Sidebar
Can
you take it with you?
Nope. But you can see the show tonight,
tomorrow or Saturday.
Speaking
of which:
Last night during rehearsal, the love scene
between Nicholas and Amanda got so steamy that when combined with the smoke
from Greg's fireworks, the fire alarm went off.
Weapons
of Sass Destruction
If the EPA really is down, it
seems their young successors will have to take up their burden a few years
early. Green Campus Initiative has stockpiled fifty megatons of sass to be used
on anyone caught dumping hazardous wastes in the environment. Don't worry,
these weapons are carbon-neutral. I'm looking at you, Ben Higgs.
The
government default looms...
So feel free to give me your US Dollars in
exchange for Twinkies, a much more reliable currency, rumored to be able to
store value even through a nuclear apocalypse. Exchange rate is currently set
at $1542 USD: 1 Twinkie
Journalism Quiz:
We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and
beautiful wave.…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill
in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where
the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Poety Quiz:
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
Writing
Prompt:
Write a story in ten words or fewer. Strong submissions will be featured in the
sidebar.
Articles
Function Boxes
By: Matt "the one who knocks" Healey
Yesterday,
the senior class spent their enrichment/milk-break getting their uniforms
checked. The dean's office told my advisory to show up at the student center at
9:45. We didn't get to actually go inside until 10:00, so we had about fifteen
minutes to ponder the silliness of the situation.
If
you've ever had Mr. Kime as a teacher, you've heard of function boxes. X goes
into the function box and F(x) comes out. The student center acted as a special
type of function box yesterday: a uniform violator box. Girls with skorts to
their knees entered, only to come out with the same skorts now rolled back up
ten inches above the knee. Guys walked in with standard Lands End pants and all
black shoes, but left with Volcom jeans and new logo-ridden shoes. I'm not even
exaggerating. I actually saw someone borrow a pair of pants just for the check
and return to their Volcolm's afterwards.
The only
people who actually received UV's were the honest ones who went inside dressed
the way they dress on most days. Everyone else just fixed their uniform for the
check, and messed it back up once they
were out of Mr. Beamer's sight. The process wasted student's time (I had plenty
of homework I planned to finish during milk-break) and it wasted the uniform
checkers' time. Even teachers laughed at it while waiting outside.
I
understand that plenty of people think it's ridiculous to get worked up about
something as trivial as uniform violations. I agree that they're trivial, until
you actually start getting detentions from them. It only takes two UV's - one
during the end of a quarter. Maybe instead of changing the uniform (given that
to people like Colin it's very comforting) like Dan Forssman suggests, the
dean's office could resolve the discontent surrounding uniform violations by
easing up on punishments.
The Bishop's Difference
By: Andy Secondine (DU Guest Writer)
Last month, there was an Op-Ed piece in the New
York Times about how we as a society give children too many awards. The
piece refers to empirical evidence which shows that too many awards cause
students to underachieve.
At Bishop’s, the awards the school gives out tend
to be well deserved and hard to come by. Less so are other forms of
recognition. At announcements, the names of people who did well on the PSAT
were proclaimed. Recognition is fine; however, in an environment as competitive
as Bishop’s, it can serve not to praise those who did well but to shame those
who did not.
By flaunting the accomplishments of a few
distinguished students, it places ever more pressure on those of us who failed
to live up to expectations. My G.P.A. is not perfect. I’m not skilled enough to
win grant money for my
miraculous-scientific-breakthrough-that-fundamentally-changes-our-understanding-of-life.
That doesn’t mean I should feel ashamed to show my face at school. I work hard
in class. I do the assignments. I juggle a crazy schedule. Why isn’t that
enough? Perhaps because whenever the work of a distinguished few is trotted out
in front of us, it raises expectations, and it degrades our accomplishments.
Rather than feeling proud of my peers, I feel judged. We started the year with
a speech about accepting our shortcomings. Less than a month later, the message
is clear: imperfection is intolerable.
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