El Estoque will accurately inform our community through well-researched, unbiased and in-depth accounts of stories of the student body and staff, local news and developments and taboo topics prevalent in and near the MVHS realm. By investigating a variety of voices and credible perspectives, we hope to foster active discussion, effect positive change and spread awareness of timely and relevant content. As a trustworthy, consistent and reliable source of information, we strive to be accountable, adaptable and ready to correct and address our mistakes. Constantly striving for improvement, we will uphold integrity and ethics to be respectful and empathetic to one another, our sources and our readers. We will exercise our press freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment and California Ed Code 48907 while maintaining a community of reporters with a strong passion for our work and journalism as a whole.
LETTER FROM THE
EDITORS
This is the last letter our editorial team will write to you. Isn’t that crazy? As we prepare to pass on the torch, we look back at our tenure with uncertainty. Was there an important topic we should’ve covered? Is there a person whose story we should’ve told? Is there anything more we could’ve done? Through the whirlwind of the new administration, changing cultural trends and more, our biggest struggle has been determining what topics to direct your attention to.
We refuse to shy away from the complex or controversial — in this issue, our News section tackles the Columbia University protests and word bans on federal documents. At the same time, we try to remain grounded in our school community, with our Arts and Entertainment section featuring the student-written and produced Saturday Night Live.
Still, there is so much of the world that exists beyond the 48 pages that we can fit in a single magazine. Our Opinion section takes a step back to examine journalism itself and the ways it has both evolved and become more dangerous. We acknowledge that the reporting we do is important, albeit small in the grand scheme of information.
So, consider this our last call to action to you: your attention is your biggest asset. In this publication, we have always tried our best to direct you to important issues, but ultimately, it is up to you to decide what issues or topics are worth your time. Action happens when there are enough people who know and care about the issue at hand — your attention holds power to make change.
As we step away from the editorial team, we look back with some uncertainty; we will have to wait a while before we know what our legacy truly will be. Despite this, we are proud of the work we and the rest of our staff have done this year, and are confident to say that the reporting we do deserves your attention.
Alyssa Yang
PHOTO | LILLIAN WANG
Jami Lim
Ananya Chaudhary Kathryn Foo
Alan Tai
Samika Bhatkar
PHOTO COURTESY OF MAYA PULLARA | USED WITH PERMISSION
PHOTO | LIZ LIU
PHOTO | SAMIKA BHATKAR
FROM CAMPUS TO CUSTODY
WDeportation and defunding threats silence student activists
BY MEGHNA DIXIT AND STELLA PETZOVA
hen English teacher and green card holder Doug Leresche attended Queens College in New York in 2008, he and his Jewish classmate decided to live in tents on campus as a show of solidarity with refugees around the world. The following year, they tried to set up a similar encampment and planned to feature flags of refugees from around the world, including the Palestinian flag. However, Leresche was called into the university president’s o ce, where he was discouraged from displaying the Palestinian flag.
“ THE DEPORTATIONS GO AGAINST EVERYTHING AMERICA STANDS FOR.
“They told me, ‘That flag represents terrorists,’” Leresche said. “And I said, ‘No, that flag represents people.’”
Leresche ended up conceding to the president’s request since he was afraid of potential consequences, such as getting suspended. While he regretted not putting the flag up for years, today, he is glad he didn’t due to his status as a non-citizen. Permanent residents, also known as green card holders, are legally permitted to live and work in the U.S. and have many of the same rights and protections as citizens, such as the right to live and work permanently. However, in the past few months,
nearly 150 college students on student visas or permanent residencies who participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests have been stripped of their immigration status and threatened with deportation by the Trump Administration, according to the New York Times.
ENGLISH TEACHER DOUG LERESCHE
Notably, on March 9, Columbia University alum ‘24 and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was detained for protesting and had his green card revoked. His arrest was the first widely-publicized deportation e ort of this kind by the Trump administration, which has pledged to crack down on pro-Palestinian student activists claiming that they align with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. Trump’s administration has further threatened to cut millions of dollars in federal funding from universities with protests on their campuses, including $400 million from Columbia.
While Harb hasn’t seen any outright antisemitic demonstrations during protests, Columbia senior and Columbia Spectator sta writer August Phillips — who has reported on several protests — has noticed some instances of antisemitism on his campus. However, he believes the vast majority of protest action is not antisemitic, and the Trump administration and the media has incorrectly portrayed all of Columbia’s student activism as being pro-Hamas.
“The amount of attention in reporting that’s directed towards this issue of antisemitism on campus has been woven into a very convincing narrative of what’s going on in campuses across the nation,” Phillips said. “There’s a lot of ways to characterize the protests, and the media has been able to use a lot of rhetoric that I wouldn’t count as antisemitism playing into the problem.”
Sophomore Ruqayyah Harb, who has participated in several proPalestinian protests and visited an encampment at Stanford, believes that equating pro-Palestinian activism with antisemitic and pro-Hamas ideologies is harmful, as she says many proPalestinian activists are Jewish themselves and are simply seeking an end to the war in Gaza.
Senior legal counsel Mike Hiestand from the Student Press Law Center also expresses his concern with grouping activists with terrorists, especially after Tufts op-ed cowriter and Turkish citizen Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested o the street by plainclothes ICE agents. Following her detainment, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized her conduct as terroristic in a press conference. Hiestand explains that the op-ed, which criticized Tufts’ response to Israel’s alleged genocide in Gaza, is protected speech and the administration cannot “willy-nilly determine that it’s not.”
“It’s just nonsensical,” Hiestand said. “It’s alarming. It’s unprecedented. Her
speech is protected — there’s nothing unlawful about it. And when you’re in the U.S. you have the same sort of First Amendment rights as anyone in the country has. If government o cials are permitted to punish her for this fully protected speech that she was engaged in, the rules have significantly changed in America in terms of what sort of speech is protected.”
Leresche agrees with Hiestand and condemns the deportations, especially as an advocate for migrants whom he says don’t fit the “very narrow” definition of what a refugee is. He finds the deportations to be unjust, especially since those being deported are legally in the U.S.
“The deportations go against everything America stands for — the idea that this is a place where people can come and make something of themselves,” Leresche said. “It goes against the reality of how hard immigrants work and how much they want to be a part of society — a part of America.”
The Student Press Law Center, along with 11 free speech and journalism organizations, agrees with Leresche and had condemned Ozturk’s detainment in a letter published March 28 stating that “this is precisely the type of speech that should be welcomed and protected at universities.” On April 3, the SPLC issued an alert to student journalists to rethink how they work with sources and sta ers to protect themselves when covering these topics.
the nation. The Columbia Spectator is independent from the school, allowing less oversight from school authority figures despite the slight tension between them. However, Phillips notes that Spectator op-eds about the protests have received mixed opinions and bold reactions from the student body.
Specifically, Phillips recounts an occupation of Hamilton Hall, a Columbia University building, by protesters. School authorities had shut down campus and prohibited people from entering or leaving, including the press. Afterwards, the Spectator’s editors sent out a letter regarding the event, stating that Columbia had restricted journalistic freedom by, according to Phillips, “seemingly not letting eyes on campus to watch them arrest all the students that were there.”
Hiestand believes that, although school authorities and government o cials are restricting these freedoms, it’s important for
student journalists to remain safe. He explains that journalists as well as student advocates must avoid facing unwarranted backlash for their opinions, and encourages student journalists to opt for anonymous articles or sources. Harb agrees and feels it’s ironic that the same government claiming to support freedom is arresting and suppressing students for voicing their opinions.
“It begs the question, what rights are they actually supporting?” Harb said. “If we don’t have the right to freedom of speech, the right to assemble, the right to protest, then what rights are being protected?”
As a news reporter, Phillips has never felt seriously threatened in his ability to publish his pieces despite the repercussions that others have faced around
PHOTOILLUSTRATION|STELLAPETZOVA
BY SIH YU (MELODY) LIN
SCIENCE OLYMPIAD
Science Olympiad placed first out of 46 teams in the Science Olympiad Santa Clara County Regionals on Saturday, March 8. The team prepared for this competition with study sessions and practice tests one or two times a week and advanced to the Northern California State Tournament on Saturday, April 5, taking first place overall at that event as well. They will progress to the National Science Olympiad Tournament happening at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on Saturday, May 23 and Sunday, May 24.
Science Olympiad competitions consist of team events based on fields ranging from biology and chemistry to physics. Competitors typically participate in pairs in study-based,
building-based or lab events.
Senior and Vice President of External Affairs Maya Pullara, who placed first in the Codebusters event, believes that the competition turned out well due to the practice sessions and provided the team with bonding experience through team rituals and traditions.
“Every single time at the end of an event, before the award ceremonies, we have these stuffed animals we bring,” Pullara said. “We form a prayer circle where we put all of our medals onto the plushies, and then we put it in the center, and we all hold hands, praying to the Science Olympiad gods that we win.”
Pullara also says that the team’s perseverance and teamwork
ultimately helped them win first place, even though Science Olympiad competitions have become more competitive throughout the years.
“Science Olympiad is a very teambased event, so there’s no one moment that makes or breaks it,” Pullara said. “For a lot of other competitions that involve both individual and team events, you can mess something up here and there, but Science Olympiad is a competition that really depends on the team’s collective efforts.”
ROBOTICS
Robotics attended the 2025 FIRST Robotics Competition Pinnacles Regional at Hollister High School from Thursday, Feb. 27 to Sunday, March 2, placing 31st out of 35 teams. The event
A CLCTION UBS IN
MVHS Science Olympiad prays to the “Science Olympiad gods” before the competition results are announced.
is an annual competition between California high school robotics teams, individuals and professionals to solve engineering problems with robots.
Sophomore Anna Zhang believes that the team’s placement in the competition was mainly due to the robot malfunctioning both before and during the competition. A malfunction in the gyro that is in charge of following directional commands caused delays in the robot’s movements and resulted in their inefficiencies during competition planning.
“There were just a bunch of other things that happened every match,” Zhang said. “Like when we’re walking, something just breaks on the way. We also didn’t have an automator — a hardware and software that performs certain preset instructions — before we went, so we just coded the automator over there.”
Despite the unexpected outcome, Zhang believes that the team will definitely learn from their mistakes and improve their performance in their next competition.
“We’ve already added new subsystems to our robot, like changing the ramp and adding a vision to increase its efficiency and accuracy,” Zhang said. “I hope that in these next few competitions, I will become more involved with the team to learn more in general about how these robots are built, and hopefully get the opportunity to learn how to carry out a team such as creating CAD (Computer-Aided Design) models for the robots.”
RESEARCH CLUB
Research Club participated at the Synopsys Science Fair and Technology Championship on Wednesday, March 12 and Thursday, March 13. The Synopsys Championship is an annual fair that features research by students from grades six to 12 in the Santa Clara County. Participants can register for both team and individual events, and many clubs and competitors start preparing for the fair six to eight months in advance — for instance, Research Club started preparing its members for Synopsys around
Photo courtesy of Siddarth Kambhampati | Used with permission
Sophomore Anna Zhang works on the team’s robot during Pinnacles.
MVHS Science Olympiad’s stuffed animals Woodstock and Winnie the Pooh wearing medals the members won during Regionals.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MAYA PULLARA | USED WITH PERMISSION
PHOTO COURTESY OF ANNA ZHANG | USED WITH PERMISSION
PHOTO COURTESY OF ANNA ZHANG | USED WITH PERMISSION
Senior Dylan Canoglu and sophomore Tanya Bandodkar present the MVHS Robotics team’s robot and answer questions from a judge during Pinnacles.
October when they first pitched their ideas. Over the following months, they created prototypes and practiced their presentations in front of other members before the competition. For instance, sophomore Eliana Lee says the competition went better than her team had anticipated and believes that it allowed her to gain a lot of insight into research.
DECA
DECA attended the California State Career Development Conference from Thursday, Feb. 27 to Sunday, March 2 in Anaheim, Calif. Throughout the conference, over half of the members
the most last year was having freshmen qualify for ICDC,” Kambhampati said. “We’re really proud that most of the freshmen qualified for ICDC this year because it comes down to us teaching them at the end. ”
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“I remember just feeling really happy after learning that we had won an award,” Lee said. “After we got the email notifying us, I was just texting everyone, like ‘Oh, we finally got in!’ as I originally was not expecting too much.”
Sophomore Catherine Zhang also says that she felt shocked after hearing the results, and believes that she and her team were able to gain a lot of hands-on and learning experience through this project. She also says that in the future, she hopes that her project can be used to aid research beyond the classroom to a larger audience.
“The competition required a lot of teamwork, which I found really enjoyable,” Zhang said. “It was really fun because we got to see everything in motion. Even though the preparation of the competition was a time crunch in some ways and the judges asked some questions that seemed a little bit out of the box, we still ended up being able to finish the project up nicely.”
qualified for the 2025 International Career Development
Conference
which will be held in late April. The conference is an annual even where
various DECA clubs in California compete, attend workshops and explore networking opportunities. First, students take a test in their career cluster, which can include Marketing, Finance, Business Management and Administration, and Hospitality and Tourism. Following the test, members then participate in a roleplay, where they are given a realworld business scenario or case study and are expected to come up with a solution within 10 minutes.
Junior and DECA Director of
Finance Siddharth Kambhampati participated in the Personal Financial Literacy cluster and qualified for ICDC. He believes that DECA’s success was mainly due to its members’ continuous test preparation, along with the mock role-plays they conducted some weeks before the competition.
“The thing that we were lacking
Apart from scoring well overall, Kambhampati also believes that the competition provided the club members with a fun bonding opportunity. He also hopes that with the continuous efforts of the officer team and the members, DECA will be able to score well at ICDC.
“I was really happy when they announced the results,” Kambhampati said. “If you look at my camera roll, I have videos of every single one of my members who qualified for ICDC. Everyone was screaming their lungs out, it was just really amazing.”
MVHS DECA poses on the last day of SCDC.
Sophomores Catherine Zhang, Subin Lee and Adhya Thota take a selfie in front of their project before Synopsys presentations.
DECA members and officers
Yash Gupta, Saran Suresh and Ian Lin receive their awards during SCDC.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ZAID NAQVI | USED WITH PERMISSION
PHOTO COURTESY OF CATHERINE ZHANG | USED WITH PERMISSION
PHOTOS COURTESY OF SIDDHARTH KHAMBAMPATI | USED WITH PERMISSION
Sophomore Roshan Saxena takes a picture with his Synopsys first place.
FILTERING THE FEED
FUHSD to receive $30,000 in the span of three years for advancing media literacy education
BY ERIC ZHOU
When Lynbrook High School Library Media teacher
Amy Ashworth attended California Library School Association teacher librarian conferences, she started to brainstorm ways in which FUHSD could adopt CLSA’s mission of promoting media literacy.
Networking with fellow teacher librarians at CLSA conferences introduced her to the News Literacy Project. The News Literacy Project was founded in 2008 as a nonpartisan education nonprofit to incorporate media literacy education in United States high schools. Their driving mission is to “ensure all students are skilled in news literacy before they graduate high school.”
77% MVHS students would be open to increasing the incorporation of media literacy in the FUHSD curriculum
“I think media literacy is important because we are in the information age,” Ashworth said. “We have access to so many different places where we are accessing information, and it’s imperative that we have skills to help us to navigate that world ethically and mindfully and safely.”
Ashworth comments that her personal
about the News Literacy Project Grant.
Johnson has also been an advocate for adapting district curricula following the plethora of AI tools at students’ disposal in recent years. FUHSD has ventured to establish AI task forces and committees to address this.
“I just feel this generation is facing a unique challenge as all information is broken into tiny chunks and remixed and reshared so rapidly that it’s difficult to know what
*According to a survey of 110 students
more engaging presentations in teaching media literacy at LHS, working closely with Cupertino High School Library Media teacher Julia Hedstrom.
As a teacher librarian at LHS, Ashworth spends time teaching students to identify credible web sources for research and other media literacy content. A group of FUHSD educators, Ashworth included, applied for a grant at the News Literacy Project in June of 2024. Upon receiving the threeyear $30,000 grant, FUHSD was accepted into the News Literacy Project’s Fellowship Program, to support the development of media literacy education.
This is on par with what Ashworth hopes to accomplish, starting small with district-wide surveys and data collection. Ashworth hopes that these surveys will shine light on which departments have already implemented media literacy curriculum and how to best support their practices.
Upon receiving an email a while back inviting FUHSD to apply for the News Literacy Project grant, Hedstrom and Ashworth volunteered themselves to this endeavor.
Hedstrom believes people of all ages are vulnerable to misinformation, hence involving herself in the News Literacy Project.
As teacher librarians, Hedstrom and Ashworth collaborate with classroom teachers to provide students with reliable and credible sources, such as FUHSD student research resources. FUHSD Chief Technology Officer Menko Johnson said in an email that he is the administrator supporting the News Literacy Project team. Johnson is a close colleague with the FUHSD Library Technology Teacher team, of which Ashworth and Hedstrom are members — both of whom later approached Johnson
OUT
MVHS students and staff discuss the implications of the Trump administration’s word restrictions in the federal government
BY CORINNA KUO AND ERIN LIU
“I
regretfully have to let you know my pronouns are on this list.”
As English teacher Mark Carpenter, who uses they/them pronouns, glances through a list of words compiled by The New York Times the Trump administration is discouraging in the federal government, they are shocked by the absurdity of it.
The move is largely part of President Donald Trump’s initiatives to rid the government of “wokeism” and diversity, equity and inclusion policies. While there have been no official bans imposed on words, the Trump administration has used a combination of government memos, agency guidance and other documents to order their removal from federal documents, websites, school curricula and even email sign offs. These restrictions flag grant proposals and contracts which contradict with Trump’s executive orders, allowing them to be rewritten, edited and deleted from public view. Additionally, the administration has allowed federal agencies to follow the executive orders as they see fit,
as long as they comply with the “two sexes” and DEI program elimination policies from Executive Orders 14168 and 14151, respectively.
Carpenter describes Trump’s action as “textbook Orwellian,” drawing parallels between it and the concept of newspeak in George Orwell’s “1984,” a book taught in the World Studies curriculum. The book’s dystopian government uses newspeak, a fictional language created through the elimination, substitution and alteration of certain words to suppress and control society.
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between the book’s main character’s job of rewriting old newspapers to align with the government’s new ideals, and the task that befell many Pentagon workers on Feb. 26 to go through Pentagon documents and remove any DEI-related content. As a result of this mass purge, over 26,000 posts and images have been deleted from public view, many of which featured the accomplishments of women or minorities. One of these such images, which Carpenter highlights, was of the Enola Gay aircraft, mistakenly flagged for being DEI-related due to the word “gay” in its name.
“Orwell’s idea is replicated in our understanding of psychology, in that the words you use to describe something define the way you think about it,” Carpenter said. “So if you limit the number of words, if you limit the range of words that are used to describe things, you limit the range of thought of the people using that language.”
Carpenter also points out similarities
“That was a high profile example of something that was erased,” Carpenter said. “I wonder what are the low profile things that people won’t notice that they’re erased until they look for it, or that nobody’s going to look for again and are just gone from archives.”
Carpenter takes some comfort in the belief that it would be impossible to completely erase the information,
since it existed online with a digital footprint. However, History teacher Hilary Barron remains concerned that the inaccessibility of such data online will result in society losing awareness of it.
“We might lose some of the highlights of history that people should know about and should be made aware of,” Barron said. “It is concerning that we’re siding on the side of censorship and taking away information, versus just giving that information and trusting people to think critically about the information that they’re seeing.”
“ IT’S NOT FAIR TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO CENSOR THESE WORDS AND MAKE IT MORE COMPLICATED FOR THE SAKE OF AVOIDING POLITICALLY SENSITIVE TOPICS.
As these restrictions are limited to the federal government and do not directly impact state governments, which control schools, Carpenter believes they will not be imposed on education anytime soon. On the other hand, Barron argues that there have already been many instances of educational censorship across the country, with students in different states often learning different versions of the same historical events.
Recently, Barron has been speaking to her students about the fundamental argument of order versus freedom — whether governments should prioritize peoples’ freedom of choice or stability and uniformity — in her government classes. Noting how different political parties often support different sides of social issues like gender expression, Barron believes much of the sensitivity around the restricted words stems from the government’s fear or feeling threatened by differing viewpoints.
SENIOR KAVEEN GOSWAMI
However, senior and Politics Club copresident Kaveen Goswami believes that it is not the job of the government to censor or restrict ideas, and it should instead be up to individuals to decide what they want to see. Goswami recalls his efforts with Politics Club’s co-officers to educate students on political issues through unbiased, factual presentations, helping students become more aware of governmental actions and form their own opinions.
“As an administration representing the American people, you have to allow for concepts that are politically sensitive — that’s part of the job,” Goswami said. “Especially if you’re making policies about a lot of these things that are being banned, it’s not fair to the American people to censor these words and make it more complicated for the sake of avoiding politically sensitive topics.”
Barron adds that the slew of executive orders, censorship and removal of governmental programs especially add a sense of fear and instability for federal workers across the country. She recalls a conversation she had at a recent history educators’ conference with a presenter who worked at one of the presidential libraries and who wasn’t sure if they would even have a job the following week.
“There’s all of this fuzziness and uncertainty, and I think that spreads fear,” Barron said. “What happens to me if I make a mistake? People are scared for their jobs. In one sense, I think it is going to be really discouraging, but it all depends on how people respond to it and how much it gets followed through on. Hopefully, people will continue to fight for equality and inclusiveness.”
WHAT’S ON THE LIST?
• accessible
•
• advocacy
• belong
• bias
• BIPOC
• equality
• equity
• ethnicity • feminism • gender
gender
inequalities
injustice • LGBTQ
marginalize
minority
racism
sexuality
socioeconomic
stereotype
systemic
crisis •
• climate crisis
• community
• disability
historically • identity
• ideology
nonbinary • oppression
prejudice
underprivileged
underrepresented
• discrimination
• diversity
discrimination • diversity
*According to a list compiled by PEN America
immigrants
privilege
victim • vulnerable
inclusion
inclusion
pronoun
woman
TAKE OUR MARCH NEWS QUIZ
Test your knowledge of key events last month
BY APRAMEYA RUPANAGUNTA
2 Security
Which app did the U.S. Defense Secretary use to accidentally text war plans to the Editor-inChief of The Atlantic on March 24?
4
1 MVHS
Which sports team got recognized in the MV Annual Board Meeting Celebration on March 12 for its achievements?
3 International
In which region did a ceasefire end on March 18?
Answers:
Who won Best Actress at the 97th Academy Awards on March 2?
5 Disaster
Which country was hit with a 7.7 magnitude earthquake on March 28?
7 Cupertino
What event was held for Cupertino dogs at the Blackberry farm pools on March 29?
6 California
Which county near the eastern California wildfires was given an evacuation order on March 31?
8 Sports
Which San Francisco 49ers player was traded to the Washington Commanders on March 12?
9 Trump
Which country did President Trump say the U.S. “will get” in an interview on March 29?
10 Music
Which musical artist announced her eighth concert tour following the release of her album, “Mayhem”?
Senior Kayla Kampp winds up for a pitch during a softball game against Lynbrook High School on Wednesday, March 26.
PHOTO | ELLIE WANG
HAIRCUT HUSTLES
Student barbers talk about their experiences cutting hair
BY ETHAN EISLER AND ARCHANA VENKATESAN
Small tufts of hair drift to the ground from a pair of sharp silver scissors working around a client’s head of hair. Senior and student barber Vibhav Pata circles his client and changes tools to a razor to skillfully blend the client’s fade. Once he is done, Pata lifts a mirror for his customer to see, watching him inspect his new haircut. The satisfied smile on the client’s face marks another successful haircut in Pata’s business. With some encouragement from his friend Advait Ramakrishnan and
hair as a freshman by experimenting on himself, studying his barber’s haircutting techniques and learning from his friend, who is also a student barber.
“I became friends with them for that reason,” Pata said. “He’s part of the reason I got encouraged to cut hair. My older brother was also encouraging me to do whatever I wanted in high school, so he
least I could give people the haircut they wanted, like the ones that are in style, and spend more time giving them a quality haircut.”
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As Ramachandran continued to improve through practicing on his friends, he began posting short videos of his hair cuts to his Instagram account @ cloudscuts. Over time, his Instagram account accrued 109 followers.
Ramachandran cuts senior Alan Tai’s hair.
decent at fading.”
Like Ramachandran, Pata continued to improve over time as he practiced, and he realized that his skill was improving, and his services were in demand, so he decided to start a business by creating an Instagram account @pata_blendz, which now has 133 followers. Both Pata and Ramachandran initially cut their friends’ hair for free but began charging $25 and $15, respectively, as their skills improved. Even though Ramachandran and Pata say they are commercially successful, they agree that it comes with challenges.
“Being a barber is inconvenient,” Pata said. “I need to clean all my tools and charge them. Then I need to drive to a nearby park. I don’t have a rotating chair for people to sit on. I can’t lower or raise the heights. I don’t have good lighting. There’s a lot of factors that you need to be a barber.”
Both barbers say that they are unlikely to pursue cutting hair professionally in the future. Currently, Pata works as a referee for kids’ basketball in kindergarten through eighth grade and says that he is not likely to return to working as a barber because of its inconvenience.
@pata_blendz
$25 / haircut
However, Ramachandran says he may continue cutting hair in college.
“I’ve heard a lot of stories about people cutting hair in college and how it’s also necessary for college students who don’t want to pay that much to go to a big salon or don’t have the time to go somewhere,” Ramachandran said. “I want to help the community, and it’s fun for me to cut my friends’ hair. I don’t do it much for the money — I do it to see the smiles on their faces because they like the haircut they got.”
@cloudscuts
$15 / haircut
U.S. veteran Philip Arroyo discusses his transition back into civilian life
BY LIZ LIU
first thing U.S. veteran Philip
to even speak about deployment. His uncle, who served in World War II, never spoke about his time in the military until Sardinas grew up and joined the military himself. These are all symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which, according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, 15% of deployed veterans struggle with.
“The government trains our soldiers how to fix their guns, clean their guns, how to shoot their guns — but they didn’t give my son any training on how to come back to a civilized world,” Satele said. “Mothers who were taking the kids back, unless they were familiar with medical stuff, how would they know how to help their kids? They left us to figure that out ourselves.”
disability ratings were denied. After receiving his full disability rating, Arroyo now spends time helping other veterans navigate the VA.
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THEY DIDN’T GIVE MY SON ANY TRAINING ON HOW TO
COME BACK TO A CIVILIZED WORLD.
ARROYO’S MOTHER DIANA SATELE
“When I help my friends, I don’t ask for a dime,” Arroyo said. “It’s that old mentality that as a veteran, you have to take care of your buddy. Because my buddies passed away, they’re not going to get their benefits. The way I see it, the government just got off scot free for not paying dues on those individuals. I’m trying to get them through the system so they can get what they’re owed and we’re not feeling mistreated.”
they return from war, often unable
Eleven years after Arroyo left the military, he applied for veterans’ benefits. Arroyo applied four times, with each application taking several months, before finally receiving a 100% disability rating from the VA for his PTSD in 2019. A disability rating determines both the severity of a veteran’s condition and the compensation they receive.
According to Arroyo, being denied a disability rating was a “horrible process,” as veterans felt like the trauma they endure is being invalidated. Three of his friends died by suicide after their
Sardinas says this mindset of helping fellow veterans is something characteristic of the military — a bond forged through shared experiences and the understanding that no one else can fully grasp what they’ve endured. He joined the American Legion, an organization comprised of veterans or active military dedicated to supporting veterans and community.
“You may be Black, you may be Asian, you may be from wherever,” Sardinas said. “The military reflects what this country is. We’re one of many and we work together as a team. You may be a Democrat, I may be Republican, but at the end of the day, we’re Americans. We all want our country to succeed.”
FEATURES | APRIL 2025 17
TAKE A BO OK LEAVE A BO OK
Tiny libraries
help foster connections and improve reading skills
BY SANIA NADKARNI AND ZAID NAQVI
Wiping the grime off his face, parent Bala Ramachandran grips his spade before attacking the dirt. The sweat drips off his muddy fingers, but Bala remains focused. After digging the 2-foot hole, Bala inserts the plywood base of the little library and pours in wet concrete to stabilize the newly constructed post. Using leftover supplies from home, Bala then built a wooden box. Bala’s family, including junior Anika Ramachandran and her younger siblings, used purple paint to decorate the box which Bala attached to the post. Filled with a plethora of diverse books for all ages, the Ramachandran’s little library sits outside their house attracting the attention of their neighbors.
Anika first discovered tiny libraries during quarantine on one of her many family walks, one of the few occasions they could leave their house. After noticing and indulging in tiny libraries throughout their neighborhood, Anika
throughout the community and her younger brother were inspired to create one of their own.
“We brought the idea up to our parents about having one of our own because we have a lot of books that none of us read anymore,” Anika said. “We wanted to give back to the community in that way.”
After researching their options, her family finally decided not to buy an official little free library kit. Instead, they chose to build and decorate their own little library as a way to save money and bond as a family. Bala dug a hole for the little library and constructed it out of leftover plywood. After painting the box, Anika and her younger siblings wrote small messages to appeal to visitors.
“The digging and the prep work for the little library are the most difficult parts because you have to figure out the right location and you have to dig really deep, around two feet, to make sure that the post is stabilized,” Bala said. “Otherwise, there’s always
a danger that posts can break or get uprooted, and we didn’t want to have that happen.”
Although building the library was laborious, its impact on the community and their family life shows them it served a purpose. For Bala, the library serves as a conversation starter with his neighbors and helps him to build relationships with people outside his regular circle, strengthening the bond within his community.
“It has provided us connection points within the community because it has allowed us to connect with people of different ideologies and different geographical locations,” Bala said. “Usually, we would just connect with our neighbors and maybe some of my relatives who are close by. Now I know at least a couple of people who I wouldn’t ever have conversed with, so it anchors to a point of community connection.”
Often peeking out her bedroom window, Anika recalls moments
when her neighbors were using and interacting with the library. These moments remind her of the library’s purpose — to give back to the community and reduce waste.
“There’s so much potential in recycling old books,” Anika said. “You don’t always have to go out and buy something. We were up in Santa Cruz last summer, and we were just driving through the neighborhood when we found a little library. We always stop to visit one when we see one.
I found ‘The Scarlet Letter’ there, which I’ve wanted to read for a while. You can find the most unexpected things in many libraries.”
“ THE LIBRARY HAS BOOKS FOR EVERYBODY AND IT’S ALLOWING PEOPLE TO SPREAD THE JOY OF READING.
“If somebody is getting some value out of reading, then it’s all the better,” Bala said. “It’s now giving back to the community. It has books for everybody, and it’s allowing people to spread the joy of reading.”
MVHS PARENT BALA RAMACHANDRAN
While sophomore Kaiyu Zhang agrees that the books she finds found in tiny libraries can be unexpected, she adds how they can also open a whole new range of books and genres for a reader. Zhang often visits tiny libraries in her neighborhood, looking for new books to add to her collection. The excitement of discovering new books drives her to keep exploring.
“There’s always new books every time I go, and it’s really interesting to see what people put in there,” Zhang said. “That helps me discover new books and genres. Many of those books are old books or historical, so I’ve discovered that whole genre of books through those libraries.”
Bala has similarly attempted to include different genres of books within his family’s little library. From fantasy stories such as “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” to historical texts like Adolf Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf,” Bala says these books help incite vital dialogue between people of different ideologies, enhancing the importance of educating oneself through books.
Zhang’s own passion for reading has grown by reading the books she borrows from little libraries. According to Zhang, exposure to a variety of genres through little libraries allows her to pick more nuanced texts that create a deeper understanding of the books she reads. Moreover, she encourages her peers to explore the benefits of tiny libraries to improve their own reading journeys.
“The books I take from little libraries are 200 times more complicated and deeper than what I normally would pick out,” Zhang said. “That’s helped me grow as a reader. Next time when you go on a walk, remember there are good books for you inside the little libraries.”
SOCIAL PHOBIA
Iwant everyone in this class and beyo “I want everyone in this class and beyond to see the version of you that I see.”
Senior Hailey Chen recalls Interdisciplinary Research and Project Design adviser Kavita Gupta’s words lingering in the air as she collected herself after enduring a public speaking failure. Just before Chen had given her conference presentation to IRPD, the same feeling of dread she had always felt before speaking in front of her peers washed over her. The overwhelming nervousness became apparent as she slurred her speech and began mumbling and rushing in incoherency. Chen had faced similar
public speaking failures as a result of her social anxiety, but in this particular failure, Gupta’s encouragement to not let anxiety overshadow her authenticity motivated her to overcome it.
Before joining IRPD in her senior year, Chen says she rarely experienced social anxiety. Social anxiety is a disorder characterized by a fear of being judged in social situations and affects around 9.1% of adolescents, indicating an increasing prevalence among younger generations, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. While Chen says the emphasis on speaking in IRPD prompted her to begin experiencing social anxiety, its structure also
allowed her to overcome it.
“By nature, I’m very introverted, and I don’t always like to show my work with others until the product is completed,” Chen said. “IRPD was the first course that encouraged public failure. In IRPD, you’re expected to publicly fail and share your journey with everyone, whereas in other classes, if you screw up an exam, you don’t need to tell anyone. That’s the beauty of IRPD, but at the same time, I hadn’t been exposed to failure before.”
De Anza College professor of psychology Robin Schulte says social anxiety can be caused by genetic and environmental factors, or a combination of both. Schulte believes
that the COVID-19 pandemic was one environmental factor that increased social anxiety for many people.
“COVID-19 is where we have gotten this message to not connect because we didn’t want to get sick,” Schulte said. “Then we got the message of, ‘Okay, now we can interact, and now we can connect. Now we don’t have to stand six feet, now we can talk to people without masks.’ And I think a lot of individuals are still scared. They’ve already gotten used to not connecting with others, and so social anxiety has definitely increased.”
of
said. “When you’re pressured to do well, people feel overwhelmed. They are sometimes impaired and can’t function properly. I was lucky it never came to that for me, but I have seen it
MVHS students have experienced social anxiety
*According to a survey of 113 people
According to Schulte, one treatment for social anxiety is exposure therapy, where individuals place themselves in more unfamiliar social situations so that they gradually become less anxiety-inducing. Chen recognizes that gaining exposure to public speaking through IRPD as a crucial part of working towards overcoming her social anxiety.
Senior Shulang Zhang echoes Chen and Schulte’s sentiments, especially after helping a close friend overcome social anxiety. Zhang, who considers herself an extrovert, feels like she made her friend more willing to talk to strangers. She attributes this to them hanging out with each other for a while, so her mindset rubbed off on her friend.
Chen believes that pressure from the community can lead to social anxiety. According to Chen, social anxiety has become more pernicious among her peers because of the competitive culture surrounding career and academics in Silicon Valley.
“I’d say that conversations about mental health overall do need to be expanded more, especially in environments like MVHS or any pressure cooker environment,” Chen
Schulte aims to create an environment adaptable to students who may have social anxiety in her Psychology classes. After noticing that certain students were more reluctant to speak in inperson classes but were more comfortable in virtual sessions, she encouraged students affected by social anxiety to compromise. For example, instead of in-class final speeches, Schulte sometimes offers a written paper alternative. However, to expose her students to more social situations, she still tries to encourage student participation.
“I’m one of these professors that gets to know my students, and I get to learn their names and I call on them in class,” Schulte said. “I have found that students have actually come to me and have shared with me, ‘I wasn’t expecting that, however, thank you.’ In fact, I have found that that really draws them out, and they feel noticed, and they see that, ‘OK, look at that. I answered a question. I was OK, and this professor cares about me.’ And that helps, believe it or not.”
to Shulte, because people are increasingly drawn to their devices rather than in-person interactions, they lose opportunities for social exposure and important aspects of exchanges, such as body language.
“We have to learn that balance of time that we’re using our phones and being disconnected versus just being with people and learning to connect again in person,” Schulte said. “Devices, social media, are starting to help people to be more socially anxious because they’re losing connection with others. You just want to have balance and to not have that be your only way to connect with individuals.”
The ability to connect with individuals is what motivated Zhang to step out of her comfort zone while experiencing social anxiety. Zhang thinks that those with social anxiety can be helped by changing their mindsets about social interaction. For example, she says her anxiety often stemmed from a hyperfixation on others’ perceptions of her in the moment — thus, she shifted her focus instead on the opportunities around her to make connections to increase her quality of life.
of MVHS students 83%
Shulte also says a factor of increasing social anxiety is the heavy presence of social media. According
“If you don’t open up and talk to other people, you would miss a lot of opportunities to meet new people, and society is based on connections,” Zhang said. “At the end of the day, no one really cares what you do and they all have their own things to do in their life. Nothing really matters, only your happiness.”
PHOTO | KATRINA LIN
THROUGH THE JOURNALISTIC LENS
The evolving role of journalism in our increasingly digitalized world brings forth changes — both beneficial and harmful
BY
KATHRYN FOO, SANA KARKHANIS, YIXUAN (JOYCE) LI, MEGHA MUMMANENI, APRAMEYA RUPANAGUNTA, AMBERLY SUN AND ELIZABETH YANG
THE ELITE GRIP ON JOURNALISM
Elitism manipulates journalism and distorts coverage
BY YIXUAN (JOYCE) LI AND AMBERLY SUN
The Category 3 storm Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005 and would later be ranked as the costliest natural disaster in United States history. The storm displaced an estimated 1.5 million people, and many were left to scavenge for resources within the flooded city. Despite fighting for survival, Black individuals were labelled “thieves,” “immoral,” “needy” and “looters” by media depictions
while their white counterparts were simply “finding food.”
This disparity isn’t surprising when considering who writes the news: journalism is increasingly dominated by predominantly white, educated, socioeconomically advantaged people whose coverage reflects their privileged perspectives on the world and inherently shares the subconscious biases they often hold. Journalism is often an exclusive
club for individuals from similar elite educational backgrounds, making breaking into journalism an uphill battle for those without privileged financial conditions. Elite educational institutions have a firm grip on the industry — within major news organizations like the Wall Street Journal, 50% of editors and writers attended an elite college, defined as a school with a median SAT score of 1400 or above. Both SAT scores and admissions into elite colleges correlate heavily with wealth — among students with the same test scores, children from wealthier families are 2.2 times more likely to be admitted. A mixture of legacy admissions, better resources from expensive private schools and a higher likelihood of becoming a recruited athlete means the wealthy have a leg up in admissions.
In addition to staff members, 65% of interns at major newspapers have attended selective schools. This barrier prevents entry for those unable to afford a tuition of over $80,000 per year. Even if less affluent students can attend prestigious schools, the burden of student loans coupled with the industry’s low salaries means journalism often seems like an infeasible career.
For those who do enter the field, financial struggles persist. Journalism is not a high-paying industry, with a median pay of $57,500 per year, and many young reporters from less privileged backgrounds face insurmountable student debt. As of 2024, the median student loan debt is $53,213 for a master’s degree in journalism. The expectation that aspiring journalists should take on unpaid or low-paid internships further narrows the field to those who can afford to work for little or no pay.
Journalism’s elitist slant is exacerbated by corporate control of major news outlets. Six corporations — Comcast, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, Fox Corporation and Sony — own 90 percent of mainstream news, an overwhelming majority. Meanwhile, billionaires like Jeff Bezos of The
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION | AMBERLY SUN
Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal and John Henry of The Boston Globe hold these media outlets at their mercy, and on occasion, use their influence to protect their financial interests rather than serve the public good.
Corporate ownership directly impacts news coverage. Bezos reportedly pressured The Washington Post’s editorial board to uphold a free-market stance. As Bezos said, “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
inequality are often covered through a singular, privileged lens, speaking to the perspective of policymakers and business executives rather than the people directly affected. The result?
“ EVEN STUDENT JOURNALISM IS NOT IMMUNE TO PRIVILEGE.
This resulted in the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley. This type of editorial influence ensures that economic policies and corporate accountability are framed in ways that align with elite interests rather than challenging systemic issues or even just maintaining objectivity.
In addition to editorial control at the national level, the trend of media consolidation has proved detrimental to the survival of local news, furthering the media’s disconnect from the public. Between 2008 and 2020, the U.S. lost over 2,000 local newspapers, leaving many communities without reliable sources of information.
Large conglomerates buy struggling outlets only to strip them of resources, prioritize profitability over investigative journalism and downsize local reporting staff. This loss has been so severe that some have referred to it as an “extinction-level” event for local journalism, particularly in rural and economically struggling communities where news deserts are most prevalent.
As journalism becomes more concentrated in an elitist perspective, its coverage suffers from a homogeneity problem, skewing toward the interests and concerns of the privileged. Issues such as labor rights, healthcare and wealth
A media landscape dominated by individuals from affluent backgrounds who are less likely to grasp the struggles of the working class. As Heather Bryant, a journalist and founder of Project Facet, a collaboration infrastructure that connects news and information partners, describes, “most news coverage isn’t created with people experiencing poverty in mind.” Mainstream media tends to downplay economic hardships and is more likely to be less empathetic towards marginalized groups.
The news is often made for and by the rich — around half of those who make over $150,000 a year pay to read the news. These affluent, urban audiences who have the time and money to read their content are not as interested in local news. As a result, news outlets do not report the issues that directly impact smaller communities such as school board decisions, housing crises and environmental concerns.
Beyond the journalists themselves, the decline in physical newspapers by 75% from the 2000s has marked the turn to digital journalism and a new monetization system: subscriptions regulated by paywalls. Paywalls have made quality journalism inaccessible to lower-income audiences. As major newspapers charge anywhere from $2 to $47 per month for access, many individuals are effectively excluded from staying informed. Digital subscription models, while financially beneficial for publications, have also
placed critical news behind a price barrier. Research shows that paywalls disproportionately limit access for younger, lower-income and nonwhite audiences, as families with minority backgrounds are more likely to live under the federal poverty limit than their white counterparts.
Local and student journalism mitigates this accessibility crisis. Unlike corporate-run publications and legacy media that sequester news behind costly subscriptions, studentrun outlets are typically free or lowcost. With many student publications sustained through donations and community business ads rather than subscription revenue, they prompt civic engagement by making knowledge freely accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford it. This helps close the information gap, particularly extenuating the lack of access for younger audiences.
53% make
pay to read the news of people who
over $150,000 a year
*According to Nieman Lab
However, even student journalism is not immune to privilege. Many high school and college newspapers exist in relatively wealthy areas with students who have access to highquality education and resources. While student journalists may not entirely escape the elitism of mainstream media, this reality presents an opportunity: we can use our platform to actively seek out and amplify underrepresented voices and report on issues beyond our immediate bubble. This challenges the myopic perspectives dominating legacy media, offering a structural corrective to their elitism. Unlike corporate outlets, we do not have the limitations of profit-driven goals dictating our coverage.
Ultimately, journalism should serve the public interest rather than act as a mouthpiece for those in power. By investing in local and student journalism — whether through readership or financial support — we can bridge the gap between the media and the people it is meant to serve.
MORE THAN NEWSPAPERS
THAN
Each alternative news sources has its own
BY KATHRYN FOO AND ELIZABETH YANG
and
PODCASTS VIDEOS & BLOGS CABLE TV PROS
During the 2024 presidential election, President Donald Trump racked up 58 million views on the “Joe Rogan Experience” YouTube channel, while former Vice President Kamala Harris went on the viral podcast “Call Her Daddy” to connect more with their younger audiences by simply being more accessible in media. This conversational format is becoming more popular.
Broadcast journalism has been one of the most popular sources of information for Americans since the rise of cable television. Different news stations become breeding grounds for echo chambers because of the 24-hour news cycle, where news stations are expected to have content to publish at any point.
YouTube videos and online blogs have become a blossoming source of information, offering in-depth coverage of traditional media in a unique visual manner. Authors on Substack and creators on YouTube have curated niche communities with similar interests, whether it be Mina Le’s coverage on pop culture or 3Blue1Brown’s on math, making them second homes for many.
Complex issues are digestible because they are in a conversational style
Longer-form discussions can have deeper analysis compared to shorter news briefs
Listeners can consume news passively (driving, exercising, etc.)
Constant updates ensure people stay informed on real-time events
News is always evolving — opportunity for follow-ups and corrections
Engaging — headlines are designed to capture attention
Offers in-depth coverage on niche topics often overlooked by mainstream media
More flexible format allows for complex explanations beyond news headlines
Can be a great visual educational tool when properly researched
More commonly used to convey opinions rather than news
May have a clear slant, reinforcing echo chambers
Tend to be made for the sake of entertainment rather than
Pressure to publish first leads to highly biased reporting
No standardized editorial process — quality varies widely
Some educational content is biased or lacks proper citations
“info-tainment” content blurs the line between education and
“Blog authors are usually teachers and educators who have a lot of experience writing them, but that’s not always the case. So we have to be careful because there aren’t necessarily strict quality requirements.”
EX-BLOGGER
JEFF LEE
NEWSPAPERS
SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media has revolutionized the way people access news, acting as real-time journalism that its users can see so that they can stay updated on current events. It’s a place where influencers, news reporters and ordinary citizens can gather, causing media to spread at an astounding rate. Yet, with a lack of editorial standards, not everything you see is what you get.
The fastest way to receive breaking news and updates
Very interactive — users can engage, comment and discuss news in real time
Decentralized — gives independent journalists and citizen reporters a platform and an audience
Misinformation spreads very quickly and often outpaces corrections
Algorithms prioritize engagement over accuracy
Many news influencers have little to no journalistic training but still wield massive influence
56% of MVHS students use social media as their primary source of news
TRAPPED IN TRANSLATION
The inaccessibility of mainstream news outlets to non-English speakers leads to misinformation within minority communities
AND APRAMEYA RUPANAGUNTA
desinformación
Chinese teacher Zoey Liu usually keeps in touch with her friends and family, regardless of where they live, through WeChat — a popular messaging app commonly used in East and Southeast Asia. While most of her conversations over Wechat do not usually concern politics, Liu’s friend recently messaged her an article with a concerning headline — “Elon Musk will become the next president of the U.S.” As an experienced user of WeChat, Liu was able to recognize the message as just another case of false news circulating on the platform. she acknowledges that specially those whose first language isn’t English, could easily fall for such cases of clickbait.
In immigrant communities across the U.S., where almost 66 million people speak languages other than English at home, platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook are commonly used for news consumption and both of which are notorious for fake news. By using online messaging and social media platforms as a source of news, the users were unwittingly surrounded by a relentless amount of misinformation. During the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook became a center of fake news regarding the virus with many of the posts markedly racist and contributing to the rise of anti-Asian discrimination. Although Facebook began implementing a fact-checking system, a study by Avaaz found that 51% of non-English misinformed content still did not have a warning label compared to 29% of English
While encountering misinformation is an experience that many Englishspeaking Americans face, this issue presents a greater challenge for nonEnglish speakers in the U.S. who aren’t le to differentiate between real and fake news due to the language barrier. Often, there is a lack of reliable information on healthcare, voting and other topics of high importance for non-English speakers due to the lack of content in other languages. As a result, the landscape of information
for non-English speakers is barren, drawing them to sources like WeChat or Whatsapp, where the cycle of misinformation first begins.
In addition to messaging apps, many news outlets make an attempt to translate news for non-English speakers on popular social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook, where misinformation is further exacerbated due to the lack of fact-checking done. Liu notes that translated news also tends to be unappealing for their target audience, further worsening the issue.
“When mainstream news translates the news in very formal Chinese, I don’t know how attractive that is for the Chinese audience,” Liu said. “Compared to someone publishing something eye-catching on WeChat like ‘Elon Musk is going to become the next president,’ which is in very simple terms, mainstream media outlets don’t
stand as an option for Chinese users. ”
Since there is a lack of a personal connection in traditional media, nonEnglish speakers are more likely to rely on the information passed through messaging chains with family members or word-of-mouth from friends, especially in communities where word-of-mouth is prominent and valued.
It’s important that we demand more from mainstream media outlets by voicing our concerns and opinions. Whether U.S. based or not, any media outlet that declares themselves a source of information for global news has the responsibility of providing information to people of all demographics. In order to do this, news outlets should increase their usage of journalists that are based in other countries and are able to produce news in their respective languages, ensuring a holistic coverage of global news.
is also a role students can play in fixing the issue within their own community. For MVHS students, living in an ethnically and culturally diverse community, this is a problem that their close relatives or even themselves have likely experienced. However, the relevancy of this issue doesn’t just end with how it affects our community — it’s up to MVHS students to reduce the amount of misinformation in the future.
CAN YOU FIND OR LINK THE AUTHOR’S CREDENTIALS? 1 3 IS THERE EVIDENCE THAT IT HAS BEEN REVIEWED? 52% of MVHS student’s non-English speaking relatives get their news Facebook or Instagram or other social media
*According to a survey of 79 people SCAN
While the issue can be solved by broader worldwide solutions, there
It is our responsibility as the technologically adept generation to ensure that sources are reliable and our community doesn’t fall prey to misinformation. It is vital that we keep our non-English speaking family and friends educated about the reality of the information that is spread by taking proactive actions such as initiating conversations about verifying our information, finding reliable sources and going beyond group chats for news. If we don’t take these steps, we end up inadvertently feeding into the cycle of misinformation.
COMPLICATEDLY RELATED
How I learned to navigate my distant relationship with my brother
BY JILLIAN JU
Ican’t count the number of times I’ve heard “But you seem like an only child!” after I mention that I have a brother.
His name is Justin, he’s eight years older than me and he plays video games in his room. “Wow,” the other person — usually a classmate who had tried and failed to guess how many siblings I had — would say. “That’s a big age gap.” Typically, I just redirect the conversation toward their siblings after that.
For a long time, those three facts were all I knew about him. (I didn’t even know which video game it was.) Repeating them gave me the false sense that I understood him the way I knew siblings were supposed to.
From a young age, I intuited that we didn’t have a normal sibling relationship or much of a relationship at all. We never hung out willingly and never talked more than a few syllables at a time. For most people, my mom included, our age gap explained our distance well enough. But as I watched my friends’ siblings pick them up from school, joking and holding their hands, I sensed that I was missing something.
My mom finally spelled it out for me the summer before my freshman year. We were having dinner at a mall in Taiwan, and I intentionally commented on how my cousins felt more like siblings than my actual sibling did.
She told me that my brother and I were half-siblings, with different mothers. I wasn’t shocked — I had guessed as much by that point — but it felt different to hear someone say it aloud. My brother and I are half siblings.
There was a lot to process in
AS I WATCHED MY FRIENDS' SIBLINGS PICK THEM UP FROM SCHOOL, I SENSED THAT I WAS MISSING SOMETHING.
I was perceptive enough to notice other signs — most glaringly, that he never called my mom “Mom” — but it felt wrong to piece them together. When I asked my parents casual questions about my brother, they always seemed uneasy. Eventually, I learned to stop asking. By prioritizing my parents’ comfort over open conversation, I inherited their unspoken shame, but I never stopped thinking about it in the back of my mind.
rejecting the idea of needing my parents’ approval to do it? Knowing the truth — that it was as simple I had guessed — made me feel complicit.
To be honest, it’s not a feeling I can confidently say I’ve conquered. My own realizations are one thing, but my overall family dynamic hasn’t shifted much, and there’s only so much that pondering can do in terms of moving the needle. Still, sorting through what I can and can’t control has helped me approach my relationship to my family in a clearer way.
I know my brother has his own struggles — I know
meantime, I still have to explain to people that I have a brother, although I haven’t started qualifying that with “half.” It’s just what having a brother means to me.
AS AN EX-TENNIS PLAYER
I’m learning to accept the loss of my childhood passion
BY
JONAH
CHANG
For nearly my entire life, I was a “tennis player” at heart. That was one of the things I was most sure of about myself. However, a few months ago, I quit. And after doing so, I felt relieved, glad to be free from the burden tennis had become. As an extennis player, I often wonder how I fell out of love with the sport that, for the longest time, defined who I was.
Rough estimates say I started playing tennis at age five, though I didn’t technically “play” tennis until much later in my life — I only took lessons. I wasn’t great compared to the older kids I practiced with. But I didn’t mind. I imagined my racket to be a sword, with which I bravely fought on the tennis court battlefield. Here, my passion was born.
I continued “playing” tennis until one week in middle school changed everything.
I tried out for the tennis team in eighth grade. The week of the trial, I couldn’t take my mind off tennis. When the day finally came, I fought hard. In the end, I felt proud of my performance and confident I had it in the bag.
failures. However, my self-confidence was at an all-time low, and my performance reflected that. Days before the results were posted, I knew my tennis journey was over.
And with that came my reality check, the first of many failures to come. My mom broke the news to me that I did not make the team. Reflecting, I realize that moment was the beginning of the end. I decided there was only one way for my tennis journey to continue — one way for my passion to have purpose. My nine years of tennis will not amount to nothing, I told myself. From then on, tennis was no longer a game; my racket was no longer a sword. I needed to win, and to win, I needed to get serious.
I enrolled in a tennis camp, looking for more opportunities to compete with others. Fueled by the desire to right my wrongs, I practiced nonstop, leading to my first tournament match. On my day of judgment, when I could have put the past behind me and set my tennis career in motion, I lost 6-1, 6-0 to a girl half my height. After that, my racket felt like a toy. All I could do was pick myself up and keep trying.
I suffered blow after blow, not only in crushing tournaments but also in frustrating practices. Despite being the oldest at the camp, I was never the best. My performance was always inconsistent. With each loss, the 5-year-old version of me who loved tennis solely because it was fun grew more and more distant.
Then came my chance for the ultimate redemption. I tried out for MVHS’s tennis team in ninth grade, again hoping to absolve my past
DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF
But by some miracle, enough people dropped the team after tryouts for me to secure the final spot on JV. Finally, success was within reach. Still, I don’t remember being proud or even glad. Maybe, subconsciously, a part of me was ready to give up.
Even though I made the team, I continued my losing streak. 6-0. 6-1. 6-2. I tried to stay optimistic, telling myself I was learning with each defeat. Slowly, I was. My tennis improved and I won my first match. But the victory didn’t feel good. The damage from so many previous losses was already done. It was becoming clear that tennis and I weren’t meant to be.
I decided to quit last winter. Tennis was everything to me for so long. I wanted to perservere. Despite this, I couldn’t find the motivation to continue. My love for tennis was gone. When my choice became official, rather than feeling empty in tennis’s absence, I felt free. In the end, I wasn’t giving up — I was moving on.
I desperately held on to what remained of my passion for a long time, trying to be persistent but suffering in vain. When I quit, I worried I was losing a part of myself. However, at a certain point, it’s important to acknowledge that our passions do not define who we are — who we are defines our passions.
Just as people change, our passions change too. It’s OK and even healthy to let them go, no matter how central they once were to our lives.
Grading participation in classroom discussions based on speaking frequency rewards extraversion over comprehension
SILENT STRUGGLE
During a Socratic Seminar, the familiar feeling of a peer sitting in silence, gripping their pen, mind racing as they try to formulate a response, is a shared experience. They want to jump in, believing that they have something valuable to say. But as their classmates debate, and words quickly bounce off one another with ease, they can’t bring themselves to speak. By the time they muster the courage, the conversation has shifted.
forced participation does not build confidence — it reinforces fear.
This is a reality that many students experience in school, particularly those who struggle with social anxiety and those who are simply more introverted. Yet many curriculum — particularly literature classes — enforce participation grades. This is often a system that evaluates students based on the frequency of their engagement and quality of their insights.
Unfortunately, while some classes are able to find a healthy balance between these two factors, with a greater emphasis put on quality, others prioritize handing out points based on the number of times students speak, seeing it as a greater reflection of overall participation. This often results in a learning environment that induces anxiety in adolescents who feel pressured to speak up more.
Participation grades, when excessively tied to frequency of speech, disproportionately harm quieter students. Being expected to routinely talk in front of the class to have a higher chance of receiving an A forces students into a highpressure scenario in which their focus shifts from meaningful discussion to hastily attempting to contribute to the conversation. For those who experience anxiety, this pressure may manifest physically — shaking hands, nausea, a racing heartbeat — yet their reluctance to speak is often dismissed as simply needing to “step out of their comfort zone.” But discomfort is not always conducive to growth, and
Beyond anxiety, participation grades may fail to accurately reflect a student’s knowledge or effort. Grading students based on if and how often they participate can reward students who make many surfacelevel remarks with top scores, while disadvantaging those who make fewer but higherquality remarks.
Even though these quieter students may not be directly penalized by their silence, it further creates an unfair grading structure where frequent contributions in some classrooms can compensate for a lack of depth and analysis in responses. This creates a system that rewards performance rather than comprehension, contributing to a warped sense of learning and even grade inflation.
Additionally, such participation grades can turn discussions into competitions, furthering toxicity amongst peers. In classrooms where speaking time or frequency is reflected in one’s level of participation, students scramble to interject, prioritizing air time over meaningful contribution. This dynamic makes it even harder for quieter students to find an opening, further alienating those who already struggle to participate. In fact, 76% of MVHS students have struggled to participate in a discussion due to feeling unable to find an opening to jump into the conversation.
This bias toward extroversion in academic settings raises an important question: Should participation be measured by how often a student speaks in front of the entire class? Some argue that without participation grades, students wouldn’t talk at all and, therefore, will remain stagnant in their extreme introversion. But forcing speech isn’t the only way to encourage engagement.
A greater emphasis on alternative participation methods that value verbal contributions — such as table group and partner-based discussions — allow students to engage in ways that suit their comfort levels. Moreover, a more inclusive approach could involve a “no harm” participation policy, where contributing can boost a student’s grade but not harm it if they struggle to speak up frequently. And redemption opportunities would provide a safety net for students who need further accommodations before experiencing a hit to their grade. Such strategies have already been implemented for example in our AP English Literature courses, though do not exist within all classrooms, particularly those for underclassmen — often the ones who struggle the most with public speaking due to a lack of experience.
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While inviting a quieter student into the discussion to talk can be beneficial for students, also allowing the inviters to earn extra participation points, it may at times inadvertently cause students to feel singled out. Moreover, often the added pressure of how and when to speak deviates the purpose of discussions away from intellectual exchange between peers, and instead towards academic survival.
This isn’t to say participation grades should disappear entirely. However, they should evolve to remove the “quantity” aspect of engagement that fits students into a preconceived box. Classrooms should be spaces that cultivate and value both speakers and listeners, recognizing that discussion is not just about who speaks the most, but about the collective exchange of ideas. A balanced learning environment acknowledges that engagement comes in many forms — and that true participation isn’t measured by decibels or frequency but by depth.
saturday
night live
MVSNL 2025 embraces first-year teacher Rachel Cassar and marks a bittersweet capstone for senior producers
BY SAMIKA BHATKAR AND BENJAMIN ZHANG
Producers Rowan Chang, Aayushi Ayalasomayajula and Trisha Akhare
PHOTO | BENJAMIN ZHANG
Decked out in purple, English teacher Rachel Cassar and Special Education teacher Doug Leresche bow during curtain call.
give a quick speech before the senior skit.
PHOTO | SAMIKA BHATKAR
Goldilocks (Avishi Bansal) twirls her hair out of frustration from not meeting her protein goals.
PHOTO | SAMIKA BHATKAR
Teacher Matias Ashtiani has a comedic exchange with Isabella, played by senior Selina Wang, during the skit “Tutorial Time.”
PHOTO | SAMIKA BHATKAR
brimming with a chuckling audience and actors bursting with expression, Monta Vista Saturday Night Live, a student-run production organized by the Drama department, was held in the Auditorium on Friday, April 4. The adaptation of NBC’s hit comedic late-night show featured student-written skits, three musical acts and a monologue delivered by its hosts — Special Education teacher Doug Leresche and first-year English teacher Rachel Cassar.
“The show is just a reminder that the theater community is so wonderful, out of the box and creative,” Cassar said. “As an English teacher, this is always what I’m hoping for my students — that they can improvise and see the joy in communicating and connecting.”
Producer and Drama student Aayushi Ayalasomayajula says dealing with communication and organization with a cast so large was a challenge. She admitted the buildup and preparation for the show felt stressful, with this being her first time running a show.
“I learned a lot about communication, and it’s honestly really, really hard to get a message across to a group of 25 plus directors and 70 plus actors,” Ayalasomayajula said. “This production is basically everything I’ve worked for all of these years. I’ve been in Drama since I was a freshman, and I’ve waited for the day that I can finally produce and make a show.”
With this being her first year teaching at MVHS, Cassar says it was nice to be a part of the school community and found MVSNL to have a very warm and comforting atmosphere.
“Honestly, I was really excited when they asked me,” Cassar said. “It can feel hard to understand the community, and it’s easy to kind of feel tucked away in your classroom. You just do
your own thing in your own little world and don’t interact with a lot of people. It’s been really sweet to have the opportunity to see students who are not my students being excellent at what they enjoy.”
Sophomore Elektra Masegian lectures about the Bechdel Test as a teacher in “The Bechdel Test.”
Big productions, such as Kendrick Lamar’s
“The Damn. Tour,” can cost a lot more than is accessible by younger audiences.
TO BE TAKES A FAN
Concert-goers discuss their experiences with ticketing and etiquette
BY DYLAN NGUYEN AND ANGELA POON
Surrounded by die-hard fans, blaring speakers and elements of punk-rock, Kennedy Middle School history teacher Ami Byrne could only describe what she had just seen, heard and felt as a transformative experience. The year was 1994, and after just having moved to California, Byrne would go to her first ever concert — watching lead singer Henry Rollins of Rollins Band perform at the Greek Amphitheater in Berkeley, Calif. This concert started her unwavering love for the ultimate concert experience.
“The experience was crazy, since I had never been to a concert since moving from Oklahoma, where we didn’t get concerts,” Byrne said. “You had the pit, which was a legit pit, unlike today, where it’s just a crowd of people standing on the floor — that is not a pit. I just remember thinking, ‘Holy cow, what planet have I landed on?’”
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PHOTO BY KENNY SUN | CC BY-SA 2.0
Although concert demand has remained robust, the ticketing experience hasn’t been as linear. As the digital era started to expand, Ticketmaster became the primary form of ticket sales, ultimately monopolizing the industry. Instead of buying inperson, a digital queue allows for a higher capacity of prospective concertgoers to find tickets and quicker service. Whereas this process is extremely stressful for some, junior Vivana Dave views the experience positively.
to buy the tickets and they don’t seem into the show, it’s really frustrating and can impact your experience too. So it really makes me sad that young people aren’t often able to go to big productions.”
“ I ENJOY LIVE MUSIC JUST FOR THAT CAMARADERIE AND FEELING OF, ‘WOW, THERE THEY ARE.’
KENNEDY MIDDLE SCHOOL
“It’s thrilling just being in that queue and anticipating whether you’re going to be able to get a good seat,” Dave said. “I worry if it’s going to be too expensive and if my parents are going to even let me buy the tickets, but getting the tickets is a big deal to me.”
HISTORY TEACHER
AMI BYRNE
Beyond ticketing, incidents involving poor concert etiquette have risen in frequency after the COVID-19 pandemic, such as when fans screamed at inappropriate times and threw objects onstage at artist beabadoobee’s tour. MVHS alum ‘24 Sapphire Yang, who previously experienced poor concert etiquette, believes that negative experiences with other fans leave a lasting impression on the artist, regardless of the nature of the incident.
this to the gradual loss of social awareness with younger concert audiences. Overall, their concern for the potential inconsistency of the concert experience poses a question that dives deeper than just ticketing issues — is all the effort it takes to secure a concert seat worth it if there’s a possibility of another concertgoer ruining the experience?
Not only has the ticketing
“Not being able to see the actual performer ruins the entire concert experience,” Yang said. “Instead of
“There’s this lack of empathy that feels like people are just meaner and don’t have that common courtesy or humanity that was prevalent in the past,” Byrne said. “It’s frustrating to see somebody hurt or suffering, and that people are not trying to help them. And an experience can turn negative for anyone if there’s something that ran out that makes you think you got slighted or evokes any feeling of jealousy. So that causes that ability to develop empathy to be really tainted — just trying to see that common experience and that commonality between us as people rather than everyone for themselves — can be hard.”
$37 1993
$59 2002
TAYLOR SWIFT
$2,000 THE MOST A MVHS STUDENT HAS SPENT ON A CONCERT TICKET IS FOR THE TAYLOR SWIFT “ERAS” TOUR *According to Background Animal
$261 2023 NIRVANA EMINEM
El Estoque reviews new and popular items at Trader Joe’s
BY DYLAN NGUYEN AND ALAN TAI
spice, these fried snacks please the palate. While they can be inconsistent from bag to bag, this fan-favorite is
chewy and firm, every bite of these mochi feels like a textural ecstasy. unfortunately, the blood orange faces an identity crisis betWeen sour and sWeet, making this treat subpar.
from crunchy sticky rice to fava beans and green peas, this snack has it all. it’s as nutty and flavorful as you’d expect from thai aromatics, and the uncanny resemblance to tom yum soup makes this worth your money.
these chocolatey delights are salty, sWeet and complex, coated in rich caramel providing each piece with a honeyed sheen. they’re sure to bring any tasters to a gustatory high.
each spring-exclusive tart is absolute eye candy, and you can be sure to expect a balanced mouthfeel. hoWever, the passionfruit is almost too tantalizing and citrusy. though, we think some may enjoy the tropical flirtation.
PHOTOS | ALAN TAI
GRAPHICS | DYLAN NGUYEN
ENTERTAINMENT SHOULDN’T BE HOMEWORK
Critics need to reevaluate how they review art to consider a variety of target audiences and themes
BY SAGNIK NAG CHOWDHURY AND ALETHEIA JU
When “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” came to theaters in 2023, it was immediately slammed with poor reviews from critics for being too childish, shallow and lacking strong characters. In 2025, the story repeated itself when “A Minecraft Movie” released to poor reviews for similar reasons. However, both films shattered box office numbers — “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” made $1.36 billion at the domestic box office, cementing its position as the highest-grossing video game inspired movie. Similarly, “A Minecraft Movie” defied box office expectations by netting $157 million in its opening
week, making it April’s most profitable box office debut so far. On sites that consider audience reviews alongside critic reviews, such as Metacritic, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” did very well among audiences, scoring 8.2/10 compared to 46/100 from critics.
As reporter Erik Kain wrote in a Forbes article about “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “In any case, a lot of these movie critics must not play much Mario or know much about Mario because the magic is apparently lost on far too many of them. That’s a shame. This movie is absolutely great, a very faithful, very fun adaptation of one of the most popular and beloved
video game franchises of all time.” This stark contrast between how audiences and critics perceive media isn’t new. Among critics, a trend emerged, especially in the past few years, where movies that prioritize being more lighthearted and fun are deemed as lesser works. The way we critique art, especially film and TV, has become narrow, with increased focus on things like depth, symbolism and overall complexity, as seen in the Forbes article. While these factors can be markers of quality, they aren’t the only thing that defines it. Sometimes, media’s sole purpose can be just to entertain, and that should be enough
to satisfy critics and audiences alike. While many critics aim to look for hidden messages and themes in media, perhaps the true meaning is that there is no hidden meaning at all. For many, there is a large appeal of things like “dumb” Hallmark movies or lighthearted comedies, purely because of their simpler nature and lack of deeper meaning or social commentary. These films, while starkly different from what many consider an archetypal “quality” film, offer a relaxing experience that promises a feel-good ending and doesn’t require the viewer to constantly focus on its intended message in order to enjoy it. This problem extends to all different types of media, irrespective of their target age or audience. Rather, they are looking for pure entertainment value. Especially when it comes to events like awards circuits or checking off criteria such as a meticulously crafted script or deeply rooted symbolism, critics often forget work that prioritizes simplicity and pure enjoyment. An article from the University of Vermont states that “Film criticism usually offers interpretation of its meaning, analysis of its structure and style, judgement of its worth by comparison with other films.” This implies that a film needs to meet these criteria, such as having deeper meanings, as well as strong structure in its script and dialogue. As directly written in a review from sportskeeda.com, “A Minecraft Movie struggles with critics but finds success in fans.” The review states how, while critics struggled to find meaning or purpose in the film, fans embraced the lighthearted nature of the film and the nostalgia it brought back to the game. The disconnect between what critics and audience members are looking for
reminds us that the target audience should be considered in any artistic critique. If children’s novels, often purposely simplified to appeal to younger audiences, aren’t expected to hold the same weight as complex texts, then why should films have to do the same?
This debate even extends to schools as well. Many high school students feel the need to force themselves to find meaning in literature — a demand superimposed by the class curriculum that insists on deep analysis of every text, regardless of whether the text offers that analysis or not. While core texts offer opportunities for discourse, numerous supplementary texts or films are often jammed into the curriculum, often confusing students rather than allowing them to find insight in the text. For example, Honors American Literature students at Monta Vista are expected to analyze the children’s book “Make Way for Ducklings,” even though the author of the book, Robert McClosky, has said that his inspiration for the book was “noticing the ducks when walking through the Boston Public Garden every morning on his way to art school.”
70% of MVHS students don’t consider movie ratings when choosing to watch one.
*According to a survey of 96 students
If students are expected to analyze a book where even the author has stated there were no hidden meanings, then what is stopping students from dissecting and overanalyzing anything? This subconscious expectation that students are expected to find meaning in everything to overanalyze often takes away from the overall enjoyment of taking in content. Because students are expected so early on
to analyze everything with a variety of lenses, they often lose the idea of taking in content for pure enjoyment. This overall culture leads to the overcritiquing of media even when the media itself is made just to give the audience a good time.
Ultimately, not every film or piece of art is required to be multi-layered and have deep levels of symbolism and real-world commentary. Sometimes, the intention is simply to entertain. A “good movie” isn’t defined by a single set of criteria — it can range from a thought-provoking drama to a lighthearted comedy. By recognizing this and broadening our understanding of what makes a film “good,” we allow art to flourish in its many forms — each one perfectly suited for its audience.
MATH MADNESS ONODERA’S
BY JONAH CHANG AND LEAH DESAI
Every March, Algebra 2 teacher
Onodera dedicates a portion of class time to teaching students about March Madness, the annual NCAA Division I collegiate basketball tournament. She instructs students to fill out a bracket and research specific schools in the tournament with the end goal of broadening students’ college options.
As an alumni of the University of Arizona, Onodera recalls watching her school’s basketball team grow stronger and achieve greater success as she progressed through college. This led her to continue following college basketball, specifically March Madness, when she started teaching. Onodera began integrating the event into her lessons to highlight certain algebraic rules.
“I followed March Madness through college, and then I was teaching middle school math afterward,” Onodera said. “Teaching powers of two — figuring out how many games are played at a certain level and how the
and the evolution of office culture.
“Ten years ago, a lot of parents were involved in the office pool, so if the parents didn’t know what it was, at least they heard it through the office,” Onodera said. “But now that so many parents don’t even go into the office, I’m sure parents don’t know, so then it doesn’t filter down to the kids. That could be one of the reasons why so few students even have any idea
PHOTO | FIRSTNAME LASTNAME
That’s kind of how it started.”
Onodera notes that over the years, her students have become less engaged with the March Madness activities in class. She believes this is because there are so few students who even know what March Madness is, likely because of the influence of their parents
As a basketball fan and follower of March Madness herself, sophomore Rachel Bergendahl, a student of Onodera, recalls being surprised by how few students in her class knew what March Madness was. According to Bergendal, she was one of only four students who had prior knowledge
Due to the lack of enthusiasm, Onodera has shifted the focus of
Math teacher Mia Onodera uses March Madness to broaden her students knowledge about college options
the activities towards encouraging her students to research colleges they might not have heard of before. She has her students log into Naviance and look at a variety of different schools.
“The last couple years, I’ve really focused on, ‘Let’s look at some schools you’ve never heard of,’” Onodera said. “‘Let’s focus on why we do not apply to those schools and why we have never heard of those schools.”
As a former student and current TA for Onodera, junior Skyler Wong has observed over the last two school years that not all of Onodera’s students, including himself, engage with the basketball element
of the activities. However, he acknowledges that he was still able to learn valuable, new information.
about the acceptance rates in the colleges and different options you can choose
than the typical ones.”
Bergendahl agrees with Wong, saying that this activity has helped both her and the rest of the class expand their knowledge of different colleges.
for everyone to see the true scope
Especially at MVHS, where the short list of popular colleges can be limited to UCs, Ivy League schools and other private schools, she believes it is helpful
when you’re only doing math or science,” Bergendahl said. “So getting to know people outside of subjects can help build better relationships.”
Duke
1 houston
1 housto n
1 florida # # #
PLAYED AND LEARNED
Teachers dive back into their high school and collegiate sports experiences
BY KATRINA LIN AND ELLIE WANG
JEFFREY THOMAS
Walking onto the stadium field, Physical Education teacher and Department Lead Jeffrey Thomas immediately felt the intimidating presence of the football arena. With thousands of people watching him, he knew that every game, practice and workout led up to this moment underneath the glowing stadium lights.
“You can’t explain to somebody what it’s like,” Thomas said. “There are 100,000 people in the stadium, and when you hear them cheer, even if it’s not for you, the sound is deafening. Conversely, when you’re at your home stadium and you or your team do something well, and everyone’s cheering for you, you can’t get that feeling anywhere else. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it. You can’t replicate that.
Growing up in an athletic household, Thomas has always gravitated towards
P.E. teacher Jeffrey Thomas tackes player during a college football game.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF JEFFERY THOMAS | USED WITH PERMISSION
sports. Whether it was playing touch football on the streets of his childhood neighborhood or on a dusty baseball diamond in a far-away high school, Thomas knew that he was meant for athletics. Even though his mother didn’t allow him to play for his safety, he attempted to rekindle his passion for football during his sophomore year of high school by joining the team. Thomas continued to pursue the sport and received a scholarship to play at Washington State University. However, to Thomas, playing Division I football wasn’t always about the flashy performances under Friday night lights, as finding a balance between academics and sports was crucial to his career. Thomas compares balancing sports and academics to working two different, full-time jobs, with football taking up the majority of his day — and ultimately being prioritized above academics. But despite the exhausting
“ WHEN YOU’RE AT YOUR HOME STADIUM AND EVERYONE’S CHEERING FOR YOU, YOU CAN’T GET THAT FEELING ANYWHERE ELSE.
experience, he says that playing the sport at that high of a level taught him important life lessons that he still follows today.
P.E. TEACHER JEFFREY THOMAS
“Football teaches you to have resolve, to keep fighting because you can’t just give up,” Thomas said. “If a guy is beating you, you have to figure it out. You can’t just quit because something is hard, or because something is difficult. You have to power through and rely on yourself and your teammates. Football is great, but you’ve got to put in the effort. It’s got to come from within. Your coach can yell at you all he wants, but if you don’t do it, it doesn’t matter.”
Besides learning from football itself, Thomas learned to overcome stereotypes that accompanied his athleticism. He cautions others from making premature assumptions about student-athletes, advocating for their work ethic around school.
“When you run across an athlete, don’t assume the worst of them,“ Thomas said. “Don’t assume that they’re morons and they just got there because they’re super athletic. They’re there because they worked hard in the classroom and they worked hard outside the classroom, in the weight room, or after hours. They’re intelligent people, and they work hard, and you can’t make a blanket statement about everybody.”
SARA BORELLI
Since the fourth grade, english teacher and Varsity Girls Basketball coach Sara Borelli has consistently been involved in basketball, volleyball, softball, track and soccer. Of the plethora of sports she played, basketball stood out to her from the rest because of her natural prowess on the court. As she followed her passion in high school, Borelli became disappointed by the disparity in support between the men’s and women’s teams, despite the women’s team being just as skilled.
“I know nobody really cared about the girl’s program; they only cared about the boys,” Borelli said. “When I went to high school, we didn’t even have a Varsity team until my junior year. We were in that group of women athletes that didn’t really have the visibility, so we didn’t have all the club teams like athletes now have. But because we went 24-0, they had to give us a Varsity team.”
we forge along the way,” Borelli said. “The girls are dorky and always fun and I love having relationships with them. As a group, they always seem to have a really good camaraderie, cheering each other on and helping each other. A lot of them start freshman year, and I want to see them grow and change to just become self-actualized women that are strong and don’t take crap from anybody.”
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In comparison, Borelli found that although friendships were still formed among her college teammates, they were not as close as the players she coaches. With inconsistent coaching staff, a heavy course load and other extracurriculars stacked on top of practices and traveling for games, maintaining strong friendships eventually became too demanding for many players.
decision to play a sport in college. From balancing her school workload to having long days in and out of the gym, being a student athlete was just as exhausting as it was rewarding. However, despite the sacrifices she made for her athletic career, Borelli recognizes that her growth as a coach is not completely attributed to her collegiate experience.
“Sometimes I look back and I wish I hadn’t played the sport because it took so much time, and wish I just focused more on other things,” Borelli said. “But I learned to be competitive and how to lose gracefully — to try to have fun, but also try to be serious. I’ve grown as a coach because the players are different, not necessarily because of something I learned collegiately.”
PHOTOS COURTESY OF SARA BORELLI | USED WITH PERMISSION
Following her high school basketball career, Borelli continued to play Division II basketball at Notre Dame de Namur University. As a basketball coach herself, Borelli notes that bonds formed among teammates in high school are significantly stronger than those formed in college. From her many seasons of coaching, she recalls the encouragement players had for each other and praises the sturdy friendships that are built through this sport.
“My favorite parts are the relationships that
“When you go to college, your ideas and priorities change, and you have other responsibilities than the ones you had in high school, so people drift apart,” Borelli said. “They’re not necessarily willing to make those kinds of connections that the girls make, like sleepovers and team dinners.”
Although her passion for basketball compelled her to become a coach, Borelli says that she sometimes still doubts her
Girls Varsity Basketball Coach Sara Borelli (second from left) poses with her team at Notre Dame de Namur University.
WHAT’S IN YOUR BAG?
What MVHS athletes are carrying in their competition bags
BY ANANYA CHAUDHARY AND RADHIKA DHARMAPURIKAR
STUFFED ANIMALS
“We all bring stuffed animals for emotional support. Our team has become so close knit that we’ll exchange stuffed animals during trips and take pictures with them.”
COLOR GUARD SENIOR YUJIN UM
SUNSCREEN
“
I play golf and my skin would be really damaged if I didn’t use sunscreen.” FRESHMAN MELODY
HYDRATION — WATER
“
When I mountain bike 3,000 vertical feet in the sun, I can easily sweat out multiple liters of water. If you don’t drink water during intense exercise you can die from heatstroke or complications of dehydration. Nothing else is entirely essential other than water.”
SOPHOMORE BECK POLTRONETTI
GRANOLA BARS
“I always carry an extra granola bar with me to all my games and practice. Sometimes a teammate needs a snack or I get hungry during practice!”
JUNIOR
SHARPIES
“Whenever I go to a swim meet, I always have a sharpie with me. As someone with a bad memory, I use a sharpie to write down my events, heats and lanes on my arm, making it easier for me to tell my coaches and remember when to start getting ready. I also use it to write down my teammates’ events, and some people also write inspirational messages.”
MAKEUP
“Even though we already have makeup on when we arrive at the competition, sometimes we’ll have to touch things up or somebody will need a makeup supply, it comes in handy because you never know what will happen.”
COLOR GUARD SENIOR YUJIN UM
POLAROID CAMERA
““It’s nice to take pictures after competitions when in our makeup and costumes, to capture those memories. We tend to take a lot of pictures, so it is routine and makes up our competition experience and memories. I feel like there is something magical, more than just taking a picture on your phone, because polaroids are very permanent, like a document of that moment together.”
COLOR GUARD SENIOR YUJIN
FRESHMAN
ALPHONSA ROSE PHILIP
CROSSWORD @elestoque
BY ALYSSA YANG
ACROSS
Buds 4 life
Long-grained Asian rice whose name means “fragrant”
Et ___
“This isn’t a joke!”
NCAA basketball tournament nickname (pgs. 42-43)
DJ’s audio setup
Coarse wool fabric
Haircare step after a visit to @pata_blendz (pgs. 14-15)
“The Company”
The L.A. Clippers, on scoreboards
Word that comes before pay, day or bay
Web addresses
High toss
Revolutionary Guevara River mouth formation
Firefighter, at times
Indispensable
Popular podcast that Kamala Harris appeared on to appeal to young women voters (pgs. 26-27)
Like a 3-4-5 triangle
Habitat threatened by bleaching
Volcanoes may form them
Small fruit pie (pgs. 38-39)
DOWN
Sounds of impact
What a fork in the road might lead to?
Computer network security system
“___ bleu!”
Like a probability distribution with two
Hank ___, Walter White’s brotherin-law on “Breaking Bad” Squeeze (out)
Something to chew on Sticks together
The second author on the byline of pgs. 4-5
Scan to subscribe to EE or become a sponsor and get your name printed in each issue.
PLATINUM SPONSORS: Naomi Byrne, David Chang, Michael McSorley, Ertai Tai, Alex Yang, Yue Yang, Hong Yao
GOLD SPONSORS: Ryan Fu, Tachung Lin, Naren Nayak, Dinesh Nettar, Dinesh Prabhu, Stephanie Shi
Second-largest U.S. rideshare company Refer to clue 34-Down of Vol. 55, Issue 3
units, for short
SILVER SPONSORS: Han Kim Teo, Brandon Tiongson
A. YANG: I don’t know anything about basketball, but if you do, I hope you enjoy this puzzle!
