Weekly News Archive

January 8 (’06) – January 14 (’06)

Passing Through

It’s been a bit since I last donated some wisdom to this site, though I must say that it doesn’t feel nearly so long as it has been. Winter break has come and gone and I barely noticed. Of course, winter break always feels short, but something about this year being filled with all sorts of work—college applications, trying to get money for college, and senior year classes—makes the time seem to go faster just when you don’t want it to. The upside is that the school year’s end is approaching much more rapidly than I though it would. The downside is that I haven’t completed nearly as many things as I had planned to by this point.

So that’s where I’ve been during this long silence—holed up in my room, staring at a computer screen, filling out applications and doing homework… or at the very least, pretending to. I confess, from speaking with other seniors in my situation, I’ve come to suspect that I’ve been spending much more time working on my applications than your average senior, but what can I say? I’m something of a worrier when it comes to my future. All the same, I have a message for those of you who have yet to experience the twelfth grade and the message is, “Beware.” Keep organized, get stuff done sooner than you think it needs to be done, and try not to freak out. First semester senior year is no picnic, but it is certainly manageable.

But enough excuses for my absence, I’m here now, and no doubt that means you want news as the title of this page might suggest.

Here are some nice tidbits:

Principal Jim Slemp gave a nice speech on Friday to all history classes. Some of us lucky kids who have two history classes even got to go see him speak twice to us. If you missed it, the main points were as follows:

1. We are the best student body he knows!
2. Some people (the taxpayers) spend a lot of money on our fancy new buildings, so we should keep them clean!
3. The end of the semester is coming up, so get those grades up!

I don’t know about those first two as much, but I’d certainly encourage you on the last one. We have only two weeks before finals, which isn’t much time, so if your grades aren’t where you’d like them to be (as is my status) then work work work.

Dance Productions opened last weekend. I haven’t yet seen it myself, but everyone I’ve talked to who has seen it says it’s good, so it sounds like that’s something well worth seeing. I hear there’s even a dance where the dancers dress up as stick figures. They will be performing two more times in the Little Theater this Friday and Saturday, the 14th and 15th of January, at 8 PM. Tickets cost $5 for students, but $10 for adults.

This Wednesday is a late-start day. You can refer to our bell scedule to see when you need to be where, but simply enough, show up at 10 AM for first period.

And for some shameless self-promotion (this is, after all, my website at the moment, and I have, after all, been talking about myself during this entire update)! I’ve started a club called the Monologue Club. The concept is mostly simple. We meet on Tuesdays in C221 and you get to listen to monologues and short scenes or read monologues and perform short scenes. It’s entirely up to you. We’ll also be playing improv games and maybe reading plays. It’s a way to have some fun with theater even if you’re not good enough for or don’t have the time to commit to the actual BHS theater department.

And as a sidebar/bit of bad news, BerkeleyHigh.org has been fairly steadily attacked by comment spam since about a year and a half ago, but recently it has seemed to pick up speed. I’m going to need to find an efficient way of dealing with these monsters so we don’t have poker and medication ads living all over the site, but for the moment I haven’t got a clue what to do about them. If it gets much worse, I may have to shut down the commenting system, at least temporarily. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it happens, you’ll know why.

— Harris