She sees all...

Tomorrow’s the last day for the seniors, and I think I can safely say that we’re not too sad to see it go. It’s been a weird four years, Druid Hills. I leave you with some spraypainted advice from the Firehouse parking lot.

Open yourself

“I am glad to be here with the Glen Haven Bulldogs to demonstrate how important it is for young people early on to begin to [monitor] themselves in [physically],” said Governor Perdue. — DeKalb County Schools Website

The governor did not, it seems, sign a bill regarding English instruction.

HB 229, or the Student Health and Physical Education Act, requires local school systems to conduct an annual fitness assessment and to comply with state physical education instruction requirements. The bill also calls for school systems to provide reporting of fitness assessment results, which is inclusive of an annual report to the Governor, and to also provide a recognition program for those students meeting standards. — DeKalb County Schools Website

The implication of this article is that school systems are not currently required to “comply with state physical education instruction requirements,” which seems odd. The bigger issue, I think, is that the state is more interested in PE requirements than in, say, math scores or a functional science (or math) curriculum. As a result of the PE/Health requirement at the school, I and the people I know learned exciting facts like:

• AIDS is caused by malnutrition.
• Cancer attacks the weakest part of your body. That’s why women get breast cancer!
• Mat ball is a real game.

Physical education is great, but it’s not the primary purpose of schools. Also, unrelated to HB 229, apparently the third floor flooded yesterday. It’s a flood of progress!

An image from the Free Verse Project. Credit to the Academy of American Poets.

…night he saw her, but there were many anonymous girls that summer,
there always are, who lower their necks to the stone
and pray, not to God but to the Virgin, herself once

a young girl, chosen in her room by an archangel.
Instead of praying, that summer I watched television, reruns of
a UFO series featuring a melancholic woman detective

who had gotten cancer and was made sterile by aliens. I watched
infomercials: exercise machines, pasta makers,
and a product called Nails Again With Henna,…
“Dangerous for Girls” — Connie Voisine

April is National Poetry Month. In honor of that, here’s an excerpt from a poem I discovered surfing the Poetry.org site this morning. (My all-time favorite poem, of course, is Sandburg’s “Chicago”.) This poem, which appeals to me on this rainy morning, is doubly cool in that it offers that poets, too, watch bad 90′s television–in this case, The X Files. So just remember–you’re not blowing off studying for exams, you’re finding inspiration.

Flowers catching the rain. Photo by Pandiyan.

Your PE class may be hosted in the cafeteria and your hangover may be killer (looking at you, seniors), but just because Spring Break is over is no reason to cry. (Instead, focus on the upcoming AP/IB exams!) For your entertainment, here’s a list of fun things you can do to pass the 6 weeks left until we’re out of here:

Timesucks for teenagers:

• Jump in the puddles! Remember when you were young, how nothing beat jumping in puddles on a rainy day? Well, thanks to construction, now you can relive the joy. Just hop a chainlink fence (any one will do) and wallow! We’re reasonably sure the water won’t kill you.
• Sing out loud! We may not have a library any more, but look on the bright side–now all of our music classes can learn from each other! Join them in this musical celebration in the media-center-cum-Carnegie-Hall.
• Kill time on the internubs. As an upside to the classroom reorganization, chances are good that you now have unfettered computer access. Use it to update the Followspot find the silliest thing you can blocked by Webwasher. We dare you to beat its blocking of GoogleDocs or anything in the Wall Street Journal archives.
• Pay your room and board deposit. Perhaps only applicable to seniors, but it feels so good. Mmmmm.
• Watch TV. Since Hulu is for some reason not blocked by Webwasher, feel free to catch 30 Rock reruns during first period!

High above the school where no students have ventured before live two super heroes so beastly that they wear sunglasses and capes to hide their identities. Who are these masked beings and what exactly do they do? (Add theme music here.) Are they good or are they evil? In a daring, spontaneous decision not based at all on Article Assignments we bravely ventured up to the steeple in search of the supposed superheroes.

Slowly, we edged around the corner of the “Superheroes” hide out. What would we find there? Super technology? Highly dangerous explosives? No, if only they were doing such mundane things as that. Instead, they were performing the highly contagious “Chicken Dance of Doom.”

After the “Super Heroes” realized that we were standing behind them, watching their ridiculous dance, and they got over the surprise of seeing us in their hide out by bravely screaming at the top of their lungs, we introduced ourselves as James Bond and Austin Powers, the school’s super secret inside reporter.

H&M: Normally, Superheroes are the ones who save the world after evil has been wrought upon it, but these old-school concepts are beneath Happy Heffalump and Mad Macaroni.
HH: Don’t forget BTRD Boy.
H&M: Who’s that?
MM: You know, Bring the Roof Down Boy, we like to call him. Our side kick who lasted for around two seconds before he fell through the roof.
HH: Anyway, like I was saying, we like to, ya know, shake it up a little…create some chaos (secretively of course) and then swoop in to save the day because, deep down DHHS is your everyday high school. The weird things that go down are all our doing.
H&M: So, what exactly do two super heroes cook up to add some spice to their day?
MM: Oh the usual. Turn off the A/C and then leave a ransom note and accidentally blow up half of the school with foreign explosives you know, same old same old.
H&M: Wait. What? Rewind. What do you mean no A/C?
HH: Well, we do like to make you sweat a little before we save the day.
H&M: Har, har Heffalump,very punny.
MM: Actually the A/C was an accident. We were practicing our killer dance moves in the Top Secret County Office one day and cha-cha-cha’d right into the Big Red Button that controls the A/C for all of DeKalb County. Well, it just so happens that at least 20 students a year attempt to break into the office so it’s under high security risk. As soon as we knocked into the button, 50 police officers rushed in (because they’d hate to see the tax payer’s money go to waste by turning on the A/C too early). At the same time the fire sprinklers went off, causing the Big Button to short circuit. Now they have to order a new one from Japan.
H&M: Mmm…okay what about the construction? How is that your fault?
HH: Well. That’s actually a funny story, Mad Mac. Do you mind if I tell it?
MM: Go ahead.
HH: We blew it up. Well, at first we were just going to do some graffiti, like a last year, but then we thought ‘Hey, we have all of these high explosives sitting around; let’s blow up Mars’ because, if you think about it, Mars is just an unnecessary planet. Well, the rocket we bought from Toys R Us was a little faulty and instead of shooting our explosives to Mars…it landed in the parking lot, obliterating half the school.
MM: So, the moral of the story here is, don’t get your heavy artillery from the Dollar Section.

So, in the future if you ever hear—wait, what’s that?
MM: Jeez, it’s the junior girls again. How many times have we had to undent their cars for them?
HH: Not to mention the upperclassmen cars. Did you see—
MM: We have to go…
HH: To infinity and beyond!
MM: No! That is not our catch phrase! To the cupola!

Branaugh's Hamlet is the sexiest of all Hamlets. It's the moustache.

The school play, Not Quite Hamlet (playing the last week of April, written by students, awesome, come see it), had its first tech day today. This meant that the intrepid techies got to build several boxes on the Pattersons’s front lawn. Then paint them. In the cold, cold weather.

All of which is to say: come see the play! It’ll be totally awesome, and I’m not saying that just because I spent 6 1/2 hours today freezing my ass off to help build boxes! April 30th, May 1st, May 2nd, and May 3rd! Walker Smith monologues! There is unresolved bromance! Thumb drives are erased and there is–dare I say it–intrigue.

This school salad is so vegetarian friendly that it's got chicken in it.

In addition, DeKalb county schools has been selected one of the top five most vegetarian-friendly school districts in the nation (press release). Speaking as a vegetarian who has been in this district since 7th grade, I can safely say that this is bullshit.

Dr. Joyce R. Wimberly, the district’s School Nutrition Director, has introduced an array of delicious vegetarian selections, including veggie burgers and vegetarian tacos.

Ignoring the fact that “delicious” is a straight up PR lie, I have never seen a veggie burger at the school, nor vegetarian tacos. Vegetarian options at Druid Hills are limited to whatever cheese-and-ground-beef concoction served that day, minus the ground beef. And we are not, though the press release calls us members of the “vegan elite,” remotely vegan-friendly: the school lunches (at least at Druid Hills) runneth over with cheese products, and not a single menu offering for this week was vegan.

Even the salads aren’t vegetarian-friendly: They’ve all got chicken in them.

And it’s not that the school simply has too small of a vegetarian population to make this worthwhile. There’s a large vegetarian Hindu population, as well as non-religious vegetarians like me. Almost all of the vegetarians I know bring their lunch because the school lunches are unhealthy and full of meat, and stale tortilla chips and bread get boring after a while.

According to the lunch menu for this week, we had veggie lasagna on Tuesday (it had meat in it, from what we could tell), veggie burgers on Wednesday (again, they looked like meat), no veggie option today, and–something to look forward to–a totally non-vegan (and unhealthy) option of cheese fries tomorrow.

If DeKalb County wants to actually earn its designation as vegetarian-friendly, they can start supplying actual vegetarian salads, clearly marking non-meat burgers, and offering cheeseless entries (which, if they don’t want us to keel over of heart disease, they should be doing anyway–this week’s lunches have an average caloric value of 902 calories). Until then, I think the school district’s lunches can be considered vegetarian-apathetic at best.

Seen on the side of one of the trailers

Just your daily dose of cheerful school defacing.

Also!: The Drama Club has had its cash box stolen, with the $160 we had saved to put on Not Quite Hamlet. This is what we in the field call “a dick move.” So, if you have any info on it (or the squiditti!) please let Ms. Z. know.