Archived News Item

The Day the Spirit Died

Ah, Spirit Week.

Nothing quite sums up the wild, eclectic, carefree, deranged, imaginative, high, spirited nature of Berkeley High like Spirit Week, the once-a-year event when students are encouraged to dress up like . . . whatever . . . and parade around the school showing spirit.

Spirit. Y’know, fist-pumping, bleacher-stomping, throat-razing gumption. Pride for yourself and for your school. Does it sound like something no student would be interested in? It does to me, but maybe I’m just cynical. Quite to the contrary, Spirit Week is one of the most beloved (and enjoyed) events of the year.

Perhaps too loved and enjoyed, according to some. There’s a minor tradition of temporarily setting aside the act of learning during Spirit Week, while the majority of the school instead drinks, holds rallies, breaks things, gets into fights, and generally enjoys itself. Apparently, it’s a tradition that’s been getting more and more ridiculous every year — long ago, Spirit Week was actually fairly docile, but lately it’s become a mosh pit.

So much so that last year, the Berkeley Police Department actually refused to provide security for the event any more. As a result, the administration decided to put the pincers on, and Spirit Week, while officially encouraged, in actuality became something more like Morale Seminar Week. Most of the activities the students enjoy were eliminated; rambunctiousness was clamped down on; fun was stifled.

Without the police, the school was helpless to the will of the free-ranging students. So it was decided that Spirit Week would become an institutional affair, or it would not happen at all.

So much for that. What ended up happening was that the student body made its own way, and Spirit Week was easily as insane as it had ever been.

This year, the administration called their bluff, and killed it. Spirit Week is dead. Long live Spirit Week.

The only officially sanctioned “spirit event” is on Friday, when the dress code will be Red and Gold, the school colors. Eliminating the other four days while keeping the school’s free advertising may seem slightly Machiavellian, but hey, nobody ever said it was a democracy.

However, it’s not quite a military rule either, which begs the question of how exactly the school would go about enforcing the lack of a Spirit Week. If a student chooses to wear pajamas to school, there’s no edict against it. And if the entire student populace chooses to do so . . . well, what can they do? Run around saying, “Hey, stop that! No spirit! No spirit!”

So Spirit Week has become Student-Organized, Underground, Guerilla Spirit Week, neither condoned by the administration nor in violation of any rules. Students circulate flyers announcing the events; faculty receive orders to tear them down. All’s fair.

Spirit Week is next week.

Derick Miller, President of the PTA Council, recently sent out a document to the BHS e-tree, detailing plans for a new small-school-oriented shakedown of the school’s organizational structure. Even though it’s not yet an official recommendation (it’s merely under consideration by the School Site Council — indeed, Derick Miller isn’t even a member), it’s tantalizing to say the least. To quote:

BHS could initially be divided into small schools or houses as follows:

A. Five houses of approximately 600 each. Two of these houses could each contain 2 of the existing small schools. The other three houses could be themed or unthemed.

B. Six houses of approximately 500 each, or seven houses of approximately 430. The 4 existing small schools could each be in a different house, and would expand from their current sizes. The other houses could be themed or unthemed.

 . . . Each house must have contiguous space.

For example, House 1 could have the H building except for the photo room, House 2 could have the east half of the C building. . . . All teachers, counselors, safety officers, support staff and custodians could be members of one of the houses. . . . All students within each house would be divided into advisories of about 15 students and one advisor.

Amazing.

You can read the entire document here.

Some changes and updates have been made to the site. First, a new section has been created — Features. It houses (or more accurately, will eventually house) the articles of writing that are worth saving. At the moment, its only contents are the recent pieces; hopefully, there will soon be more.

Second, the Site Overview has been updated with descriptions of two or three sections of the site that it had woefully forgotten about.

Lastly, a very useful link I stumbled upon recently has been added to the Links page. It’s the site of the California Virtual High School, a group that provides free help with standardized tests like the SAT, and it’s very, very, very handy. Check it out.

A few useful resources for you: the Fibonacci Sequence, the Golden Section, and the Evolution of Writing in Western Europe. Essentially, these are little mini-tutorials created by Dean Allen, a writer and general smart-ass. The first two are tiny animated walk-throughs done in Flash (a web format — if you don’t know what it is, just try ’em out and see if they work), illustrating the concepts of the Fibonacci Sequence and the Golden Section of a square. Already understand these? Great. Don’t understand them? Check it out — they’re short, simple, sweet, and ridiculously easy to understand.

The evolution of writing piece is a rather academic foray, quite long, fairly basic, and attempting to describe the progress of the written word, all the way from the early Greeks and Romans to the kinds of type we see today. It will either thrill you or bore you to death.

— Brandon