Keeping the Goodness Alive

and other means that do not require us to be physically near each other. The act of connecting can still be very much alive. We are, as we have always been, encouraged to express ourselves freely.

We can still talk and communicate with the people we care about, the people who may need our attention right now. They are the ones who may be longing for our stories and advice.

Basically, we can still be human with them.

As humans, we are expected to communicate to share our thoughts, our feelings, and our concerns. This is the very reason why I personally prefer the use of physical distancing and not social distancing

What am I trying to tell here?

Homework, is it worth the struggle?

Criticism against giving homework has been one of the concerns of the students. Some may argue that homework does not serve its purpose which is mainly to help students improve their academic performance. And while those arguments are not entirely unfounded, I believe that homework is not only essential to any learning environment but can also be one of the most crucial elements in education.

Firstly, homework allows students to learn in an environment that is void of pressure, comfortable, and flexible in terms of time. This allows for any subject to become more approachable and less intimidating.

Secondly, homework provides an opportunity for students to practice concepts and recall information. These sessions create a deeper understanding of the material. Some methods of studying make use of these opportunities brilliantly. Scientifically proven techniques such as spaced repetition and active recall are examples of these methods.

Admin Section

In Response to the Inclusion of Arts

Most schools aim to deliver holistic education. They try their best to be inclusive and cover most of the spectrum of multiple intelligences exhibited by the learners. Thus, SAMIS recognizes the importance of the inclusion of arts subjects in the curriculum, aside from being affected by the MOE directive.

Arts is a pivotal subject that plays an instrumental part in the development of human beings in several ways such as it enhances creative thinking, motivation, critical thinking, communication capabilities, teamwork, confidence, develop well-prepared students with more knowledge about the diverse cultures and societal values along with norms and traditions, enabling them to attain long-term success (Assoc. Prof. Dr. Maha Al_ Dabbagh, 2019). Admittedly, the school has yet to come up with a robust arts curriculum to be implemented starting next school year.

In Response to Reintegrating P.E.

In the early part of the current academic year, MOE health protocol issuances kept changing. Reintegration of P.E. as part of the school curriculum was vague until the middle of the school year. Much as we want to implement PE the soonest as possible time, we delayed it for the next academic year due to health concerns.

Lastly, homework develops students’ abilities to gather, interpret, and concisely describe information gained from resources that are not commonly used or found in the classroom. This is especially crucial for the development of teenagers’ and young adults’ critical thinking as such skills are often gained by experience only.

The criticism against homework is often unfounded. Much of it revolves around the idea that homework is more of a chore rather than a positive constructive learning experience. Also, critics often base homework’s value on success in careers, while homework’s focus is gaining mastery of the subject matter.

But homework should not be viewed as such and as an extension of unfinished activities in school, but rather as a significant element in education that promotes positive discipline, productivity, and a heightened understanding of a subject. It is an ingredient needed for holistic education.

In Response to Academic Pressure

Academic pressure is part and parcel of students’ lives. Not only from the school but also from the high expectations of their parents. Managing time smartly and learning to set priorities can help curb or minimize its impact. As far as the school is concerned, it has been very supportive and considerate to students whose plate is too full of the rigors of academic endeavors. Students are encouraged to join competitions and other extracurricular activities, but they have the freedom to refuse if they think that they cannot handle the additional workload. But for those who dared to accept the challenge, plentiful considerations are given.

In Response to Distance Education

Much as the school would like to diversify its offering of learning modalities [like distance education], at this time, we are to stick to and strengthen the conventional onsite learning before expanding. Insha’Allah, it will come to fruition in the not-so-distant future.

- The Administration

We can still be humane and show care to our fellow. We can still serve as a light, especially for those who were already burned out by this pandemic.

Since there is a need to physically distance ourselves from others so we can be safe and free from this terrible disease, social and emotional connectedness has become more necessary and more critical.

This is a period of time when we badly need the attention of others, especially those who love and care for us. Now is the period of time that we need to feel more human than ever. We need to feel acts of humanity from others, and we have to show the same to them more than ever. Trying times like this have made us become more mindful of our family, relatives, and friends.

To be human is innate to all of us.

Carl Rogers, a humanistic psychologist, said that nobody was born a bad person; everyone was born good. However, we need reinforcements to keep the goodness alive in us. We need some advice, lessons, and even stories that will make us learn how to be more concerned and mindful of each other.

With what is still happening in our society, awareness should be the sharpest tool that will lead us to understanding not just ourselves but others, accepting and appreciating them, learning empathy, maintaining positive relationships, and making wise decisions. Who would have thought? It has been two years since the pandemic started, and here we are. Still thriving. Still connecting. As humans.

Lithium: The Battery to Power-up the World’s Destruction

The future of the world is green, it has to be. As we discover more and more alternatives to fossil fuels, we find ourselves in a dilemma. Wind energy, nuclear energy, solar energy, and even water energy, all have one thing in common: they produce electricity, and for us to store that electricity we need batteries.

No big deal, right? We mine more lithium and make more batteries, but unfortunately, lithium mining is a process that produces so much carbon dioxide that it takes 10 years of using a battery to pay back its carbon “debt.”

This carbon “debt” is an amalgamation of a lot of different issues that are caused by lithium mining. According to the Institute for Energy Research, a non-profit organization based in Washington D.C, the lithium extraction process uses a lot of water— approximately 500,000 gallons per metric ton of lithium. Also, lithium extraction harms the soil and causes air contamination.

Those are reasons enough to look for other solutions, but there are also the human rights violations that the lithium mining industry runs on. In an article released by Washington post, it was stated that the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries - the power source for smartphones, laptops, and electric cars - is linked to human rights abuses and environmental pollution in cobalt mines in Congo, indigenous communities near lithium deposits in South America, and graphite factories in China. The stories include responses by several technology, electronics and car companies which use lithium in their batteries.

That being said, people might argue that lithium is a better solution than Fossil fuels and that is true, to a certain extent. However, the long-term effects of lithium outweigh the benefits, mainly the effects of the pollution of lithium. The problem is that extracting this lithium resource has so far necessitated moving vast volumes of soil and rocks and consuming millions of gallons of water.

The process has often unsettled local ecosystems, threatened endangered species, and disrupted nearby communities. Needless to say, moving all of that material requires the burning of giant amounts of fossil fuel. “This isn’t a green solution–it’s not a solution at all,” says Guillermo Gonzalez, a lithium battery expert at the University of Chile.

Nevertheless, if lithium mining is so bad then what are we to do? Well, there are multiple ways to reduce the use of lithium in our modern world. Firstly, we can reduce the use of batteries by lessening the storing of electrical energy, this can be done by installing local all-day energy systems, which means the need to use batteries would drop.

Those systems are solar and wind power generators.

Secondly, researching new solid-state batteries that do not require lithium. Solid-state batteries are batteries that use solid electrolytes and electrodes instead of the liquid and/or gel electrolytes and electrodes that are used in traditional Li-ion batteries.

Solid-state batteries offer multiple benefits over lithium batteries, like greater power density meaning smaller batteries that provide the same amount of energy, as well as not needing lithium.

In order to live in a greener world, we must not only reduce our fossil fuel usage but also research and implement ways to reduce the mining of lithium.

With the development of a more modern and technological society, artificial intelligence is playing a more important role in our daily lives. Hence, we must raise one of many questions: are we improving our living quality, or are we slowly preparing for humankind’s demise?

Artificial intelligence, better known as AI, is defined as “the ability of a computer to perform tasks that require human intelligence and discernment through machine learning technology.” This type of computer intelligence differs from regular computer intelligence by the fact that the computer “learns” through the tasks it performs—just like humans do. Great! This will be of great help in our daily lives and will make things much easier—or so we thought. Truth is, if we don’t recognize our limits and set a boundary point to this, we could just easily wipe our precious mankind’s existence.

AI has advanced rapidly over the past decades, most especially within recent years. According to the Statista Research Department, the AI global market’s revenue and growth is increasing by up to a whopping 54% per year in the years 2019-2021 and will continue to rise at around this rate until the year 2025. This has attracted the interest of many other fields globally, as AI is being used for both industrial

Contemporary liberal thought is usually originally rooted in the harm principle. This principle was the belief of the incredibly popular libertarian philosopher who is usually hailed for enhancing personal freedom, John Stuart Mill. He basically believed that society shouldn’t stop an individual’s action unless he’s harming someone.

Well, to be quite frank, this sounds like an absolutely brilliant and liberating idea at face value. However, it almost turns upside down when its consequences are examined closely. One would realize that this so called “harm principle”, ironically enough, demoralizes, corrupts, and rips apart society by allowing its individuals to do whatever they want as long they’re not physically harming people other than them themselves.

Some of the acts allowed by this principle are absolutely unacceptable by any sane logical human being. These include self-harm in all its forms, ideological pollution of society, changing one’s entire nature of being due to his/her emotions instead of getting treated, basically pedophilia, repulsive incest scenarios, more twisted sexual acts which have been normalized and forced upon others into complete considerations, drugs of all kinds under certain conditions, and much more. This is absolutely ridiculous. That is why I believe that the harm principle is absolutely baseless and completely radical simply because it harms more than it helps.

Because the JSM stated that harm isn’t morally evil in itself but rather only when it is done to others, the harm principle only stops people

AI: The Technological Leap of Faith

and commercial uses. This increasing usage of AI systems brings us to our first issue: unemployment.

Now that AI is advanced enough to perform many different tasks autonomously, this has caused a great deal of damage to those who had to do said tasks previously. This is most apparent in industrial and manufacturing jobs, where these machines can easily learn and perform tasks over and over, sometimes more efficiently than humans. But despite this seeming “improvement”, it has caused many people to become jobless. According to a study published by GeeksforGeeks, unemployment rates in the past decade have gone up by about 7% per year, and 3% of that is due to artificial intelligence. This could pose a problem in the near—or far—future, wherein automation rates would increase, and more humans would go unemployed.

Since artificial intelligence is made by us humans, AI can be subject to algorithmic bias and socio-economic inequality. Because we are inherently biased, we cannot make any form of artificial intelligence completely unbiased. Princeton Professor Olga Russakovsky, who’s been gathering information about this topic, stated that “Most AI researchers are male, come from a certain racial demographic, and were raised in high socioeconomic areas, primarily without disabilities.”

Together with certain types of “bad” data, this could lead AI to be much less impartial and hence cause mass socioeconomic inequality globally now that it is more vital in our daily lives. Google researcher Timnit Gebru backed this up by saying the source of this bias is social, calling scientists like herself “some of the most dangerous people in the world, because we have this illusion of objectivity; we can never be fully impartial.”

With this, one might say that these situations are “highly hypothetical” or that these effects would take place in the far long-term, but it goes without saying that we must consider all the possible effects of this technological evolution—that of both the short and long-term. Although these apparently minor issues might not cause a lot of damage anytime soon, we must beware of how it might affect humans in the long-term of things.

Take the discovery of nuclear technology, for example. During the time in which it was first discovered, it was meant to be used as a much less earth-ruining and more efficient form of technology, whether it would be as an

The Harm of the Harm Principle

from physically harming other people, so selfharm is allowed so long as the person who is harming himself/herself isn’t responsible for other people who would be physically harmed by losing him. Pay attention to the word “physically”. This literally means that this idea is radical enough to allow someone to basically commit suicide in all its forms whether it’s direct or indirect so long as people don’t materialistically need him. The damage this can cause to families is obvious. I simply don’t even need to highlight why this is not okay. Since when has personal freedom been worth tearing apart families by letting their members go die-off enjoying themselves perhaps through drug use or the like?

This also means that the harm principle approves of homosexuality, beastiality, incest, and basically pedophilia. Some of those have been normalized in the west today while some haven’t, yet. This is all because it doesn’t physically harm people other than the ones who consented. Some of this harm is absolutely devastating.

According to Avert, gay men are 27 times more likely to get HIV than other people. Avert claims that this is due to multiple reasons with one key reason being biological. According to Reuters, gay men are more likely to have fecal incontinence. All of this really shows that this is not natural nor normal as we are not biologically formed to commit such.

The harm principle also allows one to absolutely ignore their biological form and change genders. This harms that person by putting him/ her into a state he/she wasn’t supposed to be in, so now, they can’t reproduce. Other than that, it harms society by creating problems such as which bathroom should these people enter and what sports should they play. They even want others to use the pronouns they choose even when they don’t even exist in the language.

I am aware that these people do indeed have emotional problems as they feel like they don’t belong to their bodies, but I believe that it is way more efficient if they are psychologically treated as the origin of the issue is psychological and it would reduce the risks, surgeries, social issues, etc. especially considering that transgender suicide rates are very high, according to Forbes, signaling that changing to the gender they feel like doesn’t completely solve the problem.

Because it wasn’t physical harm, John Stuart Mill was in favor of almost absolute freedom of speech as he believed it will allow humans to make more progress in terms of ideas and the like.

So, if someone keeps trying to explain to us why he believes that everyone should have a personal machine gun and be able to carry it everywhere he/she wants with no restrictions, we should let him continue blabbering his nonsense which convinces more people than you’d think. This kind of speech is very dangerous as it can mislead people energy source to power whole countries or as fuel for space missions. But since we didn’t set enough boundaries and limits to this, it has become another threat to humans, used in things such as nuclear bombs and weapons. With artificial intelligence, this could occur again, with effects possibly much worse than what we’ve ever seen before; so, we must be conscious of the possible long-term effects in which AI could cause—and prevent our own creation from becoming our enemies. and incite them into violence, like the January 6 Insurrection.

Beyond technological terrors and the worlds of Sci-Fi movies, artificial intelligence is nothing short of extraordinary. From the renowned voice assistant Siri, to self-driving cars of Tesla and the like, autonomous machinery, to even humanoid robots, AI-based technology is on the path of making our lives much easier and accessible. But, we must set bounds to which we can progress, as everything is done best with moderation. The decision is in our hands: are we going to set our limits and abide by them, or are we going to keep moving without bounds, possibly causing mass destruction to humankind? If we can coexist with these systems successfully, this certainly will be another leap for our kind. So, what are we going to do?

Now, I am aware that JSM does exclude speech that incites physical harm but the problem is drawing this line isn’t as simple as that. I don’t necessarily have to tell you to go kill someone to be inciting violence. Some influences are done gradually to eventually convince people into doing something even though it started completely benign.

A famous example of this method is a game called “The Blue Whale Challenge.” According to the BBC, this challenge goes on for 50 days and each day the person is asked to do a task. The first tasks are simple and seem meaningless; however, the last task is taking one’s own life. This has resulted in multiple suicide incidents. This is why I believe that we have to be more careful with speech as one could be very cunning and gradually call people into the dark while claiming that he means good and he wants people to have their right of self-defense. That’s why we should not only ban speech that explicitly incites violence or ideologically or morally corrupts the society but also speech that hints at it and has weird cult-like groups who listen to it.

What I mentioned is why I believe that using the harm principle as the guiding ideology behind government would be absolutely detrimental to society in the long term as it will divide them by giving them too much freedom. While no country, to my knowledge, actually fully follows this principle, a lot of countries’ systems are derived from this principle.

Faith

Spiritual Significance of Ramadan to SAMISians

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. Muslims observe the sacred month in order to mark the month in which the Holy Quran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him). During this month, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset in order to truly appreciate God’s blessings and sympathize with the poor and unfortunate.

by Mohammed Khidr

Ramadan is not meant to be an easy period. It is a month of laborintensive work because it’s a month of learning and guidance of faith. This mentality of learning from struggles and self-improvement is exactly what SAMISians needed during this tough period of time. With exams on the horizon and the end of the school year, not only did SAMISians need guidance

Wisdom and Nobility

in their academic matters but also in their religious and spiritual aspects. Two years into the pandemic, three months into the invasion of Ukraine, and six months into a worldwide housing market crash, hardly anyone had a positive view of the world we live in. There is nothing that we need right now more than faith and anything that can provide a

Conquering Fears: With humble beginnings in SAMIS, Aghababyan explores all possibilities

by Sedra Ammar / Interviewed by Shahd Rashid from SAMIS Journal

An empowered woman, an alumna who is molded by challenges to be the best version of herself, and a SAMISian who knows how to look back at where she came from…

It is evident that Ms. Arpine Aghababyan, batch 2014 graduate of SAMIS, embodies these qualities. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Business from the American University of Armenia, and she completed her master’s degree in Management from SKEMA Business School (School of Knowledge Economy and Management) in France. She shares this success with SAMIS which helped her hone the needed skills and instill values that helped her overcome the endeavors she had faced along her journey.

Ms. Aghababyan has developed 21st-century skills through the help of her teachers who pushed her to make every effort in her academic life. She particularly mentioned Teacher Jasmine, Teacher Sheila, and Teacher Sallie who have aided her throughout her academic journey. With English being used as the medium of communication in school, she developed fluency in the language which has become useful in her collegiate years.

Despite all the challenges she has faced in the academe, she got to enjoy the whole journey by going out of her comfort zone. She explored new things by joining different extra-curricular activities in events such as ESM week, athletics in Sportsfest, cultural activities on Foundation

Day, as well as, Arabic week, despite her limited ability to communicate in Arabic.

More than the academic success she has achieved, she came to realize that it is all the values she got from these experiences that matter the most. The hospitality and support of the SAMIS community towards her made her feel accepted and worthy of respect which helped her build up her self-confidence and self-worth. She believes that respect and appreciation for others are the essential values that SAMIS has taught her into becoming a person with a wellbuilt character.

With all the experiences she got from SAMIS, Ms Arpine was able to effortlessly relate and communicate with other people. This has served as a foundation to further hone her skills and abilities toward achieving her bachelor’s degree and her master’s degree in France. Her enhanced organizational and communication skills made her land different jobs. Currently, she works as a business development specialist in Dexatel. She also has experiences working as Business Math Teaching Associate from August 2021 to December 2021, Project Management at Smartgatevc in July-September 2021, Digital Marketing Specialist in 20192021, Risk Manager at Betconstrat in FebruaryJuly 2019, and Customer Service in Zvartnots International Airport of Armenia in 2016.

Grateful as she always is to SAMIS for having achieved milestones in her life, Ms. Arpine Aghababyan leaves a message to all SAMISian, that is to never allow fear to hold them back from taking countless opportunities to start anew and discover possibilities. She further encourages them to keep moving forward despite all the challenges they will have to go through until they achieve their aspirations. After all, they are SAMISians, and “once a SAMISian always a SAMISian.” valuable resource, and Ramadan is the best time to ask for healing and turn into the realm of possibility. Ramadan is the most important month for Muslims, and it should be celebrated accordingly. Well, SAMISians can rest assured that celebrating the holy month with their school will not only make it easier for them but also bring them closer to their faith.