese and Irish, but a mix of many Asian, Pacific Islander and European ethnicities. “I’ve been focusing on two cultures my entire life, and it’s insane that there are 40 other ones I just wasn’t aware of,” Ota said. Ota was enrolled in Japanese school, where her primary focus was learning and embracing her Japanese culture, for 11 years before she graduated last year. Her parents have made a concerted effort to make sure Ota and her sister learn and value their Japanese heritage, she said. When Ota was in middle school, she always felt like she had to separate her Japanese culture and traditions from her American life at school. At the time, she hated going to Japanese school because she felt completely American inside, she said. But the older and more mature she became, the more she wanted to hold onto her heritage and appreciate Japanese culture as a major part of her life. Even given Ota’s awareness of her diverse genetic makeup, she still feels much more connected to the cultures she has been learning about her entire life, she said. Gordon brothers, Jack (our great grandafther), Milton and Arthur stand together in around 1960. Jack didn’t even know that his father had three siblings that never immigrated to America with him and were killed. If he knew, it “would have had a big impact on him,” our great-uncle Arnie Gordon said.

“I feel like culture is based on where you’ve lived and what you’ve experienced, rather than the fact that you’re this percent that and that percent this,” Ota said. “But knowing the other ethnicities are a part of me is still significant and made the DNA test worthwhile.”

LEARNING ABOUT OUR OWN LINEAGE CONNECTS US TO OUR WORLD IN WAYS THAT DIDN’T EXIST FOR US BEFORE. Senior Josh Carter also reflected upon his heritage when he explored his family’s history as Dutch royalty before World War II. His great-grandparents held a royal title but never had any political influence. C a r t e r ’s family kept a

book that explained their Dutch lineage and royal ancestry, but they never had much interest in learning more about it until his uncle decided to translate the book, originally written in Dutch, to English. He discovered that their family had once lived in a castle in the Netherlands. They found photos of the small castle that has now been torn down; a pile of stones is all that’s left. Carter thought it was intriguing to learn about his ancestors and how they were contributing to their communities, he said. His grandmother used to live with him and spoke Dutch in the house, but he and his siblings didn’t always understand. Carter said he now feels more compelled to learn Dutch because he wants to connect with his grandmother and his family’s Dutch heritage. “Learning about my history made me think about going to the Netherlands because I still have cousins over there that I’ve never met,” Carter said. “It’s part of who I am and something I consider interesting.” Although Ota and Carter both had different methods and takeaways from tracing their families’ pasts, the process made them both realize that learning about their culture is enriching and important to their identities. Learning about our own lineage connects us to our world in ways that didn’t exist for us before. We now feel more emotionally tied to the Holocaust and have deeper appreciation for the freedom of immigration which allowed our family tree to disperse all over America. Traditions like naming our cars with our grandpa and taking family trips to Wawa are still important and make us, us. But to discount events before our lifetime as unimportant players in the making of our personal identities would be an injustice to the key role the past can play in the present.

OneWhitman, a new initiative this year intended to encourage inclusion and celebrate diversity in the Whitman community, has gotten off to a rough start. The student body does have more than one holistic opinion about OneWhitman — but most of the feedback is negative. Instead of fostering inclusivity, students said in a Black & White survey that “no one seems to take it seriously,” “it feels forced” and, most of all, “it’s a waste of time.” In fact, in that same survey of 50 Whitman students, 80% of students said that OneWhitman has failed to achieve its goals. Complaints vary widely: Some students think OneWhitman makes people uncomfortable and creates an awkward environment for sharing thoughts and feelings, while others believe OneWhitman has been too passive and hasn’t sufficiently addressed the problems with our school. Half of the students surveyed even think administrators should remove OneWhitman altogether. “Forcing kids to talk about these issues with the peers who take it as a joke doesn’t make it effective; it doesn’t have a purpose,” one survey participant said. OneWhitman may not be perfect, but it’s far too early to declare the initiative a failure. We, as students, need to give OneWhitman a real, fair chance before we condemn it, and we have to realize that OneWhitman’s shortcomings are partially a result of our reluctant mindset and lack of participation. If we truly want OneWhitman to succeed, students across the school need to take an active, honest role in discussions. We have to be patient with OneWhitman. After all, it’s only been in place for half a year; administrators are still workshopping and experimenting with approaches. They have been tinkering with OneWhitman’s lesson plans to increase the value of the sessions and make it seem less intrusive. For most of this school year, writers on the Black & White have reported on OneWhitman; we feel like our newspaper serves as a link between administration and the students. Members of our staff who have reported on OneWhitman have seen administration working tirelessly to make the program work. Heavily criticizing OneWhitman for having a few issues in its initial stages is like abandoning a startup company if it doesn’t immediately make one million dollars. We have to give it more of a chance — otherwise, it’s very likely it won’t succeed. Originally, when the Black & White editorial board sat down and discussed possible topics for a staff editorial, many members proposed stories on how OneWhitman needs to change from the top down. People proposed that administrators should randomly choose our OneWhitman classes, instead of grouping us by last name, to create greater diversity in classes. Others suggested that trained professionals should run the discussions rather than teachers. Ultimately, though, we decided not to write an article critiquing OneWhitman or proposing changes. We realized that publicly critiquing the initiative would only exacerbate the problem; even if we proposed solutions, we would still be feeding off the negative attitude the student body already holds. We need to give administrators time to execute their vision. Additionally, if we really are committed to giving OneWhitman an opportunity to succeed, we have to go out of our way to embrace the program. In the same survey, 37 of 50 students said they regularly “passed” during OneWhitman discussions — that’s to say, they chose to not answer the question posed in the community circle. We’re partially responsible for the success or failure of the program. Embracing the program means actively participating in the OneWhitman classroom, sharing openly and honestly, and making an effort to continue discussions outside of the classroom. Participating in class discussions forms a more fluid, open dynamic between students and their teacher. With each student who shares, the next student in the circle feels more comfortable sharing. OneWhitman isn’t perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. Our school has systemic issues with race, mental health and acceptance. OneWhitman is the administrators’ initiative to address these issues, and it could work. It’s naive to think OneWhitman will immediately solve all of Whitman’s problems, but the program is a foundation for our school to tackle much larger issues and bring the Whitman community together. We have to realize that being patient and open minded is the only way for it to truly succeed.

GIVE

ONE WHITMAN A CHANCE

STAFF EDITORIAL

An uneven playing field MCPS schools face disparities in athletic resources

by Lexi Fleck and Reuben Stoll

photo by LUKAS GATES

n the past 10 years, Whitman sports teams have competed in 20 state championships. In sports where Whitman athletes compete individually — including track, swimming, tennis and wrestling — there have been 48 finalists at the state level in the last decade. Though athletic funding is distributed throughout the county based on need, ac-

cording to Whitman athletic director Andy Wetzel, the sports teams at Whitman and other MCPS schools in socioeconomically privileged areas receive much larger supplements from their booster clubs — non-profit organizations that promote and fundraise for an individual school’s athletics. Due to these funding discrepancies, most Whitman sports teams have greater access to resources, like

favorable equipment, uniforms, out-of-season training and transportation, that lead to their success within their athletic divisions.

FUNDING DISCREPANCIES WIDEN ATHLETIC OPPORTUNITY GAP

This year, Montgomery County gave the most booster club funding — more than $75,000 — to Northwood High School, while Walter Johnson received around $52,600, the lowest grant in the county, according to the Maryland Public Information Request. Whitman was given around $53,500. The county chooses to divide and distribute money amongst schools through an assessment of schools’ free and reduced-price meals program rates, Wetzel said. Schools with higher FARMS student populations receive more money, while those with fewer FARMS students receive less. Even with this MCPS effort, there is still a significant athletic opportunity gap in the county. Some teams still benefit from dramatically different amounts of monetary support, due to the activity of their school’s booster club. Booster clubs raise money through membership fees, donations, annual mulch sales and other fundraising activities. The “W-schools” is an unofficial term referring to the Montgomery Country high schools that have predominantly white students from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds: Whitman, Thomas S. Wootton, Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Walter Johnson and Winston Churchill. In 2017, the W-schools had raised close to five times as much money as the high schools in the Downcounty Consortium which include Montgomery Blair, Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Northwood and Wheaton. Socioeconomic disparities across the county mean that different booster clubs have disportionate funds. The average income of a family in Bethesda is around $150,000, while the average income of a family in Wheaton is around $73,000. “Whitman has a group of very engaged and generous parents,” booster club president Elissa Ginsky said. “We donate money each year to our sister high school’s booster club where there are unmet needs. We give to Wheaton every year. We have also given to other schools when we know there is a need.” The teams here, and largely the individuals too, are well off and not in drastic need of supplemental athletic resources, but there is still a major discrepancy on average between the W-schools and the DCC.

WHAT SPORTS PRIVILEGE LOOKS LIKE

Whitman is fortunate enough to have access to quality resources for sports. Whitman baseball players don new hats every other season, and for se-

nior night, the team buys special jerseys with each player’s last name on the back of the jersey. “We have three really nice batting cages that we can all use anytime,” sophomore Weston Weilminister said. “Everything is pretty much top of the line.” Students at Whitman often have the money and resources to attend extra workouts during their offseason at performance centers like PowerTrain and Healthy Baller, which focus on improving strength and speed. For the girls and boys lacrosse teams, players are encouraged to go to Power Train or Healthy Baller by themselves or with the whole team as part of offseason training. “PowerTrain is one-on-one training,” Weilminister said. “I work on strength in my arms; it helps me stay healthy throughout the offseasons for baseball.” Training year-round isn’t always possible for students at some other schools in the county. Blair center back Mathis Kruetzberg said that on Blair’s varsity girls soccer team, a large number of players don’t play on a year-round travel team. “Travel teams cost money,” Kruetzberg said. “It’s expensive to play a sport year-round. Someone who plays on a travel team will develop their skills further and be a better player than someone who plays four out of the twelve months, only during high school season.” The benefits of extra practices and trainings are reflected in the results of Maryland High School Soccer Championships. In the last eight 4A state soccer championships, six were won by Whitman, B-CC, Walter Johnson and Wootton. Since Magruder won the soccer state championship in 2010, every Montgomery County team who has won has been from the Potomac or Bethesda area. Whitman’s boys soccer coach Dave Greene has been coaching at Whitman for 41 years and has led the team to 11 state championships. His players describe him as “traditional,” “determined” and “motivating” because of his extensive coaching career. A significant part of getting results is a product of coaching, Millie Memon, mother of senior soccer player Zain Memon, said. “We have talented players, and we have created a certain culture at Whitman,” Greene said. “We have a certain expectation of how we want our season to go. They prepare year-round which is crucial for success.” Walter Johnson senior Philip Pham transferred from Wheaton after his sophomore year. At Wheaton, he played lacrosse, but he noticed a vast difference in resources from the bleachers at Walter Johnson.

“The coaches at Wheaton didn’t have much knowledge of the sport itself,” Pham said. “Nor do they have enough hope in their athletes or expect much from them to push them harder in certain events.” Kenneth Heckert, a social studies teacher and assistant coach for girls soccer, coached boys soccer at Watkins Mill High School 17 years before coming to Whitman. When an injury occurred during a sports event at Watkins Mill, the only way Heckert could get his athletes the treatment they needed was by driving to the doctor or hospital himself, he said. Many parents were still working into the evening. “At Watkins Mill, we often struggled to field teams for JV teams and girls sports,” Heckert said. “At Whitman, this is almost never the case. I’m very fortunate to have seen both sides of the spec-

“Someone who plays on a travel team will develop their skills further and be a better player than someone who plays four out of the twelve months, only during high school season.” -Blair center back Mathis Kruetzberg trum. It has blown my mind to see how big the disparity is between schools.” The Whitman golf team has made it to the state championship every year in the last decade. To be successful at states, more than 90% of the golf team has coaches outside the Whitman season and takes private lessons daily, senior golf player Ellie Block said. “A big benefit we have is that a lot of us belong to country clubs, too,” Block said. “We’re able to practice on nice courses and use nicer facilities.” Whitman offers bags and balls for the golf team, but the players have to supply their own clubs and pay for their uniforms. The price for decent golf clubs ranges from $200 to $400, and the uni-

form polos cost around $60. The Whitman men’s tennis team has had similar success. Last year, the team had three players who were state champions. Sophomore tennis state champion Hugh Markam said that proper tennis rackets usually cost around $250 and need to be repaired around every two weeks, which can cost up to $20. “I have noticed that a lot of schools aren’t as good as us in tennis, mainly because they don’t have as good facilities or equipment that we have,” Markham said. “A huge part of teams not being as good comes from playing at a competitive level outside of school, which requires a lot of travel, which is very expensive.”

Whitman also has several sports that other schools in Montgomery County don’t even have the opportunity to offer. Out of the 26 high schools in Montgomery County, only five schools have enough kids who are able to fund a school crew team. Members of the crew team also must pay dues. Fall dues are $1,000, and spring dues are $1,000 plus regatta, or racing, fees. Winter training also requires its own additional fee: around $300, junior rower Marlo Friedland said. The Whitman crew team gives many members opportunities to get a scholarship for college too. University of Virginia freshman Leia Till (‘19) now rows in college.

“Crew typically attracts people from the upper class rather than the lower class,” Till said. “Since there are a lot less people doing it, it results in a higher chance to get recruited.” These discrepancies mean the Whitman community needs to be more aware of the needs of other communities and take an active role in helping these other communities, Principal Robert Dodd said. “The [school] system is always thinking about how to be equitable and how to use their resources to help schools that may not have the outside resources like Whitman does,” Dodd said.

Perspective: Senior soccer player reflects on his experiby Danny Donoso ence with sports privilege Soccer has been part of my identity ever since I was a baby. My grandparents outfitted me with an F.C. Barcelona jersey when I was just days old, and I’ve been playing competitive soccer since I was four. But without the economic advantages I share with many in the Whitman community, I likely would not be playing at the level I am today. When I moved to Maryland in third grade, I immediately joined Bethesda Soccer Club. What BSC provided me with as a nine year old is not groundbreaking by any means: practices during the week and games on the weekends. But progressing from one age group to the next, club practices and games grew increasingly intensive and expensive. Games that were once 20 minutes away became three hour trips, friendly practices became fierce competitions to gain the coach’s trust as a starter and every tournament I played was arranged to give players the most amount of exposure to college coaches. Additionally, as I advanced through the age groups, the number of teams dwindled and the price rose. For the U19 age group, BSC charges an annual $2,000+ fee for being on the team, with an additional $500 for new jerseys every two years. I enjoyed the increased level of competition. Starting out on the E team in U10 and progressing to A team in U18 was a cherished accomplishment for me. But for others and their families, the increased time commitment and cost likely posed insurmountable barriers. For many, the end goal of playing for a competitive club is being recruited, but participating in recruiting outside of your local area is unfortunately expensive. A majority of the time, players considering colleges outside of their state must attend either an identification camp or a national tournament and often attend both. ID camps are great opportunities for schools to identify standout players and bring in revenue. They range from $100 to $500 for a three day training experience, excluding the cost of a possible flight. 18

During the course of my soccer career I went to a camp at Georgetown University, another at Brown University and one which combined Ivy League and D3 schools. After attending ID camps, I would follow up with a coach, who would often refer me to yet another ID camp. One thing that stood out to me at the camps was that I kept seeing the same faces — time in front of coaches was limited to those who could afford attending camps. Attending national tournaments is the only other way to get time in front of coaches, and it’s also costly. In soccer, the most recognizable tournament is the Disney Soccer Showcase, hosted at the ESPN Wide World of Sports in December. This tournament is also the most expensive. Flights to Orlando in December cost up to $300 for much of the east coast — and more from elsewhere. Lodging for the tournament turns out to be another $800. Coaches come to this tournament to scout players from across the country. Ultimately, coaches end up getting previews of only those players who have enjoyed better financial resources. This pay-to-play phenomenon also became alarmingly evident to me when I realized the effect it had on injuries. When I tore my meniscus in 2017, I was fortunate enough that my parents could pay for surgery and physical therapy. However, during the months of recovery, the thought always lingered: What if my parents couldn’t support me? I recovered in less than three months — a speedy recovery for a meniscus tear. If my parents were unable to pay for surgery or physical therapy, the injury could’ve lasted longer and potentially been detrimental to my entire soccer career. This is the reality for many in disadvantaged communities: A serious injury can break a player’s career, if the economic barriers are too much to overcome. In my experience as a soccer player, I see everyday how fortunate I was to be able to attend tournaments, go to identification camps, battle injuries and even play for a club. However, the harsh reality for many players in the U.S. is that their soccer career is largely dictated by which zip code they were born in rather than by their skill.

INDIGENOUS HISTORY

AMERICAN HISTORY by Bella Learn

If you visited Collinsville, Illinois, today, you would find a small town home to the world’s largest ketchup bottle and an annual horseradish festival. But more than 700 years ago, the area was instead home to over 50,000 people, making it one of the largest metropolises in the world at the time, similar in size to then major cities like Barcelona then. The city, then called Cahokia, covered 2,200 acres and was the most influential of settlements built by the Mound Builders, an indigenous group that lived in the northern region of the Mississippi. At its peak, the group established extensive trade routes possibly reaching as far as the Aztec or Mayan empires in Central America. Despite the settlement’s historical significance, many American students never learn about this testament to pre-Columbian indigenous culture, at least not in the classroom. The lack of comprehensive instruction regarding Native American history in U.S. history classes throughout high school is a national problem. According to a 2019 report by the National Congress of American Indians, 87% of state history standards don’t mention Native American history after 1900, and 27 states don’t mention Native Americans in their K-12 curriculum at all. There is often little to no mention of the intricacies of Native American cultures, how those cultures developed or the role Native Americans played in later historical events like the Civil Rights Movement or the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. Standard curriculums often try to shrink Native American history down into one unit or one week of instruction, but it’s time for schools to acknowledge that the roles indigenous peoples play in North American history are far more expansive than that. At Whitman, students reported that while Native American culture is mentioned in both the Honors and AP U.S. History curriculum, the full history — both before and after the arrival of colonists — is hardly mentioned. An informal Black & White survey of 25 Whitman students found that regardless of what U.S. history class they took — AP, honors or on-level — 62% of students didn’t feel confident in their knowledge on Native American history. Seventy-six percent of students felt they didn’t know enough about Native American history to speak confidently on current issues facing indigenous groups, and the same percentage felt their class’ curriculum didn’t include enough about Native Americans.

“For the most part, not much is given to Native American history,” AP U.S. History teacher Gregory Herbert said. “I think students are ill-equipped to speak intelligently on the history of the Native American people because of the limited resources they’ve had to research it.” Herbert said that in the AP curriculum, Native Americans are primarily mentioned in the context of early interactions with colonists, forced relocation efforts during the Jackson administration and briefly in the civil rights unit when discussing their occupation of Alcatraz. As a result, most students only learn about Native American culture as it relates to European settlement, Herbert said. Omitting this information does a disservice to students. Schools should be teaching students more about the history of the many native peoples that lived and still live in the United States in U.S. history classes. The curriculum gap as it stands leaves students with an incredibly narrow historical outlook, providing them with the false impression that American history starts with colonization. Native Americans are just as American as any other group living in the nation, and, given that they were the first known sedentary inhabitants on the continent, they deserve to have more time devoted to their history. Without this inclusion, schools run the risk of leaving students with the impression that Native Americans had little involvement in the course of American history when that simply isn’t the case. The holes in the current curriculum are also exclusionary to Native American students, and naturally when students don’t see themselves reflected in the curriculum, it can be harder for them to participate. According to Michael Vendiola, the education director for the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, the narrow perspective provided by history classes can severely impact the success of Native American students in public school systems. Only about .53% of Whitman’s student population is American Indian, but that’s still roughly 11 students who are underrepresented in the curriculum. The average U.S. history curriculum also does little to equip students to function in America’s diverse society. When students don’t understand the historical treatment of Native Americans in this country, it makes it more difficult for them to grasp the issues any Native groups currently face or their influence on American society. For example, it’s important to learn about their impact on the course of major wars or the arduous path toward equal rights. In 2018, the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C. launched Native Knowledge 360, a program aimed at providing educators and students with new perspectives on Native American history. States with higher numbers of Native American students like Washington and Montana have already moved to create more inclusive curriculums, but Maryland and, more specifically, Montgomery County, have no such measures. Lesson plans like those created by Native Knowledge 360 need to be more commonplace so that students can understand history through a more diverse, inclusive perspective. Some argue that U.S. history starts at European colonization and that earlier indigenous experiences don’t fall under the broader umbrella of United States history. But this perspective ignores Native Americans’ sustaining influence on the country and risks miseducating students. U.S. history has never just been the history of the colonists. To fully understand how the nation developed and how that history impacts us today, all of the demographics represented by the nation’s occupants need to be covered in class. Schools can’t expect to produce well-rounded citizens when they’re not even telling students the history of the land they live on. graphic by EVA SOLA-SOLE

graphic by SAM NICKERSON

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S IMPEACHMENT PROMPTS DISCUSSION IN THE WHITMAN COMMUNITY by Eva Levy The House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump Dec. 18, making him the third president in U.S. history to be impeached. The process has exacerbated today’s hyperpartisanship in Washington. Republican congressmen, with two abstaining, unanimously voted against both articles of impeachment. With the exception of a few outliers, Democratic congressmen also voted along party lines in favor of impeachment. The debate hasn’t been limited to lawmakers in D.C.; media coverage and political advertising have brought the conversation

from the Capitol to the Whitman community. Some students argue that there were more factors at play with Congress’ decision to impeach than simply carrying out a constitutional duty. “I can understand why the Democratic party would want to impeach Trump,” freshman Harry Goudas said. “I think this is more of a stunt to get rid of Trump.” Regardless, an overwhelming number of students supported Trump’s impeachment. In an informal Black & White survey, 86% of students said they believed Trump should have been impeached.

“I’m pretty liberal, so I was happy,” sophomore Fenna Oliphant-Linden said. “I knew he wasn’t going to be removed in the Senate, but I knew he’d go down in history as not an amazing president.”

STUDENTS REACT TO IMPEACHMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA Around 13 million Americans watched the first public hearing for the impeachment inquiry on TV. Channels across the political spectrum broadcasted the event, with Fox News receiving the greatest number of view-

ers, according to Business Insider. The majority of Whitman students receive their news through social media and oftentimes from liberal sources. A survey published in 2018 by the Black & White found that 59% of Whitman students primarily consume news media from liberal outlets. Throughout the hearing, students posted about Trump’s impeachment on their Snapchat and Instagram stories, and their friends would repost those same stories on their accounts, bandwagoning without knowing much about it, junior Satine Diouf said. Diouf learned about the impeachment through TV and social media. She follows a few Instagram accounts that break down the daily news, including CNNpolitics and NowThisPolitics. “They post videos that explain to you in terms that are easier to understand than what’s probably posted on the news,” Diouf said. “Some of these accounts are extremely useful. Accounts on social media have a way of putting news in very simple terms.” Many students share Diouf’s method; in an informal Black & White survey, 89% of students said they use social media to get their news. “It’s very convenient,” junior Joni Dervishi said. “I don’t have to go out and search for it. It’s just right there.” Though many students rely on social media news for impeachment coverage and other news, nationally people fear its implications on news consumption, especially when it comes to partisan politics. This sentiment is not unique. Nine in 10 Americans say that they acknowledge bias in social media news, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Social studies teacher Gregory Herbert finds it important for students to get their news from multiple reputable sources, he said. “Just because someone says something, or Twitter says something, doesn’t mean that’s factually correct,” Herbert said. “A lot of politicians are saying things that aren’t accurate factually, and people are just taking that as gospel, and that’s wrong. Social media is bad in the way that it spreads disinformation or ‘fake news’ if you will — it’s the term of the day.”

WHITMAN REACTS TO IMPEACHMENT AT SCHOOL

Along with the rest of the country, a significant number of Whitman students have been following the impeachment. In an informal Black & White survey, 71% of students said they followed the impeachment hearings in Congress. Whitman’s close proximity to D.C. and the large number of Whitman parents

who work in politics have likely amplified students’ awareness about a wide range of political issues, such as the Ukraine scandal, social studies teacher Kirkland Shipley said. “We get a saturation of political issues that others don’t,” Shipley said. Shipley played the impeachment hearings on his Promethean board during his AP European History and AP Human Geography classes, showing Marie Yovanovitch — the former ambassador to Ukraine — testifying before Congress. “It’s historic,” Shipley said. “As a teacher of history, too often we’re looking back at things that we’re no longer in touch with. We’ve had four presidents where impeachment articles were brought against them. Three were tried. That’s a big deal. This entire four-, eight-, twelve-year span dating from Obama to Trump to whoever comes next is going to be monumental for the world, for other reasons, but also monumental to us politically.” Some students, like senior Aaron Winegrad, didn’t feel like anything would come out of the impeachment. “Frankly, I didn’t think it was going to happen,” Winegrad said. “With a lot of things in our government, there’s always talk and always speculation, but the bureaucratic process is so slow — and it’s meant to be that way, that’s a good thing — that it seems so far fetched and so outlandish. I was just like ‘why follow this? I have more important things to do.’” In the U.S., Google searches for impeachment tripled the day after Congress charged Trump but remained fairly low throughout the months of October and November, according to Google Trends. Students openly discussed Trump’s impeachment throughout school the next day in class, in the halls, in the bathrooms and in the cafeteria. “Probably 99.9999% of my friends are Democrats,” Diouf said. “We all have the same stance on the issue. It’s not as much a debate, it’s more of a ‘finally, it happened.’” According to the same Black & White survey, around 50% of the students didn’t talk about impeachment with their friends, and 17% of surveyed students didn’t talk about the impeachment at all with anyone. “Definitely not with my friends no — we don’t talk about politics,” senior Neil Blomquist said. “I don’t know, we just don’t. It’s not that interesting.”

HOW IMPEACHMENT HAS CHANGED OVER THE PAST TWENTY YEARS

video clips and other streaming services — while only TV and radio stations covered President Richard Nixon’s impeachment hearings. Like today’s broadcasting platforms, television stations of the Nixon era broadcast the impeachment hearings instead of their regularly scheduled programs, according to Gale’s history collection, American Decades. Shortly after the announcement of an impeachment inquiry, American support for Trump’s impeachment was around three times higher than either Nixon’s or President Bill Clinton’s support ratings, which were both initially 19%, according to Gallup polls. In two different surveys conducted in October and November, 54% of Americans approved the House’s decision to hold an impeachment inquiry, according to Pew Research Center. Many students aren’t shocked by Congress’ eventual decision to conduct an impeachment inquiry. “I did kind of expect it,” Dervishi said. “I didn’t expect it to go all the way — for him to be completely removed from office. I heard the Republicans control the Senate, so they can’t really get a two-third’s vote.” However, the inquiry didn’t change people’s minds, regardless of whether they believed Trump should be impeached or not; in that same Pew Research survey, 85% of participants maintained the same view on Congress’ decision to carry out an impeachment investigation. Whitman follows this trend as well. In our Black & White survey, 93% of students said that the impeachment process didn’t change their opinions about whether or not Trump should be impeached. The most notable difference between Clinton and Trump’s impeachments is the shift in the political affiliation of the impeached president. While following Trump’s impeachment, Herbert looked back on the newspaper articles and hearings of Clinton’s impeachment. During the Clinton impeachment investigation South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham repeatedly argued that a president didn’t need to commit a crime in order to be impeached. Now he, and other Republican legislators, have taken the opposite stance, defending Trump’s actions, Herbert said. “That’s always interesting to look at because you hear what people in Congress are saying now compared to what they said then,” Herbert said. “I think that’s an interesting dynamic to compare how their opinions on impeachment have changed.”

Students were able to follow the impeachment across a broad spectrum of media outlets — TV, social media, online

graphic by NOAH GRILL

Sources’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.

Two years ago, the Maryland state legislature decriminalized marijuana and made medicinal marijuana legal. Since then, more than 30 medical marijuana dispensaries have opened in Maryland, two of which are in Bethesda: Rise Bethesda and Health for Life. The blooming marijuana industry has increased state tax revenue. Now, the licensed sale of marijuana can be taxed, with the state of Maryland earning over $10 million from legal marijuana sales in the 2019 fiscal year. Marijuana takes many different forms in the legal industry: It can be consumed through smoking, vape pens, pills and capsules, extracts, topical lotions, patches, edibles and more. But the market is adding diversity not only to the forms cannabis takes, but also to the ratios of various psychoactive compounds in the plants themselves. THC is the main psychoactive compound in marijuana that provides patients with pain relief and the characteristic “high.” CBD, a secondary compound in marijuana, provides mostly cognitive effects instead of physical ones, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Both THC and CBD take different potencies and forms in different plants. Some CBD variants, for instance, are legal federally, allowing even businesses like beauty salons to sell CBD products, while other compound variants remain illegal federally, relegating some CBD sales to state-level dispensaries. Modern growing and extraction techniques allow distributors to cultivate specific percentages of each chemical compound in new strains of plants, allowing for dispensary employees to match ailments to specific cannabis-based treatments. As a result, CBD-activated products have become a pop culture phenomenon, even making their way into many celebrities’ wellness regimens. “Some people perceive that we are just serving the stoner population, but we say that we are really serving our neighbors and our community,” said Katherine, a Whitman parent who works at a local dispensary. “When patients come in and tell me I helped them get their lives back, it really pushes me to keep learning.” Several dispensary employees from the area report that older patients tend to enjoy consuming CBD products because they don’t come with a THC high. “The joy of the business is to see people have great results with CBD and hemp products,” said Steven, an employee at Georgetown Hemp, a CBD-only business. “People’s results vary, but there are a lot of great stories from a lot of customers who have been able to reduce their use of opioids and other prescription drugs by using products with CBD.” Steven further explained that his customers who suffer from specific mental illnesses like anxiety disorders and depression reported

that they have benefitted from incorporating CBD products into their medicinal regimen. Fifty-five percent of CBD users use the product for relaxation, 50% use it for stress or anxiety relief and 45% use it to improve sleep, according to a 2019 survey conducted by the Harris Poll, a market research firm in New York. Research about CBD is scarce in part because of cannabis’ varying legality across the nation. The cannabis plant as a whole, and all of its chemical variants, remains federally a “Schedule I” drug for the Drug Enforcement Administration, the most dangerous classification. “It is a really young, new industry, so of course there are some challenges,” Katherine said. “The biggest challenge we find is that the federal government views cannabis as an illegal substance, and they claim that it has no medicinal value, which creates difficult barriers in our industry.” In D.C., cannabis is legal recreationally as well as medically, as of 2014, but commercial sale is prohibited. As a workaround, cannabis businesses in D.C. have offered everything from seemingly overpriced t-shirts to pizzas — each of which come with a “free gift” of a cannabis product. But in Maryland, stricter laws for cannabis licensing, prescribing and sales often translate to improper use. “Once a person is above the age of 18, it’s pretty easy to get a medical marijuana card,” senior Michael said. “All you have to do is tell them [doctors] that you cannot sleep, or that you have back pain or any sort of condition that would justify a medical card.” The opening of medicinal dispensaries across the country has also created a new black market for the sale of marijuana. To fuel this market, residents legally obtain medical cards and safely buy products from dispensaries — but patients then illegally resell the products, in some cases to minors. People often hold the misconception that medical marijuana is completely safe as it comes from a more reputable source than traditional street drugs. The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, recently narrowed down the causes of the recent vaping epidemic in America to street-made and street-sold vape cartridges specifically. Although it’s true that the sources of medical marijuana are more trustworthy, cannabis still poses dangers in high doses and for people who aren’t used to the effects, according to USA Today. “Medical dispensaries in Maryland sell safe and extensively regulated products, so everything that is sold in Maryland comes from plants that are grown and cultivated and processed in the state,” Katherine said. “The unregulated market allows anyone to process something in their basement using toxic solvents, cutting agents, additives or all of that stuff that was read about during the vape crisis. Then, people can just slap a sticker on it, and the buyer has no idea what went into that

device.” For local teens who seek safe recreational use, the draw of Maryland’s legal marijuana isn’t the subtler CBD products, but rather those products high in THC. In an informal Black & White survey of 30 students, 20 students said they had smoked marijuana. Five out of the 20 students said that they buy it from dispensaries or from dealers who buy from dispensaries. All of the students surveyed said they prefer THC-heavy products over CBD-heavy ones. Junior Rachel said she also does not have a medical card but that she buys marijuana from people that do. “A lot of seniors have medical cards, which is illegal without parental consent, and it’s actually pretty easy to get one,” Rachel said. “A lot of them also have fake ID cards, so they go into different dispensaries in D.C. to get high quality weed and then sell it.” To legally obtain medical marijuana in Maryland, each resident must register as a patient with the state-run Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission, obtain a written certification from a provider registered with the commission and visit a licensed Maryland dispensary. Some current Whitman marijuana dealers who don’t have their own medical marijuana cards get marijuana from older friends and dealers who do, and then sell it to other students. “I’ve slowed down my selling and stuff, but I still occasionally get medical weed from people, and then I can sell it to my friends,” senior Ryan said. Whitman alum Celia (‘19) resells to close friends and students on “rare occasions,” she said, but also purchases it medicinally for personal use. The idea came to her because she was looking for a way to make some extra money and knew how easy it would be for her to acquire a medical card. All she had to do was bring a bottle of her antidepressants that she was prescribed by a doctor to a dispensary, where she was immediately approved for purchasing her own medical marijuana, she said. When asked about the downsides of growing teen marijuana use, Katherine cautioned about the drug’s effect on developing minds. “Studies have shown that cannabis, even in small amounts, has the potential to alter the developing brain, which can cause a number of long-term or even permanent cognitive deficits,” Katherine said. But not all teenage card-holders are sensing such side effects. “I switched to medical marijuana for so many reasons,” said Celia, who has a prescription for anxiety. “It prevents me from getting in trouble with my parents and into less trouble with the law.”

“OH SO “OH SO YOU’RE YOU’RE ?” MUSLIM ?” BREAKING DOWN STEREOTYPES AS A ZOROASTRIAN

artwork by SAMANTHA LEVINE

s a bubbly ten year old, I loved striking up conversations with anyone I met. Sometimes, it was even difficult for my parents to pull me away from the random strangers I would start talking to at the grocery store. On a trip to my favorite bakery, I excitedly started a conversation with a woman who loved the same cookie I did. After exchanging pleasantries and discussing our favorite cookie, the woman asked me where I was from. I didn’t hesitate — I proudly stated that I was born here but was originally from Iran. Immediately, her eyebrows furrowed, a frown set on her face and she wordlessly left me in the middle of the store. For years, I was confused as to what had happened. I worried if I had said something impolite or unkind. I don’t wonder anymore; stereotypes about my Iranian ethnicity follow me wherever I go, as well as assumptions about my religion, which most strangers assume is Islam. These stereotypes aren’t true, and in the long run, they have dangerous consequences. Recently, I converted from Islam to Zoroastrianism. While the religions differ greatly, the transition wasn’t very hard. Personally, I never considered myself a good Muslim. I ate pork, never visited a mosque and disagreed with multiple beliefs stated in the Quran. While I chose to separate from Islam, the previous religion of my family, I was always interested in learning as much as I could about the history of Iran. Childhood stories of early Iran imprinted into my mind. I researched the Persian Empire, and I looked into multiple aspects of its history like its leadership and expansive geography. When I found Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of the Persian Empire, I felt a connection that I hadn’t felt with Islam. I liked how it gave me the power to make my own choices and own my mistakes. As a Zoroastrian, I practice penance and purification. Most of my religion is practiced through individual reflection. To perform penance — the act of reparation to compensate for bad decisions or sins — I don’t go to confession or give money to the church. Instead, I stand in front of a mirror, stare at my own reflection, think about my decisions from the day and decide whether they were made in the pursuit of good or evil. After I have completed my evaluation, I consider what I can do the next day. If I made the decision to hurt someone’s feelings or do something morally wrong, I make it my mission to apologize or fix the problem the next day. I believe that to fully compensate for sins, you have to not only acknowledge them but also work to change them. Aside from its core values, Zoroastrianism emphasizes the importance of multiple natural symbols, with fire being the most influential. Fire represents the ultimate purity and light of God, or Ahura Mazda. All Zoroastrian rituals and ceremonies involve fire. However, Zoaroastrians aren’t fire worshippers as many wrongly believe. Zoroastrians believe that the elements are pure. I use this to remind myself to be kinder to the environment as well. It was only after my conversion to Zoroastrianism that I noticed how “Muslim” I appear to people. Without fail, every time I mention my Iranian orgin, most people immediately follow it with, “Oh so you’re Muslim?”. When I was a Muslim, I didn’t think anything of the fact that people thought Iran and Islam had to come hand in hand. These stereotypes — not only about my religion, but about my home country — affect my day-to-day life. In my experience, manifestations of these stereotypes include when my history teacher calls Iran the “bad and not so nice country,” or when I get pulled into a “randomly assigned” TSA check that almost makes me miss my flight.

All of these stereotypes become more aggravating the more I run into them. I cringe at the thought that someone thinks they know me just from my appearance. In the larger picture, these unfair misconceptions affect more than just myself. They hop from one person to another, friend to friend, coworker to coworker or parent to kin. They’re dangerous, and after so many misconceptions, people often become blind to our real identities. Stereotypes are crowding America’s judgment, and they leave no room for the reality of Iranian citizens. In consequence, we have a lack of empathy and support for the suffering Iranian population. It hurts me to hear about what’s happening in Iran. Just two months ago, when the economic strain from international sanctions on Iran hit a high, the government raised gas prices by 50%. It marked a final straw for many, as citizens took to the streets to protest against the government’s actions. Reportedly, more than 200 Iranian people died in massacres on the streets in November as they protested for freedom from their own government — freedom to be their own people separate from an oppressive regime. Recently, I began messaging my family in Iran. I called my aunt for the first time and cried into the phone when I heard how happy she was that I had finally gotten in touch with her. I was heartbroken over all our lost time and how long she had been waiting for my contact. We messaged back and forth every day for a couple months. Then, the gas prices in Iran rose and the riots began. I messaged all my relatives, begging them to stay inside. I panicked when my 23-year-old cousin wouldn’t answer my messages, knowing the police guard was targeting young men on the streets. When the internet shut down and I couldn’t message my aunt to see if she was okay, I found myself feeling worse than when I wasn’t in contact with her because now I had so much more to lose. I feel powerless and angry. While I’m here, dreading the horrific things that could be happening to the people I love, my ears burn with jokes about WWIII, with students referencing Iran’s dangers and depleting oil conservations. Nobody thinks twice about making these comments because many people in the U.S. see Iran as dangerous. My classmates who make derogatory jokes and the people who avoid me in the grocery store don’t think of the country’s oppressed citizens as victims of a broken and corrupt system. Those oppressed citizens, my oppressed aunts, uncles and cousins aren’t thought about. I don’t think many people are even capable of seeing Iran apart from Islam these days. What many in the U.S. don’t know about are the origins of this broken system, which date back to the 1979 U.S.-assisted overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. With U.S. aid, Ayatollah Khomeini, a leader of one of the factions of the revolt who was exiled from Iran twice before, became the new president of the Islamic Republic. Though a republic is promising in name, in actuality, the Iranian government is an authoritarian theocracy, according to Freedom House, a non-governmental research institute. Corruption runs rampant in government, and there have been serious crackdowns on aspects of civil society, such as freedom of association and freedom of assembly, according to Freedom House. Not many people see the suffering of Iran’s population that I do. I consider Iran’s current state a tragedy. It’s very overlooked in the U.S. and I wish my peers, the strangers I meet at the bakery and my teachers could be a little more open minded. Besides wishing, I take advantage of my freedom of speech to educate the ignorant. As a person living in a country with these freedoms as well, I hope you take advantage of it too.

Proud: LGBTQ students and allies come together at Whitman's Pride Alliance by Eleanor Taylor

All around the classroom, the air was abuzz with conversation. Students separated into small groups, chatting amongst themselves about that day’s difficult math test and exchanging weekend plans. But when senior Skylar Huebner stepped up to the front of the classroom next to the pride flag displayed on the Promethean Board, each student took a seat, turning their attention toward her. “Welcome to Pride!” Huebner is one of three co-presidents of Whitman’s Pride Alliance, a club that strives to facilitate discussion about current events and issues relating to the LGBTQ community and provide a welcoming environment for LGBTQ students and their allies. Huebner has been a member of Pride since her freshman year and describes the club as “comforting” and “safe.” “You know you have other people in the LGBTQ community that are going to support you and respect your opinions because you're not always comfortable speaking out in school or in class,” Huebner said. “You don't want to out yourself all the time.” In portable 1231 that Monday, the tone of the meeting was serious: Huebner and her co-presidents began with a discussion of MCPS’ new guidelines for addressing gender identity in the classroom. Though MCPS has updated its gender identity guidelines each year since their introduction in 2014, this year’s revision focused specifically on updating gender identity definitions, encouraging the formation of Gen-

der and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) clubs like Whitman’s Pride Alliance and directly addressing issues affecting non-binary students. Additionally, in preexisting sections of the guidelines that discuss proper treatment of non-cisgender students — including transgender and gender-nonconforming students — the county rephrased some language, making the sections more action based. In place of words like “should,” for example, the county substituted in words like “must,” “will” and “required.” The guidelines received mixed reviews in the club meeting. While some were satisfied with the county’s progress in recognizing and protecting LGBTQ students, others were reluctant to get their hopes up about the progress. “Initially, I was really worried that they had just Googled the words and slapped some definitions on a page without actually consulting queer people and having them involved in the creation of the guidelines,” sophomore vice president Leo Levine said. Levine has been a member of Pride for both of their years at Whitman. To them, simply being conscientious about constantly evolving language is one of the most important gestures of acceptance toward the LGBTQ community. It’s a gesture of both awareness and respect, they said. “Words go in and out of use within months or a few years, and that language is shifting and changing,” Levine said. “I guarantee you, there are teachers in the school that

probably still think ‘transsexual’ is an okay term to use, when in fact that's actually an outdated slur that hasn't been used since probably the ‘80s in the United States acceptably.” Levine can attest to the power of language from firsthand experience. At school, they’ve been called “it” by a number of students and even a few teachers, they said, and are no stranger to hearing slurs being casually thrown around in the hallways. To Levine, the slur “f-----” is an especially hateful and painful term. It’s a word of French origin that refers to a bundle of sticks bound together, often to be used as kindling. Later, the word came to be used to refer to criminals and heretics, who were often burned at the stake. Even today, in the United Kingdom especially, the word is used as a slang term for a cigarette — something that is designed to be burned. “Hearing that word used around school is awful,” Levine said. “It’s horrendous. It genuinely feels like every person who uses that word condemns me to death in a way. It feels like they don’t see me as an actual human person.” Even seemingly casual insults that might fly under the radar of most students and teachers can be hurtful, junior co-president Julia Cronin said. “I would say Whitman’s a lot safer than other places in the greater world,” Cronin said. “But there are moments where you hear in the hallways, people like, ‘Oh, that's so gay,’ or something, and it really hurts. I

think that Whitman could definitely improve on how inclusive they are toward the LGBT community.” Back in portable 1231, the discussion shifted from talking through the updated MCPS guidelines to sharing experiences where the students felt marginalized in the classroom because of their identities. Despite the updated guidelines, students like Levine feel there is still work to be done to change the underlying culture of awareness and acceptance of the LGBTQ community at school. “Every year since I came out, I've had to send a very formal letter to all of my teachers saying, ‘Hey, these are my pronouns, this is my name,’” Levine said. “Until somewhat recently, I had a different name in the system on the official records. I had to explain why I use those pronouns and why they can't separate the class by boys and girls. It sucks, and we have a systemic issue. It's going to take a while to fix.” Another anonymous non-cisgender student shared an experience where, at this year’s post-homecoming event, an administrator was directing students into the gym, sorting them by “guys” and “gals” as they entered through the door. When the student, who uses they/them pronouns and describes their style as “androgynous,” reached the front of the line, the administrator hesitated, first labeling them “guy,” then “gal,” and then, after an awkward pause, simply ushering them through the door. “Although I personally don’t have a preference for pronouns, that was the first time I felt like my identity was something that people actually assumed or paid attention to,” they said. For Sheryl Freedman, Pride’s teacher sponsor, discussions like these have made her more aware of the struggles faced daily by LGBTQ students at Whitman, she said. “I hear about instances of LGBTQ students being marginalized or victimized for their identity,” Freedman said. “I have not personally witnessed it, but it’s been very eye-opening for me as the sponsor to hear stories of what happens particularly when other adults are not around.” Some of the students’ negative experiences were the results of subtle flaws in MCPS and schoolwide policies, they said. On this year’s new attendance form — a form for students and parents to fill out in order to excuse an absence — students noted the use of he/she and him/her pronouns in places where the phrase “your child” would have sufficed, for example. “One of the biggest things I think, if you take a step back, is the sheer lack of competency and LGBT sensitivity and understanding within the administration, the superintendent and very senior people,” said Mark Eckstein, the chair of the Montgomery County Council of Parent Teacher Associations’ LGBTQ committee. “And so, in some ways,

it's like the blind leading the blind.” That “blindness” — which also includes the lack of LGBTQ professionals in county administration — is directly reflected in the lack of LGBTQ inclusivity in MCPS curriculum, according to Eckstein. Discussing prominent LGBTQ figures in history class and reading works from LGBTQ authors in English could go a long way in imparting an understanding of what it means to be a part of the LGBTQ community, Eckstein said. For Huebner, a gesture of inclusivity could be something as simple as teachers giving students the opportunity to share their preferred pronouns with teachers at the beginning of the year. “Just prefacing with that, just saying those couple of words, puts a message out there that ‘I am accepting of the LGBTQ community,’” she said. “It's kind of custom for us; at meetings, we go around and say our

You know you have other people in the LGBTQ community that are going to support you and respect your opinions because you're not always comfortable speaking out in school or in class. - senior Skylar Huebner name and pronouns. It's kind of just a little way to say, ‘This is a safe space for you.’” One of Eckstein’s initial concerns with the guidelines was that they would fall short of their intended impact, he said. Policies are requirements that teachers and administrators are obligated by law to follow, and he worried that the guidelines would be treated just how they were marketed: as guidelines. However, MCPS is actively working on plans that further address LGBTQ issues in the county, such as increasing LGBTQ inclusivity in the county curriculum, said Greg Edmundson, the director of MCPS’ Student Welfare and Compliance Unit. Developing policies to help LGBTQ students feel included in the classroom is especially important considering that a high percentage of those students struggle with their mental health, Eckstein said. Gay, lesbian and bisexual high school students are nearly five times more likely to attempt suicide compared to their heterosexual peers, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. For transgender students, suicide is just as much of a concern: One in three transgender students experience suicidal thoughts, and one in five attempt suicide, according to the

Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Despite the serious discussion surrounding the new guidelines, the underlying tone of the club is much lighter. For each serious moment, there are just as many moments of laughter and non-judgemental acceptance, Huebner said. The club serves as a place both to “vent” and to seek a welcoming, supportive community, she said. As 3:30 p.m. rolled around, students began to put on their coats and backpacks. Conversation returned to weekend plans and homework. Before leaving, the club’s co-presidents made an announcement reminding members of an upcoming “s’mores night” get-together. “It's definitely a good support network and a place to vent because you endure a lot of crap from being in Whitman and existing in the world as a queer person,” Levine said. “But there’s also a real sense of community. Most of my close friends now I met through GSAs previously, so it's just really a sense of community and almost a family.” That community has come as a reassurance for Whitman parent Lisa Lacourse, whose two daughters have both been involved in the club each of their years at Whitman. “Even though my children are parts of other communities at school — in sports and music and different things — I think being able to have Pride at school and being able to talk about LGBTQ-related issues across the world is really helpful,” Lacourse said. “There are obviously exceptions, but I think there are plenty of schools in the country that don’t have that type of group and set of friends and support.” In their meetings, Pride members also organize fundraisers and drives to collect money and supplies for various LGBTQ organizations in the area. Last year, they hosted a clothing drive for Casa Ruby, a D.C. based organization that provides services, like housing aid and medical treatment, to LGBTQ citizens in both English and Spanish. For Lacourse, Pride’s impact extends beyond the walls of Whitman. What she’s learned from her children has made her a better parent and a better person, she said. Huebner’s feelings echo this sentiment. To her, Pride isn’t just a forum for LGBTQ students; it’s a place where anyone can come and learn about issues facing the community. “I feel like a lot of times the LGBTQ community is like ‘the other,’ or people think, ‘Oh, that doesn't happen here where I am, that doesn't happen to me,’” Huebner said. “Just the knowledge that there's an LGBTQ club here — just knowing that those people exist here — I think is really valuable.”

To learn more about the LGBTQ community and identities, scan this QR code with your camera. 27

Boys in the boat: a week with Whitman Crew

graphic by SAMANTHA RUBIN

uring my time at Whitman, I’ve had my fair share of highschool defining moments. I’ve put up posters of my face wide enough to cover an entire stairway. I’ve dressed up as a medically trained bear to raise awareness for charity. I’ve even given a history presentation on the 10 most culturally impactful Muppets. But of all my goofs and gaffs, all of my most bizzare stunts, one of the most interesting decisions I made was to row on the crew team. There was once a time when I attended Whitman, starry eyed and full of hope, hope that crew would be the sport for me. That was in ninth grade. How naive. I trained for months, battling the harsh winds of the Potomac in the autumn and the grueling indoor practices on stationary rowing machines called ergometers, or ergs, in the winter. It was all to achieve one singular goal: racing in the spring. If I was going to train for six months, I expected to race for more than a total of five minutes on the water. Granted, there

by Taylor Haber are rowers who enjoy those practices, they stick with the sport and get better — but it just wasn’t for me. With that realization, I quite literally left. After my final race of the season, I carried my boat toward its storage space with my team, left the competition a full three hours early before the award ceremony, and to this day, I have not received my bronze medal from the WIMIRA regatta. Now a junior, I recently realized that my crew journey wasn’t quite complete. I needed to do some soul searching, to remember what drew me to the sport in the first place. I decided to get back on the erg and revisit Whitman crew one last time. My rules were simple: For the sake of journalistic integrity, I would exercise with the novice men’s crew team for one school week’s worth of practices, from Friday, Dec. 13 until Thursday, Dec. 19. I wasn’t just going to report on winter training; I was going to take part in it. For 90 minutes every day, I would do it

all. I would run in freezing temperatures around the track and row on an erg until I fell off (falling isn’t a typical part of rowing — this was more just because I’m clumsy), and I would do it all while wearing a week’s worth of uncomfortably tight Spandex shorts, the crew uniform. I soon realized that this new week would be far different from my previous time on the team. During my freshman year, I had dreaded rowing after school. I felt that if I didn’t row at the same intensity as my teammates or if I didn’t finish a race quickly enough, I wouldn’t be able to compete at the highest novice level. Those feelings of stress vanished when I came back. My scores for the week wouldn’t have any bearing on my ranking on the team because I wasn’t on the team anymore. I did want to break a sweat, but that was a personal goal. Rowing was now simply a weeklong time commitment rather than a yearlong marathon. I spent my week with the novice

men’s crew team, a group of roughly 20 freshmen and sophomore boys. Most of them seemed eager to prove to themselves, and each other, that they had what it takes to become some of the finest rowers at Whitman. Suffice to say, I was not on their level. Most of them had been training for months before I arrived. During one practice, our warmup was to run around the track two times. I kept pace with the group, even surging slightly ahead, but as I started making my way off the track, the other rowers were making the turn into their third lap. I soon realized that the warmup was a four lap one mile run, something my unathletic lungs were not prepared for. By the end, I had to literally cut corners, running across the field instead of around the track to keep pace with the slowest members of the group. I struggled to breathe, and I downed the contents of my water bottle. Eighty-five minutes were still left in the practice. That experience and the handful of others that I had over the week are all thanks to the men at the top: the coaches. Rowers at Whitman revere their coaches, a small group of former collegiate athletes in the sport, all of whom started crew in high school just like the group they train. Coaches take on a number of responsibilities for the team, acting as both the motivator — pushing rowers to reach their best scores on the erg — and the enforcer to whip kids into shape for the racing season. It’s all a part of the coaches’ tough love approach when training the team: Do the work, even if it’s brutally painful, and you have a better chance at succeeding. The Whitman crew team strives to make its rowers the fastest in the country, and according to novice girls crew coach Pat McCloksey, “you can’t do that with candy and flowers.” My chance for redemption came on Tuesday, my second day struggling through practice. Both the novice and varsity teams were preparing for a 2,000 meter sprint on the ergs, commonly referred to as a “2K.” A 2K mirrors the length of a race on the water, making it one of the best metrics to judge a rower’s strength, skill and stamina. For this reason, 2Ks become one of the most competitive activities in crew culture, where edging out the person next to you can mean moving into a more elite boat for the season, sophomore rower Sawyer Hays said. Most of the varsity rowers wanted to set a personal record for their 2K scores, and a few of the scared novices, seeing as it was their first time, were trying to leave practice for an urgent, last-minute dentist appointment. As for me, I was preparing to risk it all — and by that I mean my dignity — if I could prove my worth

to a bunch of ninth graders. I needed the personal validation of just completing the test. I had been working out with the crew team for a day, and I wanted to feel like I had taken something out of the experience, aside from the heart palpitations. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my intended Olympian performance on the erg. I wound up with my legs feeling like jelly and finishing near the bottom of the group. While my scores may have been disappointing, my confidence was booming. The fact that I had been able to finish the 2K was an achievement in and of itself. I was impressed with myself, since I’m the type of guy who calls running on the treadmill once a month “working out.” The practice wasn’t done, however. The coaches still had us go for a run on the neighborhood streets surrounding Whitman. I wound up trailing so far behind that I lost the group on the way back. For those wondering, you cannot make a beeline behind people’s houses to the school. There are fences that aren’t worth climbing. My second day with crew reflects my experience for the week: Every day took a physical toll. By the end, I felt like I should have been on crutches. Not everything during my week on the team went as I expected. My five day long experience with the team eventually whittled down to three, with one day lost to a snowstorm and the other to me forgetting to bring a pair of gym shorts. Maybe those delays were the crew gods smiling down upon

me, or it could have just been the forecast. Storm Team 4 works in mysterious ways. I learned to appreciate Coach Pat’s approach to crew, partially because his instructions didn’t apply to me anymore, but also because I realized that he was trying to turn his rowers into elite athletes. Even after this whole ordeal, I can’t really remember why I joined crew, only why I was so eager to leave. While crew wasn’t the sport for me, I did gain several rowers’ perspectives on why they enjoy the sport, however soul crushing it may be to me. “The community around here is pretty great, I’ve made a lot of good friends, it’s a great way to stay in shape,” junior Peter Godshalk said. “It’s really competitive, and I’m hoping it will help me out with college admissions. Every day is a new workout, a new race, where you can try and beat the guy ahead of you.” Other students on crew expressed their enjoyment for training on the picturesque waters of the Potomac river. “It’s always fun to go out and row in D.C.,” junior Josh Kim said. “The scenery is always nice, and of course, racing is also fun — just going out there and competing.” Over the course of the week, I learned something about myself: If I ever want to challenge myself, I’ll pick an activity more calming, like meditation or chess. Something where I don’t run the risk of pulling a hamstring.

Junior Taylor Haber attempts to row on the erg after losing all feeling in his lower body. Photo by CHARLIE SAGNER

New Year’s resolution: Finish the crossword by Kaya Ginsky and Mathilde Lambert

ACROSS

1. Smoothie superfruit 5. Abrupt sound 8. Digital Advertising Alliance, abbr. 11. Yearly pilgrimage to Mecca 15. Steers clear 17. Escaping or avoiding 19. Moves smoothly to something new 21. Shout loudly 22. 12th-18th letters of the alphabet 23. Total 24. Education Welfare Officer abbr. 25. Encouragement: “____ boy” 27. String and axle toy, plural 28. Billions of years 30. Wisconsin’s time zone, for short 31. Repair 33. About, in text 34. December 31, to a year 35. Detects 36. Colorants 38. Pay attention to 41. Despise 43. Classic: “____, but a goody” 44. Road vehicle 46. Headphones “Dr.” 47. Youth Development Organization, abbr. 48. “Dude” alternative 49. Sneaker company, with “New” 53. Suddenly inhales in surprise 55. The act of performing a popular dance move c.2014 59. Opposite of WSW, in direction 60. Fire residue 62. God, in 56 down 63. Distress letters 64. Equal score 65. List ender, briefly 67. White banner, in war 70. With no shoes, ____ foot 71. English as a New Language, abbr. 72. Leukemia Inhibitory Factor, for short 73. Knowing the newest fashions 74. Customer Lifetime Value, abbr. 75. 1944 film “Meet me __ __ Louis” 76. Reaching of new levels 81. Hello, in 56 down 30

83. Artist Yoko 84. 2013 slang for significant other 85. Internet Information Services, for short 86. J.D. Salinger’s favorite type of bread 87. Picnic-destroying insect 88. Open-toed shoes 91. Once more 93. Beachside tents 96. Honest president, for short 97. A sheep’s sound 98. “High School Musical” star Efron 100. Amused text 101. Buddies 103. Featuring, for short 104. Part of the mind that mediates the conscious and unconscious, plural 106. A ridge on textured fabric 109. New Zealand native 110. Electric sea creature 111. Small lump 113. A seasonal mood disorder, plural 115. A government sponsored, tax-deferred personal retirement plan 116. Statement of agreement 117. Wheel of Fortune, abbr. 120. Canadian actor Michael 122. Aunt, in Madrid 123. State with North and South 125. Miserable 128. Small islands 130. “Ready, ______, go!” 131. Escape secretly 132. Long college essays 133. This in Spanish 134. “I haven’t gotten to it ___” 135. Female deer 136. Established, for short

DOWN

1. Confessed 2. Division of Britain’s “New World” 3. Sicken 4. New thought 5. Eg.wishing “Happy New Year” on January 2nd 6. An abnormal connection between an artery

7. Opposite of few 8. Perfect duo with chips 9. American Notes and Queries, abbr. 10. Phrase to resolve a conflict: “______ __ disagree” 11. Female chickens- HENS 12. American televised singing and variety show, abbr. 13. Turned lemons into lemonade, literally 14. “New” state under New York 15. Throat-clearing sound used as an interjection 16. Mrs., in Peru 18. Music genre of rhythm and blues: “___-wop” 19. To arrange for delivery 20. What the sun does at dusk 26. Honestly, in text 29. Half of two 32. “What the hecka is ____” 35. Messy person 37. Saint, in Mexico 39. Stationary rowing machine 40. When New Years Eve turns to New Years Day 41. To put forward a conclusion 42. Product promotions, for short 43. A spherical body 45. Canada’s Air Force, for short 48. Foundation 49. “Busy as a ___” 50. Radio signal receiver 51. Derives support from 52. Sign language of the UK 54. Norse earth goddess 55. Doctor or document, abbr. 56. Romance language of Florence 57. Early ‘90s grunge band, or a transcendent state 58. Mild expression of surprise 61. To split in two 63. Type of person with special powers 66. Language Learning and Teaching, abbr. 68. Gemological Institute of America, abbr. 69. Basketball hoop 70. Battle of Bethesda Rival

75. Operating system for iPhones 76. Having the skill to do something 77. The, in Germany 78. U.S. foreign intelligence service 79. NYE ball drop city 80. Greenish-blue 82. Overtimes, for short 89. Spanish surrealist 90. Six pack muscles 91. Org. for drivers 92. To constantly irritate 94. Archery device 95. Expression of concern

97. Highway encircling D.C. 99. To surrender or yield 101. Ship robber 102. Stops sleeping 103. Service payment 105. To institute legal proceedings 107. Newest, in the news 108. Corrected, in a newspaper 109. Human or goat children 110. Auctioning website 112. Eg. a Londoner 114. Impudence 116. 2019 phrase: “What __ __

baby” or “__ __ be like that” 117. California’s coast 118. Order to show cause, abbr. 119. Daily nourishment 121. Tennis great Arthur 124. Cereal grain 126. Order of the British Empire, abbr. 127. Mobile Network Operator, abbr. 129. The, in France