Weekly News Archive

June 13 (’04) – June 19 (’04)

Closing the Lid

Well, it’s done.

It’s a little unfortunate that the final throes of the site this year had to take place during a torturous stretch of studying, homeworking, and general school-kicking-my-ass-ing, because it obviously meant that I haven’t updated at all for many weeks. To a certain degree I have been actually too swamped with work to lay a finger on it, and to a larger degree I have found that in the few periods of free time I’ve been able to dredge up, I was less and less inclined to spend it doing anything but cooling my heels.

The nature of people, I suppose. But the end result is that between about… a month ago?... and when classes closed their doors on Thursday (Friday for an unlucky few), both this site and myself have been wordless as a marshmallow peep. Consequently, I’m going to combine my close-of-the-year post with a quick concatenation of a few of the things that I didn’t get a chance to post during my dead period.

Tidbits

• Vicky Turner passes along a link to All Science Fair Projects, a help site compilation of science fair ideas. While BHS doesn’t have a science fair (the very idea boggles), it’s a common thing for one science class or another to feature final projects or similar things that require good ideas, making this a useful tool. It’s been added to the Links page. Some other stuff got added there as well.
• “Juachoerin”, who prefers to remain otherwise anonymous, sends in a great dissertation he wrote called The Grammar of Slang. Briefly, it’s a rundown on some of the most popular slang among high school–aged youth in this area, giving definitions, grammatical breakdowns, and syntax deconstructions. Lots of fun; check it out. It’s also been added to the Features page.
• There’s been a small mess surrounding efforts to assign a summer reading list (and possibly an accompanying writing assignment) to next year’s AP English classes (both Literature and Language & Composition). Subsequent reading assignments keep being distributed, through the e-tree or wherever, each one different and each one sounding equally self-important. Quite frankly, it is still wholly unclear what students who signed up for these classes should be doing this summer; the latest word, through the e-tree, is that if you expect (through, I suppose, your scheduling crystal ball) that you’ll end up in Mr. Bye’s Lit class, you should read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (good luck), as well as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Whether this will remain to be the case is uncertain, as is what exactly your plans should be if you don’t magically know what class you’ll be in. Honestly, your best solution may be to subscribe to the e-tree, if you haven’t already (do so here: http://idiom.com/mailman/listinfo/bhs) and stay subscribed at least for a few days, maybe a week or two, to try and pick up any new information. I don’t know if there’s going to be a final, formal announcement clarifying the matter, but if there is, it will be on the e-tree.
• School is over yahoo.

So 2003–2004 rolls to a close.

This marks the second year on the web for this site, and my second year writing for it. By the second year, the novelty has worn off, as has the feeling of uniqueness; even enjoyable tasks (of which, for me, the site has been one) tend to become fairly passé. Nothing wrong with that – indeed, it may be a good thing, because it means the focus of both myself and of the readers can shift to “using” the site for whatever it’s best at, rather than standing off and saying, “How neat.” Whether you read the site for the information, for the resources, or even for my worthless rambling, I’d much rather that you read it for something, rather than just because it’s here and you feel you should because you can. The passage of time helps with that.

The downside of time is that it means my increasingly blasé attitude makes me less and less motivated to keep up with the site’s maintenance (both creative and technical). I would not worry immensely if everybody read it only to, say, grab a phone number from the Contact list, but it would not be my preference. So that’s something I’ll need to find a way to combat next year.

One possible solution could be to keep pursuing this site’s Holy Grail, a true community-based content system where news and articles were written by the public and posted in a collectivist (if not quite democratic, for I would still want to keep the overall reins in my hands to ensure quality) array of material. I have always strived, from the moment of its conception, to make this site “community-oriented,” but that’s not the same as being community-based – at the moment, it’s mostly me-based, serving the community out of a tight bottleneck. If the community could be made to serve itself, with my facilitation only, then it would be better for me (less work) and better for everyone else (a larger base of more useful, objective views).

Another bogey I’ll need to confront is the growing realization that, as I’ll be a senior next year, I will before long have to come to a decision on what to do with the site after I’ve graduated. I would hope that it could continue in the capable hands of others, though perhaps that would not be best; we’ll see. Still got a year.

On the whole, this year was probably not as exciting as the last. But on the whole, that’s a good thing. The entire school disappearing in a cataclysmic fire would be pretty damned exciting, but would not be my first suggestion for overall improvement.

And this year was a year of improvement, which may have been why it wasn’t all that interesting; decline is always more interesting than progress, but when you’ve got to hang around it day after day, it’s much less comfortable. The shiny new D building was actually completed, and to my shock and amazement, appears on all fronts to be functional, attractive, looked-after, and well-done. It even smells nice. We were given a new principal who, riding in on the tail end of a rolling sea of scandal and crisis, managed to be remarkable in his unremarkability; his great success was that he never blew anything up. All year long I’ve been saying, “Well, Slemp seems great, but we’ll have to wait until something really catastrophic happens, see how he handles it.” The year is over and I’m forced to conclude that catastrophes did happen, and he “handled” them in perhaps the best possible way: calmly and collectedly, with so little outward turmoil that people like me were left thinking he hasn’t done a thing.

But that’s his art. Previous generations of principals, whether good or bad, were all blessed with a singular ability to run flapping in circles day after day, crowing about the dozens of emergencies they were facing. The point is not whether they were dealing with serious situations, for they surely were, just as Slemp surely is; the point is that, by projecting a continuous air of alarm and just-holding-on survival, the school and its community were left with the impression that if we breathed wrong all four walls and the roof would blow away. Slemp? He’s the opposite, something of a drug-free stoner; his outward appearance is of a man with so few cares that he literally has nothing better to do than wander the hallways chumming it up with students.

He certainly has other things to do, but his insight is that, when it comes to leading the school, there could not possibly be anything better than to lend a calm eye to the storm.

I may not agree with every decision Slemp has made, nor with every viewpoint he has espoused, but I feel very strongly that it just doesn’t matter. And that, almost certainly, is the point.

If there were real events of note this year, they were surely the deaths of not one but several Berkeley High students. I will not pretend to be able to guess what cosmic influences could make so many tragedies occur in such a brief period of time; it seemed and still seems ludicrous that so much could go wrong so quickly. But the community did all of the right things, and in a way, perhaps that’s what’s important: that even in the wake of wave after wave of real, lasting catastrophes – or maybe only in such a case – the overall spirit of the school and the community was all right. Not saints, not sinners. Just all right.

For my part, the only thing I still regret is that in the days following Nic Rotolo’s death, this site reached the highest traffic and usage that it ever has.

If I can find out whether I should be pleased or shamed, I’ll be more content.

In the meantime? In the meantime, Berkeley High School grinds on. In classic fashion, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and I have every expectation that next year’s students will be privy both to many new sights (pleasing and lame) and, in some higher sense, exactly the same school.

As it has been, it will be. And so will this site.

Have a wonderful summer. Sleep for a month if you want to. We’ll be back, bright-eyed and bushy tailed and bitter as ever, on the first day of school; until then, enjoy yourselves.

— Brandon