By Holden Purvis, Nicholas Huang
Astronaut trainer reaches for the stars
By Doan Nguyen
“The point of college education is not just to get a job. There’s more to college than that.”
‘The Beldham’ finds fear in familial relationships By Kiran
Parikh, Luke Nguyen
PAGE 28-29 SPORTS
Decades of tackling concussion culture
By Sam Morse
Friday, October 31, 2025
Volume 72, Issue 2
St. Mark’s School of Texas Dallas, Texas
Each family is unique, and some find stability in nontraditional ways. Their stories show how they adapt and redefine familial bonds, revealing the many ways one can find belonging and care.
See coverage, Pages 16-17
Michael Jimenez Managing Editor
As we get closer and closer to the holiday season, I continue to look back at all of the special times I’ve had at St. Mark’s since first grade. Grandparents Day remains one of my favorite events of the year and I can’t help but look back on all of the memories I’ve made with my grandparents as my last time with them on campus gets comes to an end.
Throughout the entirety of my lower school career, both my maternal and paternal grandparents got to share the experience with me, but all of that changed when my brother came to St. Mark’s.
While at first I was sad that I wouldn’t get all of my grandparents at the time, looking back, I now realize that I was able to grow closer to whoever I was with.
While I remain fortunate enough that my maternal grandparents live in Dallas and I see them almost every day, my paternal grandparents, who live in Waco, are around a lot less.
Because of this, the only time I really get to see them is during the holiday season and as I prepare to leave for college next fall I really hope I can make the most of the short time left that I have with them.
From my very first Grandparent’s Day in Mrs. Broom’s class, I never really understood the true meaning behind it. To me, it was just a day filled with fun activities and no real in class work and marked the start of my one week Thanksgiving break.
It wasn’t until my freshman year that I really began to understand how fortunate I was to be able to bring my grandparents on campus.
As the years went by faster than I thought, slowly and slowly I recognized how much of a sacrifice that not only my grandparents were making, but the countless amounts of grandparents who travelled from all over the world just to share the special day with their grandchildren.
Although Waco only remains an hour and half drive from my house, I started to appreciate my grandmother taking the time to come and see my brother so much more.
Some of my best memories to this day remain the nights I get to spend with her over Thanksgiving break and travelling to Waco for our Christmas celebration with all of my aunts, uncles and cousins.
As my Common App fills up with submitted applications and the decisions keep coming in from schools, I’m reminded that the times of getting to see my family everyday when I get home from school aren’t infinite and that I need to make the most of the time I have left.
By Doan Nguyen
The taste, the crunch, the satisfaction. The Kit Kat. This is the candy that I would trade three blue raspberry Jolly Ranchers for. Snapping the wafers in half is a top 10 most enjoyable experience. The chocolate is light and not too sweet; Kit Kat’s are masters of the art of balance. Even their slogan — “Have a break, have a Kit Kat” — just makes me feel warm and relaxed. In a Halloween world full of sugar overloads, Kit Kats are the calm, cool professionals. The calm in the candy storm.
They’re good. Historically the most popular Halloween candy, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are everywhere. There’s no denying the chemistry between chocolate and peanut butter (the power couple of the candy world). The only thing I’ll say is the chocolate gets everywhere: the back of your teeth, the sides of your mouth, your fingers. Love them or not, they’ll keep winning Halloween, one sticky orange wrapper at a time.
Every Halloween, it seems like the best costumes come in pairs. Matching outfits aren’t just for couples anymore—they’re for friends, partners, and anyone who loves a good themed photo. Here are two costume ideas that won’t miss.
Imagine knocking on a door, holding out your candy bag and saying trick-or-treat, only to find a fistful of peanut butter M&Ms dropped into your bag—I’m pinching myself to get out of this nightmare. The one redeeming thing I’ll give them is that they have M&M World in Times Square, which, I have to admit, is a pretty popular tourist destination. I don’t know what M&Ms stand for, but if I had to guess, it’d be “Mid & Mid,” because that’s exactly what these little colored circles are.
You can’t escape them—Kit Kats, Reese’s, and M&Ms rule every candy bowl. But how good are they really? Here’s my unfiltered take on America’s three favorite candies. For these web exclusive stories and more website content, visit smremarker.com and @remarkernewspaper on
PAGE 8
The right to speak openly doesn’t erase the potential consequences that might unfold.
With various expense strategies, students have a multitude of avenues to take to manage expenses.
Friday, October 31, 2025 PAGE 7
Tomek Marczewski ‘22, taking his experience in engineering at St. Mark’s, has now carried those lessons into the collegiate and professional world, through Formula SAE and F1 respectively.
By Nicholas Huang and Sebastian Garcia-Toledo
Tomek Marczewski ‘22 grew up watching Formula 1 cars race by at 200 mph on television. Now, he’s working on those same cars competing in F1.
His engineering journey started at here, continued with Georgia Tech’s collegiate racing competition team and now brings him to Williams Racing, where he engineers for the top level of motorsport competition.
At St. Mark’s, Marczewski always loved to create. Whether he was designing for the robotics team, building in the wood and metal room or working on his own projects, he was always innovating.
He would spend hours tinkering and machining, working on one project. And after all of his effort, Marczewski would be left with a finished creation that represented all the passion and pride that he put into his craft.
“I always liked the idea that with engineering, you could put a bunch of time into designing something, and then you will be able to point to the physical product of all of the time you spent,” Marczewski said.
His passion for design first started with his involvement in wood and metal. The class not only taught him the basics of machining, but it also developed his creative and artistic style.
“Having an understanding of how things are made makes you a better designer,” Marczewski said. “And also, without wood and metal, I think I would be missing a fresh take on things. It gave me a creative outlet, which I think is important for anyone.”
As an engineer at heart, his proudest creations came from his time in the Makerspace. When alumnus Victor Vescovo ‘84, the world record holder for the deepest manned submersible ocean dive, made a visit to the school, Vescovo looked to the Makerspace for assis-
Students navigate competitive culture at school
In a school where high achievement and excellence is the norm, students seek to balance drive and well-being.
tance in a new venture of his.
I will say every time I go to work in a professional environment, I’m reminded of why I love FSAE so much. It’s because it moves so fast and you don’t have the restrictions.
He needed a design for a soil sampler that would collect dirt to be analyzed for microplastics. Notably, the sampler would operate from the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest currently known point in the ocean. Marczewski would lead the project.
“We were tasked to find a way to create a mechanical-only soil collection system that could be attached to the underwater landers accompanying the submarine,” Makerspace Director Stewart Mayer said. “And the idea is that they would automatically activate when
the landers hit the ocean floor.”
For Marczewski, this project was exactly what he loved about engineering. The design was purely mechanical: Vescovo had tested a commercial, electrical prototype that failed. He and his team poured hours into the project, finding a solution to a niche problem, but there was risk involved.
To make sure the sampler would work successfully, Mayer and Marczewski tested the sampler in Mayer’s backyard pool and in White Rock Lake.
By Lucas Pei
Austin Street Center, Rays of Light and Genesis Shelter — these are some of the most popular community service opportunities in the area, and limited spots can make it challenging for students to get involved.
Students must complete 15 hours of community service hours every year, but many of these opportunities posted on MobileServe are almost always full. This often leads to students rushing to complete their hours right before they are due.
“It becomes competitive for spots in popular projects like Genesis or Rays of Light,” Director of Community Service Jorge Correa said. “We try to post at different times to avoid people having to rush to sign up.”
One of the things that the school has recently begun doing a few years ago is adding an hour to the service time to account for transportation regardless of the actual travel time. This also applies to out-of-state opportunities.
account, that wouldn’t be right,” Correa said. “Also, many people go and work at a camp over the summer. Well, you can’t enter the time when you’re sleeping. If you have a schedule, like one from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., those are the times that you can count.”
Another thing that was recently added is double hours. This allows a student to bring one or more family members to a service opportunity and claim double the hours.
your family.”
However, students often complete their hours just to meet the requirement for school or get recognized with certain awards that have a certain limit in terms of hours that a student must have to get recognized.
Interesting news headlines from the month that sparked conversation
LOUVRE HEIST
On Sunday, Oct. 19, four thieves disguised as construction workers stole around $100 million worth of French crown jewels from the Louvre, including items linked to Napoleon. On social media the crime has been romanticized as an “old-school heist” straight out of a movie.
GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN
On Oct. 1, Congress failed to pass funding legislation, leading to all non-essential operations being shut down. As a result, thousands of federal employees have been required to continue working without pay.
PRINCE ANDREW
After ongoing allegations of sexual misconduct and potential association with Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew has relinquished the use of his royal titles, including Duke of York.
5
“One thing people don’t know (about me) is that my dad went to St. Mark’s. I think it’s really cool, really special that my dad went here. It was more of a happy coincidence.”
“Here at St. Mark’s, I help with anything academic related: study skills, executive functioning, time management, organization. Kind of helping guys with the tools to be the best that they can be academically here in St. Mark’s. In my role, I get to also be a seventh-grade advisor, which is really fun.”
“I love to cook. I love sports, so I love watching football. My favorite team is either the Aggies or the Dallas Cowboys.”
“If you tell me ‘I’m going to go to Oklahoma to do service’ and I take how many hours you drive into
“It’s like school. In a perfect world, people would come here to learn, and you don’t have to give them grades,” Correa said.“Now (students) try to get more hours because those hours are going to be recognized by colleges or internships.”
“We still have the remains of what COVID did where students want to do stuff online,” Correa said. “They’d rather find some way to do it from their home than have actual interaction with people. That worries me. We want them to go out there and work with people via physical interaction.”
Correa emphasizes the importance of doing service for the benefit of the community, not for external recognition.
“It’s not about the hours you accumulate,” Correa said.“Our emphasis is on the service.” PAGE 5
“It’s a win-win because it creates connection,” Correa said. “The double incentive is to get you out of your comfort zone and work with
Nowadays, students can even complete their hours digitally.
Although kindness is woven into the curriculum from an early age, maintaining that positive spirit through adolescence can be challenging.
By Grayson Kirby and Lucas Pei
Holding the door open.
Saying something encouraging.
Picking up litter on campus.
All these acts, while seemingly small, may have a large and lasting impact on someone’s day. Small gestures of kindness seem to be increasingly less common in everyday life. What was once considered to be the bare minimum — merely good manners — has become rare enough to be noticed.
In Lower School, faculty mem-
bers like first grade teacher Elizabeth Beacom are working to make sure that Marksmen are taught kindness and other essential virtues from a young age.
“We have two character traits every month,” Beacom said. “This past month (the students) learned about kindness and respect.”
The school works to continue to strengthen this base of kindness and respect throughout the boys’ time at the school through their Character and Leadership curriculum.
Dr. GayMarie Vaughan, who teaches English 10 as well as Literature of Human Rights, believes that people should be role models in order to spread kindness and other virtues.
“(We should) model kindness, respect, openness and growth mindset, all those things,” Vaughan said.
“Even discipline in terms of holding your tongue when you want to lash
I think learning to dial down the heat is a good thing, remembering that it’s more important to be kind than it is to be right.
Dr. GayMarie Vaughan
Victor F. White Master Teaching Chair
out.”
Contrary to popular belief, kindness is something that takes practice to become good at, like any other skill.
“I hope that we get better at practicing kindness because these are habits we develop, and unless we practice them, we’re not going to get good at them,” Vaughan said.
In Vaughan’s Literature of Human Rights class, her students have frequent debates on new political issues like the death penalty. She emphasizes the educational aspect of the topic, which helps turn down the heat.
“Everybody has an opinion,” Vaughan said. “But I think (we should) maintain a position of learning and presenting facts like, ‘what is the history? What do the statistics say?’ I tell the boys, ‘I’m not here to tell you what to think about this. I’m just asking you to think about it.’”
Vaughan highlights the importance of emotional control in difficult situations.
“Respond, don’t react. There’s a huge difference between responding and reacting,” Vaughan said. “If somebody is gonna come at you, or if you see something that’s intended to evoke a response, take a minute and try to understand where that person is coming from.”
Even in difficult situations like arguments, Vaughan stresses that people still need to exhibit kindness in addition to maintaining one’s composure.
“I think learning to dial down the heat is a good thing, remembering that it’s more important to be kind than it is to be right,” Vaughan said. “If your intent is to put someone in their place or have a sense of superiority like, ‘Oh, I just won that argument,’ that’s not good.”
Junior Payton Elder believes kindness is a conscious decision, not just something that comes naturally.
“I think humans are wired to judge people,” Elder said. “When you bring awareness to the fact that your brain wants to judge people, and you realize that in the moment that you’re judging people for superficial things, you have to bring awareness to that and make a conscious decision to change the way you’re thinking and eventually that will become habit.”
That realization is often easier said than done, and students often find themselves subconsciously judging those around them. Even at school, where virtuous behavior is stressed on such a high level that often leads to false expressions of kindness, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to differentiate those who are being genuine from those who are not.
“I think the Character and Leadership program does a great job of telling us who we should be,” Elder said. “And with that it puts a damper on moral development and confines it to the classroom by giving us tests on vocab words verbatim. It makes being a good person a chore rather than a responsibility that we feel.”
While the idea of a curriculum that focuses on building character and leadership works in concept, students often believe that it encroaches on their ability to develop those positive traits in their own ways.
In many cases, students approach the character and leadership focus of the school as a chore and mundane task that has to be completed rather than something to take advantage of and grow from.
But kindness can’t be fully institutionalized — it isn’t a vocabulary word or checklist. It’s a consciously developed habit built from the small, quiet choices practiced every day, long after the lesson ends.
By Jay Panta
For more than seven years, sophomore William Braskamp has volunteered with Paper for Water, a Dallas-based nonprofit that aims to raise funds through origami creations to ultimately provide clean water to underfunded communities around the world.
His journey with this initiative all began with his lifelong passion: origami.
“I found out about Paper for Water through some friends who went to church with the family who started it, and they knew
that I was interested in origami,” Braskamp said.
Now, Braskamp serves as president of Paper for Water’s Changemakers Council, the nonprofit’s youth leadership board, where he helps organize events, lead projects and inspire other youth to give back to their communities.
Over the past year, Braskamp has volunteered roughly 250 hours with Paper for Water, marking his commitment to the program.
He recently oversaw a largescale project where he helped conduct a massive origami installation at the Galleria Dallas.
“(Starting in) April this year, we were working on a massive installation at the Galleria,” Braskamp said. “It was a total of 250 stars. There were a total of 4,000 sheets of paper that had to be folded. I took responsibility for the design and then the folding of some of these stars.”
One of Braskamp’s most memorable experiences at Paper for Water took place two summers ago, when he embarked on a mission trip to the Los Velasquitos village in Guatemala. During the trip, he helped to drill a new well as a gift for the village’s underserved residents.
For Braskamp, being able to see the fruits of his labor firsthand inspired him to further serve his community.
“It was a very typical rural Guatemalan community, and the people were extremely caring,” Braskamp said. “And it was just very special for me to see the realization of all of that work. They were very, very hospitable and very hard working, and to see them be able to get clean water for the first time was incredible.”
Looking ahead, Braskamp hopes to see the nonprofit gain more traction, generate more impact and raise awareness for its cause.
More specifically, he hopes to get youth involved in the mission.
“I hope that we get a little bit more into this involvement, especially building up a solid group of people who are consistently helping,” Braskamp said. “Also, getting a little bit more into youth actually folding origami — I think it’s integral to spreading our message because it’s something that people can see, and they ask questions about it, and they know that it’s interesting and it’s beautiful.”
In a polarizing culture, the right to speak freely doesn’t erase the weight of potential consequences.
By Holden Purvis and Nicholas Huang
Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrated the ousting of conservative commentator Tucker Carlson from Fox News in 2023.
Conversely, she condemned ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show.
In one case, deplatforming was essential for a just society. For the other, it was a blatant attack on keystone First Amendment rights.
And although the public controversy surrounding both cases didn’t last long, they reignited a centuries-long debate on whether freedom of expression should ever be controlled and who gets to decide if it crosses the line.
In a country built on the principle of free speech, there are times when it could be argued that unrestricted free speech may be too free. Hateful. Offensive. Violent.
What counts as acceptable speech — and what crosses these lines — is often very difficult to define.
While some argue that such speech is simply a necessary cost of freedom, others believe certain limits are necessary to protect communities.
“America is a little bit of an outlier in the world in defending a pretty robust interpretation of what our freedoms are,” History & Social Sciences Department Chair David Fisher said. “Bottom line, we really do stretch the notion of what is free speech, and maybe that’s for the good, but there is a debate on this.”
Any speech that can cause immediate harm, danger or violence isn’t protected by the First Amendment. Hate speech, however, has historically been safeguarded by the United States, largely because the definition of “hate speech” is nuanced.
Because of this subjectivity, the judicial system is hesitant to make any concrete ruling on First Amendment rights. Lawmakers tiptoe between the thin line that separates regulation of harmful speech from censorship.
Still, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence. With greater freedoms come greater responsibilities to defend one’s ideas and understand their potential repercussions.
And while hate speech may be legally protected, the school maintains its authority to decide what crosses the line.
“Each individual must take responsibility for the things that they decide to take in, and that’s the independence, that’s the freedom that we have,” Director of Inclusion, Diversity and Human Resources Lorre Allen said.
In addition, regulation of speech can be used as a political weapon, with both sides of the political spectrum having a history of deplatforming the other side.
So in many ways, the question of what counts as “acceptable” speech has become increasingly partisan.
“This is more of a cultural problem, not a legal problem,” Fisher said. “Both the left and the right need to be able to open the window a little bit to be able to accept speech, criticism, opinions, dialogue
that they might find offensive.”
And with more and more political polarization, finding civil discourse can be tricky.
A lack of discourse fosters frustration when people feel that their opinions go unheard, and without a safe, mutual space for discussion, the power of one’s voice fades.
For students, the ideal school environment serves as one of, if not the only place where they can challenge ideas without fear of repercussions. While it may be simpler to try to completely avoid complicated discussions, the school stresses the importance of not shying away from these issues.
“I relish this as a teacher of history and politics and economics and government,” Fisher said.“If I’m not making you uncomfortable a little bit in class, then I’m not teaching you anything.”
And aside from the classroom, the school has implemented various platforms for unrestricted, student-led conversation.
The Inclusion and Diversity Leadership Council (IDLC) and Global Engagement Committee (GEC), for example, host many events throughout the school’s campus in order to promote more understanding and less polarizing speech, creating a platform where students can openly discuss their opinions and feel heard in their community.
“The goal, one, is that it always remains a student-led discussion or conversation,” Allen said. “Two, the intent is to create an environment where people feel comfortable to have engaging and sometimes challenging topics to discuss and have dialogue on.”
But even in student-led discussions, certain parameters can be necessary to guide the conversation.
“You have to have parameters for any type of dialogue,” Allen said. “Whether it’s at school or at work in a company, there has to be some form of parameters in place to have these types of conversations.”
Some rules, for example, prevent the discussion from getting out of hand, being dominated by one voice or from steering off the intended topic.
Both the left and the right need to be able to open the window a little bit to be able to accept speech, criticism, opinions, dialogue that they might find offensive.
David
Fisher History & Social Sciences
Department Chair
And while it’s human nature to listen in order to respond, listening for the sake of understanding first is essential for a productive flow of ideas.
“When you’re having conversations on challenging topics, you should not go into those conversations thinking, ‘I’m going to change this person’s mind and have them think like me,”’ Allen said.
For the IDLC and GEC, a discussion isn’t a battleground of opinions — it’s a place to understand other people.
And the events are not necessarily designed to change peoples’ opinions.
“We choose the kinds of people who would have the best insights and the most variety of insights, what teachers and students would have the biggest and most diverse insights so that we can come to a better conclusion and have a better conversation,” junior GEC member Paul Sumethasorn said. “Inviting people who all have the same opinion is like an echo chamber.”
Because one of the greatest benefits of free speech — access to a wide range of opinions — can only occur when students are openly learning from one another, disagreement is an essential part of the process.
Conversations covering challenging topics will naturally lend itself to conflict between viewpoints, but they can also reveal ideas that students hadn’t even considered, as long as students remain open-minded.
Without that openness, the effect is little different from censorship — except it’s the individual restricting the intake of information instead of the government.
“We learn the best when our preconceived notions and beliefs are challenged, not to the point where I’m challenging you because I want you to believe what I believe, but I’m challenging you to reconsider something that you may not have thought about,” Fisher said. “I think that needs to happen because you need to be able to come up with good arguments to defend the beliefs that you have.”
The First Amendment protects certain broad categories of speech, though their boundaries are often left for interpretation on a case-by-case basis.
Hate speech is generally protected by the First Amendment unless it falls under a few specific categories. Nevertheless, such speech comes with potential social or professional consequences.
Political speech, which includes criticism, commentary and activism about government, politicians and key issues is protected under the First Amendment.
Using humor, exaggeration or mockery to comment on people, issues or the government is a protected form of speech even if it offends or ridicules others. Unlike defamation, satire is not intended to make false claims about someone’s character or damage their reputation.
Speech that is seriously intended to provoke violence or encourage others to commit violence is unprotected. This includes true threats against an individual or a particular group.
Making false statements that damage someone’s reputation, such as libel or slander, can lead to significant legal consequences if proven untrue and harmful.
When it was time for the sampler to be put to use, it was a resounding success. By the end of the project, Marczewski left knowing that he had made a tangible impact.
“I think the Vescovo project was obviously really cool, because it was the real world engineering project we could point to,” Marczewski said. “In fact, Jacob Bell ‘21, who worked on it with me, recently sent me a picture (of it). He was at a museum, where they had a watch that had been to the bottom of the ocean with the lander. And there was a video of our own scoop there.”
The momentum didn’t stop there. Upon Marczewski’s arrival to Georgia Tech, he fell in love with a new endeavor — Formula SAE. Created in 1980 by students at the University of Texas at Austin and sponsored by SAE International, Formula SAE (FSAE) is a student design competition where teams are tasked with manufacturing a small Formula-style racing car from the ground up that competes in different events at meets.
“I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to be involved in Formula SAE,” Marczewski said. “I’ve been very heavily involved ever since. That’s the primary way I engage with physical engineering on campus.”
Marczewski led the suspension team for the prototype for two years, working with a subsystem of 18 people under him. Every year the Georgia Tech team would return to Michigan FSAE in order to compete against 119 other teams.
The experiences that Marczewski has had through FSAE have now led him into the world of professional engineering. And while he has had some doubts, he remains excited, especially given the new opportunities afforded.
“I will say, every time I go work in a professional environment, I’m reminded of why I love FSAE so much,” Marczewski said. “It’s because it moves so fast and you don’t have the restrictions. But professional engineering is wicked cool too. Getting to work for companies like Honda and Tesla, and being in the manufacturer and designing things that get shipped out to hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide is pretty exciting.”
Marczewski is currently in the beginning of a one-year internship program at Formula 1 team Williams Racing in the United Kingdom. As is customary for those in the process of attaining the threeyear-long engineering degree, Marczewski has taken a year off to gain real world experience in what is known in the UK as an industrial placement.
I will say every time I go to work in a professional environment, I’m reminded of why I love FSAE so much. It’s because it moves so fast and you don’t have the restrictions.
Formula 1, the pinnacle of motorsport, has 10 teams and 20 drivers across the world that race over 24 Grand Prix. Williams, in particular, has made a significant rebound this season compared to recent years and currently sits in fifth place. William’s driver Carlos Sainz recently finished third at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the first regular podium since the same race in 2017.
Even more exciting for Marczewski, he is currently working on the driver controls that the Williams Formula 1 team will use for the landmark 2026 season, which will introduce active aerodynamics, Manual Override Mode, as well as smaller, lighter cars.
“We design the steering wheels, seats, pedals, steering columns and brakes,” Marczewski said. ”I’m actively designing components that
will go on that car, which is tremendously exciting.”
Marczewski attributes his engineering opportunities to his handson experience with the Makerspace.
“The Makerspace and the technical sort of courses that are offered at St. Mark’s are awesome,” Marczewski said. “And stuff like having access to a CNC mill in high school – I think we don’t realize how lucky we are that that’s there, and how much of an advantage it gives us when we then go into college and the professional world.”
Because of Marczewski’s time at the Makerspace, Tomek Marczewski, who has been a lifelong Formula 1 fan, has now taken an active role in what was once a dream to him — actually designing components for a real Formula 1 car.
By
Due to sudden forecast changes, the Homecoming football game was moved from Friday, Oct. 24, to Thursday, Oct. 23 while all other Homecoming events remained scheduled for Friday.
“On Monday it looked like there was going to be rain Friday night at 10 p.m., and that stayed the same through Tuesday,” Associate Athletic Director Josh Friesen said. “Wednesday morning the forecast started to shift and all the bad weather
started to get here earlier and earlier.”
With the unpredictable weather encroaching, Friesen and the athletic department immediately began coordinating with Houston’s Episcopal High School (EHS) and other Dallas-area schools. After discussing multiple options, the schools mutually agreed that the safest and most time-efficient option would be to host the game on Thursday at 6 p.m., an hour earlier than the usual starting time.
Because EHS traveled from
Houston, their limited flexibility was one main factor behind the scheduling change.
“If it had been a local team, we would have kept it on Friday…knowing that if we couldn’t finish it, we could do that Saturday morning or afternoon,” Friesen said. “But since it was a team coming up from Houston, we had to play it safe.”
Although the football game was rescheduled, no other Homecoming activities or events were adjusted, leaving the Homecoming pep rally on Friday as originally planned.
Student body secretary Ilan Gunawardena said this was largely due to potential assessment conflicts as well as a modified schedule due to the pep rally.
“Optimally we would have wanted to keep the game on Friday,” Gunawardena said. “But unfortunately due to the masses of tests and assessments happening on the Friday, and the special schedule as well, it wouldn’t have been convenient for the teachers to shift around their entire day just to make space for the pep rally were it on Thursday.”
Despite the logistical issues, Gunawardena believes the pep rally still managed to hype the student body ahead of the rivalry game against the ESD Eagles on Oct. 31.
“I think having the pep rally on Friday, even though the game had already happened on Thursday, was almost the perfect setup for our game next week against ESD,” Gunawardena said. “They are, in my opinion, a much bigger rival than whoever we played on Thursday. If anything, it wasn’t a terrible experience at all.”
From credit cards to allowances, families take different approaches to teaching financial independence.
By Emiliano Mayo Mejía and Luke Nguyen
It’s as easy as double tapping the power button.
A face scan, a small beep and a few dollars vanish.
There’s no cash, not even a card and definitely no second thought.
When money is as invisible as it is now, it’s easy to forget what it’s worth.
For teenagers, money serves as a medium for food, gas and for going out with friends. Yet, the way students balance their money differs from family to family as parents tend to control their kid’s budget in different ways.
According to a poll of the sophomore and junior classes, out of 50 people, 24 use credit cards, 10 have an allowance and nine reported other sources of income. Other sources include jobs, investing, stocks and any other financial income.
“It’s always good to talk about expectations and make sure that everyone knows their plan for themselves and not treating others or taking others out on a regular basis,” student store manager Nancy Goldberg said. “I think it’s up to each family to know their budget and expectations.”
Expectations serve as a large indicator for families to manage student budgets, but there are times when students have to work for the money they spend.
Whether it is by tutoring, mowing lawns or gardening, a large group of students work to earn money to spend on themselves or with friends.
“My parents don’t give me money unless it’s for something that I absolutely need like getting a meal if they’re not home,” sophomore Leo Vallejo said. “I put up political signs on weekends and I get paid for each sign.”
While jobs can be sources of income for students, others decide to invest their money to grow their wealth exponentially. With organizations such as the Stock Market Club, students can learn how to manage their money and increase their profit.
“I keep all my money in Bitcoin,” junior Tyson Diep said. “Sometimes I spend money with Bitcoin, and if you go to Steak‘n Shake, you can
pay them directly with Bitcoin.”
It’s always good to talk about expectations and make sure that everyone knows their plan for themselves and not treating other or taking other out on a regular basis. I think it’s up to each family to know what their budget is and what their expectations are.
Nancy Goldberg Student Store Manager
However, for younger Marksmen, the ease of going to the student store and buying something with no physical exchange of currency can lead to overspending. This can cause a significant burden for parents, who then have to explain the value of money to their kids once the checks come in.
“A lot of kids say, ‘I can come in twice a week or I can buy this many things for a month or whatever,’” Goldberg said.
For greater ease of access, lots of parents allow their children to use ApplePay, which is accepted at more than 85 percent of retailers in the U.S.
While some parents add their own credit card to their children’s digital wallet, others add a debit card where money can be added at a moment’s notice.
“I can use (ApplePay) for anything I need in a moment. I don’t use it for any personal stuff,” freshman Trevor Hsu said. “I have separate personal money that I get from holidays.”
According to Goldberg, younger children can often overshare about family finances, a pattern she sees firsthand in how kids use, perceive and talk about money on a daily basis.
“You don’t want to start them
too young,” Goldberg said. “They don’t know. Just because their parents tell them about money, it doesn’t mean they should tell everybody what their parents said about the money.”
Money is always a difficult conversation topic. For students it can be a normal subject, but for parents it often remains a challenging thing to talk about.
In a country that creates numerous financial opportunities, it remains a subject that few will talk about openly.
“I think money and politics are the most divisive topics,” Goldberg said. “It’s really hard, because everyone has different thoughts on it, and everyone has different ways of dealing with it. Some people don’t talk about it all the time.”
Goldberg believes that it is important for students to learn about the value of money and their parents’ hard work.
She stresses that students will eventually have to fare for themselves and manage their own expenses.
“It’s really hard when you think about how you earn this much money — and by the time taxes, where you live and insurance and health care (are taken out) — you still have to have money to live and enjoy yourself,” Goldberg said.
By Sebastian Garcia-Toledo
The school’s vaccination policy stands to protect its students from illness in its many strains, and its adamant guidelines continue to do so.
The current vaccination requirement form is issued to every incoming student and their family, as well as returning students. The form must be updated to keep up with each grade’s required immunizations, and parents must submit forms and dates showing when the
student will be immunized. For school nurse Julie Doerge, the plan serves as a safety net for everyone on campus.
“We’ve had the policy in place for 12 years,” Doerge said. “We accept only medical exemptions, so if you have an allergy to a vaccine, then you can get a medical exemption from a specific specialist that allows you not to have it. But otherwise, we require everyone to be up to date on all their vaccines.”
Along with this policy, the school does not accept Reasons of Con-
science as an acceptable field for lacking any vaccine, meaning that a child whose parents have chosen to not vaccinate him for any reason other than a doctor’s orders cannot attend the school, unless they were to receive the required vaccines.
“We do not accept Reasons of Conscience.” Doerge said. “If you want to go to a public school, most public schools accept those certificates, we just do not.”
As for being up to date, it depends on a student’s grade and age, with incoming first graders and
seniors having separate requirements. The amount of necessary vaccinations also varies.
“Before kids go into kindergarten, you need to have certain vaccines by the time you’re five,” Doerge said. “Then you have updates again in third and then again in seventh and then what happens in high school (is getting the meningitis vaccine). You get one of those along the way and another when you’re 17 to 18 before you go off to college.”
Doerge highlighted the impor-
BY
Students reported their sources of income in an anonymous poll of 50 students from sophomore, junior and senior classes.
24
Students use credit cards for expenditures
10
Students receive allowances from their parents
9
Students reported other sources of income
tance of getting the meningitis vaccine as a senior. Due to its affinity for occurring in dorm environments, it carries a high level of contagiousness and potential to be debilitating. She also emphasized that getting the DTaP (Diphtheria/ Tetanus/Pertussis) vaccination is important to keep up through regular life.
The vaccine policy exists to keep all on campus safe and healthy, and its continued application has been one of the root causes for Marksmen’s health.
In a school where excellence is the standard, students must balance high high achievement and college expectations with personal passion and thriving.
By Holden Purvis and Benjamin Yi
According to Harvard Magazine, the acceptance rate for Harvard applicants in the class of 1989 was 16.1 percent.
Today, for the class of 2028, that number stands at 3.6 percent.
And the total number of students enrolled remains almost the same, while the number of applicants only continues to grow.
This growing scarcity of spots at prestigious schools breeds unrelenting competition.
Competition fuels ambition.
And ambition, when left unchecked, can harden into obsessive perfectionism.
Still, the school’s role isn’t to reject ambition — but to channel it.
While school life can be easily simplified to a zero-sum game, measured by grades and test scores, the school tries to build a culture that values both achievement and fulfillment, without sacrificing one for the other.
“I think that St. Mark’s does a good job of thinking of everything as an infinite game,” sophomore Eugene Wang said.
As a college preparatory school, the culture exists within a unique bubble — a bubble that comes with built-in expectations.
A bubble full of students boasting remarkable achievements.
A bubble where students may feel pressured to match or outperform their peers to fulfill the great expectations set by their parents, by their community and especially by themselves.
“I think everybody realizes the social push is on the side of competition, and often the parents are sending their kid to St. Mark’s primarily for college admission,” Malcolm K. and Minda Brachman Master Teaching Chair Martin Stegemoeller said.
These social norms bring inevitable pressure, but despite a high-intensity environment, many students, including junior Nathan Tan, agree that the school community helps to offset that stress.
“I think we’re taught to be supportive of each other no matter what, even in the midst of college stuff,” Tan said. “Have I felt that (pressure)? Yes, and I think everyone has, because of the caliber (of students) that St. Mark’s has. Any school will ultimately
have that, but I think there are things that the school does and that the people do that can help manage that.”
And while it would be reasonable to assume that competition is fiercest between classmates, Stegemoeller has seen students become more supportive of each other throughout the entire process, even amidst the initial stretch of looming deadlines.
“It’s competitive against the whole crowd of people applying, not just here (at St. Mark’s), and that’s different, I would say, as a benefit of the school’s efforts in character and leadership,” Stegemoeller said. “I think if you go back 20 years, there was a lot more competition among seniors.”
In fact, instead of a cutthroat atmosphere between students, Tan believes that openness and collaboration serve as cornerstones of the community.
“They don’t really keep secrets here at St. Mark’s,” Tan said. “Whereas in some schools, everybody’s very secretive about their activities and awards and things that they’re applying to because they don’t want other people to apply to them.”
Despite the potential downsides of an overly-ambitious mindset, Wang feels that peer pressure can be a good driver of innovation and encourage a healthy competition between students.
“I don’t think (the culture is)
very toxic,” Wang said. “I think most teachers do a really good job of setting a goal for each individual student, and just helping everyone learn at their own pace.”
For Stegemoeller, helping students balance college aspirations with deeper fulfillment is a key challenge.
While students rarely struggle to seek achievement, he has seen many struggle to find purpose beyond grades and accolades.
“I’ve never met a student who needed help understanding succeeding,” Stegemoeller said. “It’s very natural, but thriving can be much tougher. Some kids get it very quickly, partially depending on how they were raised. Others, it takes months.”
That distinction between success and fulfillment often stems from how a student’s ambition is directed.
“There is a distinction between ambition and doing things just for college, just for the numbers,” Tan said. “I think St. Mark students are very ambitious in general. They want to accomplish as much as possible. But I would say we have the good recognition of having ambition towards something that you’re actually passionate about.”
Similarly, Wang believes that choosing certain clubs and extracurriculars based on college potential alone leads to a lack of passion, limiting what students can gain from the experience —
It’s competitive against the whole crowd of people applying, not just here (at St. Mark’s), and that’s different, I would say, as a benefit of the school’s efforts in character and leadership.
Martin Stegemoeller
Malcolm K. and Minda Brachman Master Teaching Chair
both on a personal level and for applying to college.
“I think that some people definitely do them for the college apps,” Wang said. “And I can see the appeal in doing so. But the key thing to realize is if you do it only for the college app and not because you actually enjoy the subject or whatever you’re doing, then you don’t really get a lot out of the club.”
He believes that devoting significant time to classes or clubs that spark curiosity will naturally lead to growth, influence and leadership opportunities.
And while students will ultimately always feel pressure to build their college résumés, that drive and passion can coexist in harmony.
When ambition aligns with genuine passion, purpose and impact, the result can be both successful and meaningful — with college serving as an authentic byproduct rather than the sole objective.
“Students are inevitably going to do things just for college apps, though, and I think it’s not worth it to hyper-fixate on getting into college,” Tan said. “I feel like if you actually do things that you are good at and that you are passionate about and that are making an impact, then college will naturally follow, and you can tell a genuine story about what you’ve done.”
Several Texas universities recently fired professors for “idealogical differences,” stressing the boundaries of academic freedom.
PAGE 12
Alumnus discusses journey to train astronauts
John Paul Yabraian ‘92 works at Mission Control of NASA, playing an important role in space travel.
The best way of teaching kids to read has been subject to fierce debate for many years. Nowadays, many teachers and experts are pushing more for a science-based phonics approach to reading, which they argue provides a better foundation for students.
By Christopher Huang and Dominic Liaw
For multiple decades, a war in education has been growing. These “reading wars” have been a contentious contest among educators over the most effective way to teach children how to read.
Some are turning to a science-based phonics approach as the nation continues to grapple with declining reading scores.
The newest statistics released by the
TB: This portrait of Texas Longhorns safety Michael Taaffe was inspired by his remarkable journey from an unranked walk-on coming out of high school in Austin Texas to an All-American safety in the same city. His story embodies resilience, faith and relentless work ethic, qualities that any Marksman aims to follow. Through this piece, I aimed to capture not only his athletic determination but also his loyalty to the team that gave him a chance to play the game of football at a high level.
2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as The Nation’s Report Card, showed continuing declines in average scores for reading for students in fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades.
The 2024 average reading score for 12th graders is the lowest ever recorded. These poor performances could be remedied by a switch to a new reading education methodology.
For many years, the educational system in the United States has used a socalled “balanced literacy” methodology.
The main criticism against balanced literacy is that it fails to teach phonics effectively and utilizes a whole word approach that relies too much on context. As a result, many are now pushing for a “Science of Reading” approach that focuses more on phonics.
“We’re moving back to what is really grounded in science, which is phonics.
It’s how we teach kids how to read most easily,” said SMU PhD researcher Charlotte Gregor, who also holds a master’s degree in education from Vanderbilt University.
Phonics can be defined as the system
that ties written letters to spoken sounds in English. Phonics education teaches children to learn the relationships between letters and sounds, allowing them to sound out and read many words instinctively.
And with its intuitive basis, phonics allows children to develop strong reading foundations.
“Our English language has about 900,000 or more words, and so if you’re learning to read with a whole word approach, then you’re basically trying to memorize those words,” Gregor said. “If you’re using phonics, we know we’ve only got 26 letters. They can only make about 44 sounds. So if we know each part of the word and we can sound them out and then put them back together, I only need to teach you those 44 sounds and those 26 letters instead of the entire language.”
Phonics has been shown to be effective in teaching kids how to read and write, helping build reading comprehension and literacy skills.
iPhone 17 RELEASED
Benjamin Yi: The iPhone 17 was released on Sept. 9, unveiling four new smartphones, with the 17, Air, Pro and Pro Max. Pre-orders began on Sept. 12 and in-store availability began on Sept 19. For the first time in several years, the base model iPhone 17 is actually very solid, with many of the “pro” features being included without premium pricing. The two newest developments have been in the iPhone 17 Air and Pro Max. This year’s Air model is the thinnest phone ever released from Apple, being a record breaking 5.6 mm thick, while the Pro Max has expanded the camera bump in order to boost processing speed and power.
PAGE 14
As job markets increasingly value STEM talent, many college-age students are experiencing pressure to excel in science and math.
Friday, October 31, 2025 9
By Luke Nguyen
It began during his sophomore summer.
Benjamin Standefer ‘26 was working with other philanthropic organizations when he decided to take a stab at making his own — Binary Tree. What he started two summers ago has evolved into a program that has educated over 1200 students across Africa.
For Standefer, programming came easily. His father is a software engineer, so he was exposed to programming as early as middle school. The skill proved valuable, helping him navigate his early years of high school and eventually found Binary Tree.
“We teach digital literacy skills, so everything from how to send professional emails, how to craft a resume, to introductory programming in Python and JavaScript to AI,” Standefer said. “That’s been a really popular subject nowadays.”
The first program began in Tanzania through a preexisting organization that had worked with other American groups in the past. It had 30 students.
“We set up weekly meetings with them where we would call for about an hour,” Standerfer said. “We distilled the curriculum. We had assignments between each meeting, and then we had a culminating project. That culmination was a package deal of some emails, resumes and some digital design products that the students made.” Standefer’s next goal became clear: expansion. He and his team reached out to other organizations and slowly perfected the “recipe.” There were some variables, like getting French translators for Senegalese students, but they were able to replicate the formula a dozen more times. Now, Binary Tree is looking to teach outside of Africa.
“We actually have a program right now going on in Thailand, which was a chance happening, and it’s not exactly the same age demographic, but it’s working well,” Standefer said. “There’s a push to move into South Asia, to move into South America, anywhere and everywhere in the world to teach.”
Other organizations, including tech startups, universities and academic institutions, have sought out Binary Tree asking how to build a large language model (LLM) or use their curriculum as a model to teach programming in South Africa. They consulted with an organization that reaches 500 public schools over Africa.
“We basically said, ‘This is how we learned how to program. Maybe you could take pieces of our experience and use it to develop a course.’ There are a lot of different directions,” Standefer said. “We got to learn a lot, feature on a couple of podcasts, meet a lot of professors in that part of the world. That all has been really fascinating.”
Many have raised alarms about the deterioration of academic freedom in higher education, citing concerns regarding state legislation and nationwide initiatives aiming to reshape the education landscape.
By Christopher Huang and Michael Chang
In early September, a video of a confrontation between a student and a professor at Texas A&M University over gender-identity content in the course began recirculating.
Pressure increased on the university as politicians, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, posted fiery condemnations on social media platforms like X.
Texas A&M later fired the professor and demoted two other officials.
However, even these punitive steps were not enough to calm the whirlwind of anger.
On Sept. 18, Texas A&M University President Mark A. Welsh III announced his resignation amid the controversy.
For many in the academic sphere, the turmoil at Texas A&M was just one recent example of political headwinds influencing the workings of higher education and threatening academic freedom. From local, state-level legislation to national pushes by the Department of Education, many scholars are now worried that academic freedom is being eroded.
Academic freedom is the right to teach, discuss and research without fear of censorship or punishment. This freedom has been enshrined in higher education for decades due to the view that the freedom of ideas on campus fosters effective discussion and therefore academic excellence.
“(Faculty) should be able to pursue the truth about their field without fear of governmental intervention, and the reason why that is important is because we want to make sure that the research and the teachings of the institution aren’t influenced in biased ways,” said Dr. Ashley Stone, a clinical associate professor at the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at the Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.
The purpose of maintaining academic freedom is to prevent scholars from being controlled by external influences and to allow for a free flow of ideas and information that can benefit society and the academic community. Additionally, the presence of a strong tradition of academic freedom allows for teachers to teach comfortably without fears of repercus -
sions when covering controversial topics.
“At the maximalist level, I have the opinion that teachers at a public university should have as much freedom as they can possibly enjoy without necessarily indoctrinating or imposing a particular point of view on students,” History and Social Science Department Chair David Fisher said. “Students should hear different points of views. They can even be exposed to a teacher who has a single point of view, and as long as they aren’t penalized for not adopting that teacher’s point of view, I think it’s entirely appropriate for the teacher to express that. As a matter of educational philosophy, I don’t think we’re learning anything unless we’re actually challenged to examine our viewpoints.”
Public schools have always faced more state-level restrictions on what can be taught, while academic freedom tends to be much broader at institutions of higher education — though many are now raising alarms about a decrease of academic freedom at universities due to certain state-level legislation and national policy agendas.
“When we’re thinking about limitations on faculty members and higher education for many of them, it’s not just about what they’re teaching in their classrooms, but it’s also about the research that they’re able to pursue, how that moves their field forward, and that ultimately does also influence their teaching,”
As a matter of educational philosophy, I don’t think we’re learning anything unless we’re actually challenged to examine our viewpoints.
David Fisher History and Social Sciences Department Chair
Stone said. “Whereas at K-12 level, there’s a little bit more consistency in what the state has determined that the curriculum needs to be.”
The situation at Texas A&M highlighted how public, politically motivated pressure can threaten the careers of educators in higher education, potentially causing other professors to be more cautious with what topics they cover. The high-profile and rapid eruption of the situation could also leave some professors in fear of teaching parts of their courses that may be politically sensitive, leaving important knowledge gaps.
“The biggest concern is that one short video clip cost someone their job, one person officially, and two more people were removed from administrative positions, and then ultimately the president stepped down in the wake of all of this,” Stone said. “I think that sends a scary message.”
For many professors, the controversy paints a bleak picture for academic freedom, one where instructors must carefully teach long-standing courses to avoid contentious topics.
“Yes, it harms that person who lost their job, but it harms our students,” Stone said. “It harms the institution, and I think (that) if those things are harmed, it ultimately harms our state. That means that those who are coming through (and) graduating, who are doing all those things are going to lose value.”
Individual states have control
over their public universities through funding and legislation, though most universities have internal governance systems as well — ideally, these two “governing bodies” should be balanced in their abilities to support and control institutions. Recently, however, there have been more examples of state governments using legislation to intervene in the public school system in ways regarding curriculum, hiring and other facets of university operation. A new Texas bill serves as just one local example of this trend.
Texas Senate Bill 37, passed over the summer, came into effect Sept. 1 of this year. The bill increases the power of university governing boards at public universities, which are appointed by the governor, in making decisions about hiring and curriculum, and also decreases the power of faculty senates, among other things. Specifically, the new law gives the politically appointed governing board ultimate authority over curriculum changes. The main criticism of this legislation is that it increases political control over public universities, which could be seen as a challenge to academic freedom.
“I think a part of why people are concerned is because of the ways in which they’ve seen the legislature intervene into classrooms and the review of curriculum and syllabi in ways that are counter to what the field would consider best practices, and if that’s going to be the way that they implement the program, then it does severely limit academic freedom,” Stone said.
On a national level, the Department of Education is able to leverage its power to allocate financial rewards to promote programs and ideologies that it finds to be in the best interests of the nation. Recently, the Department has made rapid moves to create initiatives to promote “patriotic education” across the country, specifically regarding the subject of American history. Some have taken a cynical view of this approach, seeing this push by the De -
Recent actions in the political sphere have raised questions about academic freedom in education, especially universities.
TEXAS A&M
Recent firing over course content raised concerns about political interference in higher education
TEXAS SENATE BILL 37
Passed this summer, increases political control of public universities
“PATRIOTIC EDUCATION”
National initiative by Department of Education to promote a certain style of teaching around American history
THE “COMPACT”
Trump’s deal to universities promising financial benefit for meeting certain demands
partment as a way to control the historical narrative of the country and choke out dissent by financial means.
If we can find better platforms to talk to people about why academic freedom is important, why understanding different ideologies is important or (why) different perspectives on a topic are important, then I think we’ll end up in a good place.”
Ashley Stone Clinical Associate Professor in Education Policy
A rule proposed by the Department of Education on Sept. 17, 2025 describes creating a new priority that “focuses grant funds on programs that promote a patriotic education that cultivates citizen competency and informed patriotism.”
The same day, the Department of the Education announced the launch of the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, a coalition led by the America First Policy institute along with 40 other conservative organizations, including Turning Point USA and the Heritage Foundation. The coalition’s stated goal is to ”spearhead nationwide initiatives to engage students, educators, and communities in conversations about liberty, citizenship, and America’s enduring values” in the leadup to America’s 250th birthday. On Sept. 29, the Department of Education announced a new $153 million in grants through the American History and Civics Seminars Program, bringing the previous total of $7 million to $160 million. The program will be awarding grants towards programs promoting American history and civics education.
The president and the Department of Education have
largely framed their pushes to promote civics education as a way to develop a patriotic citizenry and commemorate the greatness of America in the leadup to the nation’s 250th birthday. Opponents claim that these efforts are part of a larger campaign to sanitize American history, citing past executive orders and actions — including the executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and his efforts to remove certain exhibits from Smithsonian museums — as examples of this “purge.”
“The concern with ‘patriotic education’ as it has been discussed in the current administration is that they want to limit people from being able to teach the truth about history, and if we don’t teach a complete history, then we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes we’ve made previously,” Stone said. “We’re doomed to repeat the harms that we’ve previously done rather than to learn from them, and I think that it’s really important that we’re being honest about the whole picture of the United States, the good and the bad, so that we can consider what are the best ways to move forward.”
Many critics of recent actions by the administration involving “patriotic education” point out that the America 250 Civics Education Coalition is entirely composed of conservative groups — though civics is not necessarily a partisan issue — and that “patriotic education” has an arbitrary definition. For some, these efforts represent an attempt by the national government to impose a certain ideology and view of history, threatening academic freedom by indirect means of monetary grants that universities may find vital and by promoting other partisan initiatives.
““If presented in a sort of abstract way — should public schools instruct their students in ‘patriotic virtues’ (and) respect for the Constitution, democracy and so forth — I don’t think anybody would object to (that education),” Fisher said. “I think the concern that people have right now is that
the money is attached to what many might consider a Republican coded set of values.”
On a broader scale, the current administration has chosen to take universities head-on in an effort to widely reshape higher education in America, engaging in legal battles and coercion to push certain institutions one way or another. Federal influence in private and public universities raises pressing questions about academic freedom, which many fear would be at risk if institutions had to answer to the government.
The administration has recently gone after universities like Harvard and Columbia University for alleged wrongful admissions practices, DEI programs and antisemitism, among other things. Threats include the freezing of federal funding and research grants and other major punitive measures. Some universities, like Columbia, Brown and UPenn have ended up reaching settlements with the administration, making concessions to stop the persecution. A new effort by the administration has taken this approach of negotiating deals with universities a step further.
In early October, the Trump administration sent out letters to nine major universities offering them to join a “compact” that would give them an advantage in federal funding in exchange for agreeing to certain demands laid out by the administration as a part of a broader effort to reshape higher education.
“(The administration) would ask these institutions to sign, and that would influence who they could admit to learn, how they do their admission, some of their parts of their admissions processes, sort of doing all this in favor of getting preferential treatment in terms of federal funding,” Stone said. “It’s the federal government (offering) rather than a stick this time, a carrot: ‘Here is a financial incentive to align with what we want you to teach and what we want you to research and study.’”
This compact is a new kind
of effort by the administration to change higher education, offering advantages in federal funding and a stronger, more direct relationship to the White House in exchange for caving to demands. These demands include a cap on international student admissions and an adherence to a stricter definition of gender and a requirement to remove institutions that “punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
As of writing, six of the nine initial universities have denied the offer, including MIT, Brown, USC, UPenn, Dartmouth and UVA. Brown’s president sent a rejection letter to the White House stating a concern that “the Compact by its nature and by various provisions would restrict academic freedom and undermine the autonomy of Brown’s governance.” The president has also invited several other universities — specifically WashU, Kansas and ASU — to possibly join the compact and may extend more invitations in the future to other universities.
Many onlookers have slammed the compact deal as a way for the government to infiltrate the higher education sphere and exert unprecedented influence and have openly called for all universities to reject the offer.
In such a tumultuous landscape for academic freedom, with challenges at the state and national levels, students, teachers and researchers are uncertain about the future of higher education in the US. However, the tradition of academic freedom has had a long and storied history in this country, and many are still willing to defend it.
“If we can find better platforms to talk to people about why academic freedom is important, why understanding different ideologies is important, or (why) different perspectives on a topic are important, then I think we’ll end up in a good place,” Stone said. “But in the meantime, I think it’s going to be a hard fight.”
Many say academic freedom is under pressure, mostly from political actions that threaten to weaken it.
From evenings spent tracing constellations to training astronauts, John Paul Yabraian ’92 has spent a lifetime chasing the stars. Now, he works to prepare crews for missions that will carry humanity back to the Moon.
By Doan Nguyen
John Paul Yabraian ‘92 loves looking up at the stars. Lying on his back, tracing the constellations with his fingertips, he would stare up at the sky for hours as a highschooler. And now, decades later, he watches the same stars, just for a different reason: training the people who are going to live among them.
Just a couple months ago, Yabraian watched as Crew 11— four astronauts he’d spent the past year training—rocket past the stratosphere. For Yabraian, launches like those, ones that he’s been a part of, are exhilarating. They’re the culmination of a journey that started with weekly Astronomy club meetings in the school planetarium in the 90s.
This winding career path, from space enthusiast to mission controller to astronaut trainer to his current role in the Artemis lunar program, spans 26 years, countless simulations, and an enduring love for space.
In his sophomore year, Yabraian, who used to keep to himself so he could focus on his studies, started to come out of his shell and explore what the school had to offer. Searching for interesting clubs, he stumbled upon a group of students huddled around an old telescope in the school’s observatory.
The Astronomy Club, filled with peers who also loved looking up at the night sky, became his community. They would discuss the visible constellations of the month, watch astronomical phenomena, and perform light shows with lasers and mirrors for friends and faculty.
Dr. Thomas K. McCarthy, the club sponsor, would give them opportunities to go on short field
trips to the McDonald’s Observatory in West Texas. A few times a year, Yabraiain and the rest of the Astronomy Club would drive up to Atoka, Oklahoma and set up camp in the middle of an open field. In the cold Oklahoma air, the group of star-fanatics would stay up all night watching the stars together.
“Dr. McCarthy didn’t have to do that stuff—take us on field trips to stargaze—but he loved it,” Yabraian said.“And he passed that same spirit to us.”
But despite his interest in space since he was young, Yabraian never thought he was going to be an astronomer after college. He definitely didn’t think that he would be at NASA.
At 25, Yabraian reluctantly took a mission control job at NASA, thinking he was going to try it out and maybe stay for a couple years. Yabraian remembers walking into the same control room where flight directors worked together to bring back the Apollo 13 mission safely. His eyes scanned the room filled with headsets, data plots and monitors. This was the room where history was made. And now, it was where Yabraian would work.
“I was part of a new generation
that has accomplished so much, and I wanted to carry that forward,” Yabraian said. “Getting this opportunity, I just found myself on a continuum of responsibility.”
Becoming a flight controller isn’t something that just happens, though. Yabraian spent three years getting fully certified, starting as a back room controller who monitors the thermal system on the International Space Station (ISS). The job comes with immense pressure: dealing with sudden emergencies, being responsible for multi-million dollar spacecraft and most importantly, taking care of the people hundreds of miles away from Earth.
But what Yabraian remembers the most about mission control weren’t the stressful moments. It was the caring culture.
“It’s actually not a cutthroat environment,” he said. “Everyone there is working towards the same mission. You want everyone else to succeed, because their success equals your success, which equals the mission’s success.”
In 2003, less than a year after his full certification, Yabraian felt that caring community come together to support each other after a di-
Throughout his career, Yabraian has been involved with space in several different ways. Here are the highlights of his career.
As a dedicated member of this club, Yabraian spent countles evenings stargazing in the school observatory. These nights sparked his fascination for his space.
A couple years after college, Yabraian joined NASA’s mission control, where communication was vital. Here, behind the curtains, he learned the teamwork needed for spaceflight.
saster. On Feb. 1, Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on its descent back from the ISS, killing all seven astronauts on board. After the incident, former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara drove down to the Mission Control Room and talked with the flight operators, giving them their support.
“It’s actually not a cutthroat environment. Everyone there is working towards the same mission. You want everyone else to succeed, because their success equals your success, which equals the mission’s success.”
John Paul Yabraian ‘92 Thermal Systems Instructor
Their visit made Yabraian realize how significant and important his work was; there’s a lot of weight that comes with the job.
He knew how diligently the astronauts worked in preparation for space travel because he had been helping them by running elaborate simulations for them in his field. After working for a couple years in mission control, he took another step into a line of work that he found more sustainable and meaningful. He started to train the astronauts themselves.
Many know that the astronaut selection process is very meticulous. When Yabraian started training crew members on life support and thermal systems, he realized how competent his students were. Some had medical degrees or PhDs and others were fighter pilots and Navy Seals.
“On this particular thing, on my part of the space station, I knew more than them,” Yabraian said.
“But I had to be confident in my own abilities. These people challenge your knowledge and ask deep questions, and you have to know
Transitioning from the control room to training simulations, Yabraian began working directly with astronauts and prepared them for orbit in a year-long course.
enough to earn their trust when you answer them.”
For a year and a half, Yabraian worked with a crew and trained them in his field so they could live full time on the ISS. He believes the biggest challenge for aspiring astronauts is the sheer amount of information they have to take in. So he drilled the information in them, spending time with his mentees and growing closer to them as the term progressed. A few weeks ago, a group of four that he spent the past year with launched to stay on the ISS for the next couple of months. For two members of the crew, it was their first time ever going up to space.
“Anytime there’s a rocket launch, I get a little bit nervous,” Yabraian said. “But I’m also really proud once they get up there, because I know how hard those astronauts have trained for it.”
Today, Yabraian is part of a new NASA project, the Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the moon and eventually establish a permanent presence there. Serving as a liaison between NASA and large commercial space companies building the lunar landers, Yabraian is drawing on decades of experience with the ISS to monitor designs and make sure they meet NASA’s operational requirements.
“It’s been a job that’s evolved so much that it continues to challenge me,” Yabraian said. “There’s always been something new to work on.”
This year marks the 25th anniversary of continuous human presence on the ISS; for Yabraian’s entire adult life, there have been people living in space. And in 2030, the ISS will be retired. The Artemis program is the next phase for both NASA and the development of human spaceflight. Yabraian hopes that by the time he retires, space will be more accessible to all.
Yabraian will always be mesmerized by the night sky, just like he was 34 years ago in the school observatory.
But now, he knows that among the stars, his trainees are up there in the ISS, looking down on Earth. On him.
Now, as a liaison for NASA’s Artemis Program, he connects big commerical companies together as they work to the ultimate goal of sending humans to constantly be on the moon.
With one of the lowest student-teacher ratios in the state at 8:1, St. Mark’s fosters a more personal relationship in the classroom.
By Rishik Kapoor and Lucas Pei
Twenty-eight tests to grade. Twenty-eight packets of homework to go over. At her old public school, Teri Broom felt overwhelmed with more than two dozen students to manage each day. At St. Mark’s, things are different.
The 8:1 student teacher ratio at St. Mark’s is one of the school’s most unique traits, allowing students to benefit from more personalized instruction through deeper relationships with faculty members. In fact, studies by the National Institutes of Health have demonstrated that lower student teacher ratios improve student outcomes and achievement — especially in lower grades.
This ratio marks a drastic difference between St. Mark’s and public schools, where, according to the U.S. News and World Report, the average student teacher ratio in Texas is 15:1.
First grade teacher Teri Broom used to teach a class of 28 fifth graders at a public school in Coppell. For her, the contrast between her old teaching job and current one here is stark.
“There were very few breaks in the day,” Broom said. “I taught all subjects. It was a self-contained classroom, so I taught English, science, social studies and math — everything every day, and the schedule was the same every day.”
Broom now teaches 16 first graders, allowing herself to give each student the attention they deserve. She feels a lot less overwhelmed after coming to here, now able to focus on building stronger connections with her students.
“I feel like a weight has been lifted. In general, regardless of grade level, having smaller classes is a gift.
BY
You can just do so much more, and you’re not spread so thin,” Broom said. “You can make better use of your time because you’re not having to grade as much.”
Teaching a smaller class is not only beneficial for teachers, but for students as well.
“I am making better progress with the kids because I can make sure that I give one-on-one attention to the kids to get them back on track if they’re struggling with a concept,” Broom said.
Junior Collin Ku takes AP Chinese with only four other students. He finds that every person can participate fully and receive more attention.
“(Class) is more like having a slightly larger tutoring session, where there is a lot more attention per student,” Ku said.“ Whenever we do a class activity, like reading the textbook, each person gets to do a chunk of it. You won’t run out of
At the start of the 2025-2026 school year, St. Mark’s had the following statistics for its student body and faculty: BOYS ENROLLED
material to talk about.”
Ku also finds that this intimate classroom setting allows him to build strong connections with his fellow classmates.
“If you have a question, usually your classmates will be able to help you. It’s very much brotherly,” Ku said. “Obviously, everyone already knows each other, but we’re all good friends instead of just classmates.”
The small student teacher ratio highlights the school’s approach to teaching and mentorship. A vast group of teachers and advisors, such as librarians and admissions officers, are involved in students’ lives, whether through direct classroom instruction or not.
“The ratio symbolizes how we value the boys and their education by ensuring that they have qualified, enthusiastic and engaged faculty leading them, not only through content, which is super important, but through all facets of the Path to
I am making better progress with the kids because I can make sure that I give oneon-one attention to the kids to get them back on track if they’re struggling with a concept.
Teri Broom First Grade Teacher
Manhood,” Director of Student Recruitment Korey Mack ’00 said.
The ratio is also one of the most emphasized facts about the school to prospective students and parents.
“It’s a commonly inquired about question from families,” Mack said. “We’re also mindful of the number of students we aim to enroll. Those are conversations that our Director of Enrollment Management has with the Headmaster and the Executive Team. They set the enrollment target for the following year and our job is to meet that target.”
Beyond just an admissions statistic, Mack noted that the ratio ultimately reflects the school’s broader goal for its students.
“I think it speaks to our commitment to the boys, to their development,” Mack said. “
AVERAGE CLASS SIZE
“Our English language gets a really bad rap that everything doesn’t follow the rules and that all of our words are spelled with crazy derivatives, but actually, about 85 percent of our language could be sounded out if you know the rules of phonics,” Gregor said.
Nationally, many educators have seen the value in phonics education, and this has been reflected in legislation.
stated in House Bill 3, passed in 2019. Many other states have passed literacy laws in the past five years as well, marking a gradual push towards more science-based reading education across the nation.
In the lower school teachers are tasked with the objective of building the young students into strong readers and writers, and their teaching methods can sometimes include phonics education, among other methods.
teacher Teri Broom said.
Because all students are new to the school in first grade, reading abilities differ from student to student. Some schools don’t teach basic reading skills until first grade while others prioritize reading skills.
“Even within the boys who are reading, they have definitely a range of ability and experience,” Broom said.
In Texas, all public schools are required to use a phonics curriculum from kindergarten through third grade, based on requirements
“When they arrive and they get here within the first couple weeks of school, we have them bring to us level readers to kind of find out what level they’re on,” first grade
Regardless of their background, most students come to the school with knowledge of phonics. Thus, language arts teachers such as Broom focus on other aspects of reading fundamentals.
“In general, they come to us with those skills, so we don’t have to do a lot of that. We just kind of have to reinforce it and assess, but not quite to the same depth that a good Montessori school or good kindergarten would do,” Broom said. Reading instruction is vastly different across the world. Traditional methods of group readings vary from a more individual learning in a Montessori program. In this spectrum, the school tries a variety of approaches to better help each student.
“I do think it’s a pretty rich program, just because there’s so many facets to it,” Broom said. “If you’re not getting them hooked with one idea, one thing that we’re doing in reading, then maybe you’re getting them in another way.”
As more children are exposed to social media at a younger age, making reading a more exciting experience becomes increasingly important. Transforming the “chore” into a passion leads students to improve fluency and comprehension.
“They each have to hold the book (when reading).” Broom said. “They have to criss-cross applesauce. And then they put the book between them, and then one person reads a page, then the other.” PHONICS, from Page 9
As jobs in STEM industries become more popular, some students may choose to sacrifice balance between STEM and the humanities, raising questions about the potential benefits and drawbacks of such a choice.
By Michael Chang and Jay Panta
According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCSE), in the last 10 years, the number of computer and information science degrees has gone up 129 percent. Engineering degrees have increased by 51 percent. Biology and biomedical science degrees have increased by 37 percent. In total, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) accounted for nearly 22 percent of all degrees handed out during the 2021-22 graduation year.
But these changes are no surprise given the enticing six-figure salaries often promised to STEM graduates.
Currently, an overwhelming number of industries are moving toward prioritizing STEM talent, with some companies like Meta even offering $100 million bonuses to top AI researchers. This shift has caused students across the country to gravitate towards STEM majors, resulting in a lack of enrollment for humanities and liberal arts majors — again, according to the NCSE, from 2020 to 2022, total humanities
B.A.’s dropped below 200,000 and then fell again to 170,000, a sharp 7.3 percent decrease.
As this gap widens further, students face the difficult decision of sacrificing balance between STEM and the humanities for the sake of commiting to STEM and specializing in one field. By doing so, many hope to one day land lucrative jobs at prestigious tech companies.
Associate Headmaster John Ashton believes that this pressure largely stems from a scarcity mindset — college students perceive STEM jobs as extremely difficult to obtain, which then pushes them to abandon other facets of their lives.
“The scarcity mindset is having the mindset where there is a finite amount of resources, and you’re going to have to do whatever you need to do to secure those resources for yourself,” Ashton said. “Therefore, you’re not going to place a higher value on community, social life or self.”
This mindset can be risky, especially given the fact that job markets are volatile. Although hard work is typically rewarded by, for example, a job at a reputable company, interviews or admission are never guaranteed. There are also challenges discerning the authenticity of the pursuit of interests to further one’s career or college placement. Often, those interests are only propelled because of what one believes the interest might yield.
“There are only so many seats at a given college or job, and therefore, you (have the) mindset: ‘here I am, a student at St. Mark’s,’” Ashton said. “‘Everything I do will decide how I’m going to have my experience in school equip me to be more competitive than whoever else is applying at these schools or jobs. But really, what are we willing to trade for that possible — not even guaranteed — interview or admission?”
Max Yan ‘25, a freshman at Stanford University, has witnessed this unspoken pressure to “hyperfocus” on STEM classes at university in hopes of one day creating a start-up. However, despite pursuing a math major, he still engages in various English and humanities classes to maintain balance in his life.
“I think there are definitely a lot of people who try to do everything
they can to secure a job, and sometimes, it becomes unhealthy,” Yan said. “I don’t think I’m necessarily in that camp right now, but it is something on my mind.”
Ashton points out that the intrinsic good in different experiences outweighs the tangible and material goods in finding a high-paying but often unfulfilling job in STEM.
“I think it’s important to acknowledge (the tradeoff) and then maintain autonomy and make decisions about what you’re going to prioritize,” Ashton said. “It’s college admissions now, but after that, it’s going to be a job. And after that, well, it’s a slippery slope. We should think through that framework and ask ourselves: ‘What experiences do we want to have?’”
Yan similarly stresses that the purpose of college is more than just preparing students for the job market. There are many different classes — both STEM and humanities — at students’ disposal to explore their interests.
“The point of college education is not just to get a job,” Yan said. “There’s a lot more to college than that.”
Fortunately, the school prepares students to make these sorts of long-term decisions by presenting different opportunities through
It’s college admissions now, but after that, it’s going to be a job. And after that, well, it’s a slippery slope. We should think through that framework and ask ourselves: ‘What experiences do we
John Ashton
Associate Headmaster
classes, clubs and extracurricular activities.
“We hope to equip you guys with the agency to make choices,” Ashton said. “St. Mark’s is a school that’s going to make all sorts of opportunities available to (students), so you really (get to) pursue those things that pique your curiosity.”
The Character and Leadership education also encourages students to chase fulfilling and balanced lives. At the end of the day, finding meaning in a career is far more important than any materialistic reward gained from accomplishing some goal.
“We continue to place priority on developing your character and who you are as young men and equipping you to apply those concepts in your life today and into the future,” Ashton said. “The concepts of this framework come together to inform daily decisions that each of us make that will help us then continue to move towards a sense of balance.”
By Dominic Liaw
Time consuming.
Expensive.
Maybe even embarrassing.
Yet somehow students with extended time are perceived as lucky.
It’s not a quick email sent out to a teacher requesting extra time on a test. The process of applying for extended time is thorough, detailed and time consuming.
“Our students who have been approved for extended time have it after going through a really comprehensive process that many times takes a couple of months and both working with a psychologist
outside of St. Mark’s in the community,” Director of Academic Success Julie Percherski said. “We talk to their teachers, we look at their grades, we look at their emotional wellbeing, as well as their academic achievement and success.”
And it doesn’t simply come down to a diagnosis or recommendation. Pechersky and the wellness department look for the best approach for each individual student, oftentimes not involving extended time. The suggestion varies even within a medical diagnosis, depending on a multitude of factors related to processing challenges.
“Some of the boys here, if they were in a different environment, they may not be as happy,” Pechersky said. “We have some students with social anxiety. They don’t need extended time, whereas maybe somebody with generalized anxiety who suffers really bad test anxiety, they might need it.”
Even students approved for extended time go through different processes like meeting with therapists or psychologists. Autistic students require different care than students with ADHD. Thus extra time on a test can’t cover all bases.
“Extended time is one little
piece of treating any diagnosis. It is not gonna solve all the problems that a student or that person is potentially dealing with with that diagnosis. It’s one area that can help,” Pechersky said.
Not all kids with processing challenges require extended time. Factors such as severity and environment may impact a decision.
“It’s really kind of a fact finding mission that we go on when somebody comes in,” Pechersky said. “Because to go through that process and the psycho-educational, it’s very time consuming, but it’s also very expensive for the family.”
As of 2019, only around three percent of students use extended time on assessments in the country, yet a misconception of unfairness remains.
“It’s not just at St. Mark’s you know. The state of the world can cause different levels of anxiety or trauma or COVID, for example, we saw a big spike in anxiety, not just at St. Mark’s, but all over the world. Just because of the situation,” Pecherskey said. “Environmental factors can play a role too.”
PAGE 19
LPAGE 18
‘The Beldham’ finds fear in familial relationships
Film studies teacher Mark Scheibmeir worked with director Angela Gulner to realease a new horror film, “The Beldham.”
The Americana music group the Old 97’s recently received a lifetime award for its music.
Marksmen and teachers remedy attention differences with novel approaches.
By Emiliano Mayo Meíja, Armaan Newaskar and Wes Jackson
According to the 2022 National Survey of Children’s Health, an estimated 7.1 million children aged 3 to 17 have Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This statistic accounts for around 11.4 percent of children in this age group, meaning almost one in every nine kids can have ADHD. In class, ADHD can cause a lack of concentration and an increase in hyperactivity, leading students to struggle with academics or balance outside of school.
“ADHD is basically a lack of dopamine in your brain,” Director of Marksman Wellness Center Dr. Gabby Reed said. “Dopamine helps us pay attention to things that we care a lot about.”
To be able to keep students, both with
and without ADHD, engaged, Reed believes that teachers have to use different tactics to rest the students’ minds, especially during long periods.
“In Middle School, a lot of teachers give a break in the middle of class,” Reed said. “They have a 10-minute break, so they do two 30-minute sections most of the time. Teachers are encouraged to use 70-minute periods to do things that are kind of out of the box.”
Out-of-the-box teaching includes interactive activities such as debates, discussions, group projects and presentations. These interactive activities help students dive deeper into the curriculum and enjoy learning new material while keeping them active.
Reed said attention problems become more noticeable during longer class periods, especially if the lesson involves extended lectures or repetitive work.
“Let’s be honest, not every class is super interesting,” Reed said. “So for an ADHD student, a 70-minute lecture can feel like climbing uphill.”
Even for students without ADHD, Reed
explains, the brain’s attention span is limited. She supports the use of the Pomodoro method, a study method based on 25-minute intervals of focus and short breaks in between.
“After around 25 minutes, attention starts to decline for everyone,” Reed said. “That’s not just ADHD brains, that’s all brains. But ADHD students feel that drop off even more sharply.”
Despite the challenges associated with them, Reed said she believes the long periods ultimately benefit students by helping them build endurance for future scenarios.
“College classes are 60 to 90 minutes, and life is full of long meetings,” Reed said. “We have to train our brains to handle that kind of focus. It’s hard, but it’s preparation for the real world.”
For junior Caleb Ratcliff, working at places other than school, such as Central Market, helps him focus when he needs to get work done or study for an upcoming test.
See Students, Page 18
MCDONALD’S WEEK
This year’s McDonald’s Week will feature classic activities and exciting new features.
GRANDPARENTS’ DAY
On the last day before Thanksgiving Break, grandparents are invited to campus.
PAGE 21
Seniors take new interest for a spin
Amid senior-year stress, students turn to DJing as a creative outlet and a new form of self-expression.
It hasn’t been three months into my junior year, yet I’m already finding myself nodding off in class and forgetting to turn in assignments.
Part of it is adjusting to the bigger workload, higher expectations and greater responsibilities, but that doesn’t explain why I’m staying up well past midnight on most days when I don’t have to.
So I designed an experiment to try and solve this issue. For the past two weeks, I’ve been my own guinea pig.
The idea was simple: for two weeks, implement a study technique and observe the results after the time was over. For my study technique of choice, I picked the Pomodoro method, a system where I took a five-minute break after 25 minutes of work and took a 15-minute break after an hour-and-ahalf.
For the first day, everything went without a hitch: I wrapped up my work closer to 10 p.m. and promptly went to sleep. The next day, though, I made a mistake.
I put my phone next to me on my desk while I worked.
Assignments that should’ve taken 30 minutes took 45. Breaks that were meant to be five minutes suddenly were 10. My Pomodoro technique had completely fallen out of the window, all because of my phone.
I finished up my work at 11:30 p.m. I fell asleep in History the next day. I did not pick up on the nuances of the Articles of Confederation.
I hate to admit it, but I allowed this pattern to continue for the rest of the week. My experiment had not gone as planned, and nothing much had changed: I was still tired, and my grades were still suffering because of it.
So, when the next week came rolling around, I set out with a new sense of determination. This week would be test-heavy, and I would be taking the PSAT on Thursday, so getting my work done early was paramount.
I didn’t change much from the previous week except for one key detail: I took my phone and put it in another room. What seemed like a small detail turned out to completely transform my experience, as I repeatedly finished up my work early every night and was able to get adequate sleep for my testing.
Essentially, I realized that I had no discipline when it came to my phone. If it was around me, I was eventually going to get on it, and once I was on it, good luck to anyone trying to get me off it.
But by removing my phone from my reach and sticking to a specified plan, I was able to properly concentrate on my work.
And, although I love watching Instagram reels in between math problems, I think I’ll be keeping my phone far, far away from me when I’m trying to work in the future.
Or at least until I get to that 15-minute break. Then anything’s fair game.
From grandparents and single parents to blended and adoptive households, families take countless forms. No matter the structure, each finds its own ways to love and support one another. These unique family dynamics shape not only home life but the school community, showing that love and connection come in many shapes.
By Doan Nguyen, Kevin Ho, Christian Warner and Michael Jimenez
Anyone can describe a house: four walls, a roof, a door and windows. But picturing the family living inside is much more complex.
The idea of a “traditional family” has evolved. Some households have eight children; others, just one. Some are led by a single mother, and another by two fathers. Some families span multiple generations with grandparents or even great-grandparents under the same roof. And each of these families shape the unique fabric of the school.
They don’t need to follow a cookie-cutter structure with stereotypical roles. They are where arguments happen, reconciliations are made and love endures unconditionally. And while families have different compositions, they each find their way to thrive.
There’s no single way to be a family. Only countless ways to make it work.
There wasn’t always someone at home to open the door for him. The little key in his pocket welcomed him after school on most days. He was in fourth grade when this change happened. Young, but old enough to notice the newly quiet house.
Junior Noah Park’s father had taken up a job in New York, leaving throughout the week to work and stay there. His mother had four kids and four dogs to take care of. The oldest, Jake ’23 and Owen ‘25, attended St. Mark’s while Noah didn’t at the time. And the youngest, Ollie, required special attention; he was blind.
So when his mother drove Owen, Jake and Ollie to school each day, Noah understood what it meant for him, his new responsibilities. He rode his bike, let himself in and learned early on what it meant to manage on his own. He wanted his brothers to have the best opportunities, even if it came at his own inconvenience.
Each boy grew a sense of independence; there was only so much attention that could be given with the parents’ vast responsibilities.
“I’ve always felt like I’m my own person and have to create something for myself,” Noah said. “My dad has definitely helped pave the way for me.”
With her husband hundreds of miles away, Mrs. Park kept herself busy, driving the kids across town, helping Ollie with his needs and holding the house together through exhaustion and love.
Noah saw it all.
“I don’t get angry about them being gone,” Noah said. “I understand what they’re doing. It’s for us.”
Both parents are second-generation Asian Americans who knew little about convenience. Their parents (Noah’s grandparents) had worked tirelessly to build a life in a new country. That same resilience carried forward. Both Mr. and Mrs. Park relied on their siblings, something instilled in Noah and his brothers. Now, with Jake and Owen away at college, the house feels quieter, but the lessons remain.
“I’ve understood what they’re sacrificing is what we’re going to gain,” Noah said.
The Parks have learned that stability isn’t necessarily about everyone being under the same roof. For Noah, that means honoring his parents’ sacrifices by making his own to help everyone succeed.
“The sad part is that, at times, I probably spend more effort on my students than I do for my son,” Westbury said.
As a single mother whose job revolves around guiding discussions between teenage stu -
On some days, History and Social Science Teacher Dr. Jerusha Westbury’s fourth-grade son Oliver mows their yard. On other days, he might vacuum the house. Or unload and reload the dishwasher after each meal with her. Because on those days during the week, she comes home exhausted.
dents around Harkness tables at school, she knows that balancing her family and work responsibilities can leave her energy levels depleted.
And more often than not, it can feel as if she’s never really leaving work.
Oliver has learned to navigate his mornings by himself—getting ready or finding tasks that
need to be done around the house without being asked. But despite her son’s independence, Westbury has set the goal of sitting down with him once a week to go over his schoolwork and assignments together.
“I want him to cultivate the behavior of looking around and seeing what needs to be done and proactively doing it,” Westbury said. “I think he’s become more responsible for remembering his own schedule and making sure he has the materials for it.”
That absence of a co-parent can transform nearly small decisions into internal debates. The questions that other “traditional” couples can hash out together— is this a big deal or not? When do we stand up for him? When do we not?—can echo unanswered in Westbury’s mind.
“It’s just having somebody in the household to talk about my son with,” she said. “I don’t get that alternate perspective, which means I may not always be helping him the best way I could be helping him.”
Yet within this single-parent dynamic, Oliver has grown to become his mom’s strongest advocate, because when St. Mark’s Father-Son events roll around, she shows up as one of the few mothers among fathers.
“I’ll almost chicken out,” Westbury said. “And he says, ‘No, come on, we’re gonna go. You’re doing the work of my dad. You can go to this dad event at school.’”
She doesn’t know of too many children in his grade who also come from single-parent homes. And she knows he probably feels a little different from the rest of classmates in that sense. But whenever she might waver, her son pulls her through with him. The community welcomes them both.
He was 6 years old when his parents divorced. Too young to understand those changes.
“It’s just the way things were,” senior Spencer Hopkin said.
Two homes an hour apart but there was never a disconnect.
At first, he and his four siblings stayed with his mom in Flower Mound for most of the time. The board games and movie nights and Bible studies kept the family together.
“My mom did a great job… there was never a moment when I felt unwanted,” Spencer said.
As he grew older, Spencer began to realize his mother’s position, her responsibilities: a single mother raising five kids. His brother Taylor Hopkin ‘20, just seven years older than Spencer, stepped into a greater role. He glued everyone together as his mother struggled and questioned how she could do it. To Spencer, there weren’t any gaps that his mom or dad couldn’t fill because of their circumstances or responsibilities; it was just that his brother guided him instead. He taught Spencer how to shave and how to do his homework or just be there to talk to.
On Spencer’s first day at school, his name resonated in the Great Hall after Taylor, the former Student Council president, commended him during his Convocation speech. It gave him the confidence to find his place.
“He was always looking out for me, and he did everything he could as a brother to be there whether I asked for his help or it was apparent I needed it,” Spencer said.
Every other weekend, the
St. Mark’s is no different than a blood family. We’re just related in different ways, but the bonds are just as strong. We spend so much time together, it’s almost impossible not to become a
family.”
Korey Mack ‘00 Director of Student Recruitment
kids would stay at their dad’s two-bedroom apartment. Spencer and his twin sister slept in sleeping bags beside their father’s bed, Taylor on the couch, and his two older sisters in the other bedroom. It was cramped but cherished. He remembers playing football against his brother with their dad quarterbacking their showdown and the time his father bought supplies for a paper-airplane contest which consumed their entire Saturday. Spencer doesn’t remember who won or lost; in his mind, they’re all just memories that make him smile.
Yet in this dual-house divide, the family grew closer. But they were just an hour away from an entirely different dynamic.
Whenever junior Gregory Cunningham gets into an argument with his twin sister, Liliana, they open their phones to look at the date. On odd days, Gregory sits in the front seat on the way to school, picks whatever show he wants to watch on the TV and gets the keys to the car. But when he wakes up the next morning, his sister wins the days’ sibling fights by shoving her screensaver in his face—it’s an even day of the month.
To minimize arguments, the pair decided to split their chores and privileges perfectly in half, recognizing the calendar date
hold, especially for their daughter. The pair enrolled Liliana into The Hockaday School, surrounding her with classmates and role models she could easily communicate with and look up to. For mother-daughter dances, they’d ask a close family friend to substitute in as Liliana’s plus one.
And for Gregory, he’s never felt that absence of a mother figure. Whenever forms require him to put down the contact information for both of his parents, he automatically crosses out ‘Mom’ and writes another ‘Dad’ instead. It’s not that he’s focusing on his family’s differences; that’s just what’s been normal to him for his entire life.
“I always get asked ‘Who’s the mom, and who’s the dad?’ Gregory said. “And it doesn’t really apply to my family; there’s no specific role that gets assigned.”
To the Cunninghams, home means unconditional support, where all worries are welcomed and differences are understood. They’re an atypical family, but their values are the same as others.
“As parents, we’re their guides,” Michael said. “We guide them to be good people. To find their passion. To make the right decisions. That’s the best you could ever hope for as a parent.”
Growing up, Korey Mack ‘00 was the youngest person at home
as their law. The twins’ parents, Bennett and Michael, have always put an emphasis on familial communication.
In the Cunningham household, family dinners are mandatory. Even if Liliana has an evening field hockey game or Michael’s shift is running late, the family believes it’s essential to sit with each other for dinner. Cooking for the family every evening, Bennett has the kids put away their phones and encourages them to talk about their days, whether they were good or bad.
“Growing up isn’t easy, and it’s only gotten harder,” Bennett said. “I want our kids to be able to talk to us about anything: problems, concerns, joys. I want them to trust us.”
This openness becomes especially important in a household that doesn’t fit the traditional mold. When the twins were younger, Bennett and Michael had worried about the lack of a motherly presence in the house -
“We’re all related in love, whether we’re related in blood or not,” Mack said. That philosophy came full circle when Mack’s father legally adopted Mack’s 7-year-old niece — a child who needed the same kind of care that Mack once received. Watching his dad step up and be a father decades later showed him that love can make any family whole.
Now, Mack has three children of his own who live with their mom, seeing them twice a month. When they’re together, he insists on having the same family dinner rules that he grew up with: no screens and real conversation.
Just like how his grandparents and extended family cared for him, Mack wants to make sure his children remember that they’re loved by an expansive network of aunts, uncles and grandparents.
Mack notes that this familial network expands to the school as well; any Marksman can lean on another. As a former student, Mack has experienced the brotherly bond with his fellow classmates firsthand.
“St. Mark’s is no different than a blood family,” Mack said. “We’re just related in different ways, but the bonds are just as strong. We spend so much time together, it’s almost impossible not to become a family.”
Brandy Schumann, SMU’s counseling program Clinical Professor and Internship Director, emphasizes that one of the keys to maintaining a healthy family structure is simply having open dialogue — being able to just talk about the things that otherwise won’t be brought up elsewhere.
“So many parents now, I think, didn’t have a lot of communication with their own parents,” Schumann said. “And the reality is that there’s a lot of taboo topics that parents just didn’t talk to their kids about, and so having some of those conversations, but having them in developmentally appropriate ways are helpful.”
But Schumann also notes that non-traditional households shouldn’t automatically be seen through a negative lens, as she believes some possess unique strengths that are often overlooked when such assumptions are made.
by more than 50 years. And even his grandparents weren’t the oldest generation in the household; Mack grew up with his great-grandmother and great uncle, too. His grandparents adopted Mack from his parents, who were young and couldn’t raise him by themselves.
There was always someone telling him a story, offering advice and teaching him life lessons. There was always someone caring for him.
He never felt he was missing anything, even though his parents weren’t the ones tucking him in at night. His grandfather ran a limousine business, employing extended family members who became Mack’s chauffeurs, caregivers and safety net.
As the Director of Student Recruitment, Mack works with families of all configurations — single parents, separated families, adopted children. And his own upbringing taught him that that family doesn’t require an exact structure.
“We don’t want to just assume these families are struggling,” Schumann said. “There’s a lot of very healthy ones that I think we could stand to learn from. I do think that sometimes, and when it’s a family of divorce, you’ll sometimes see a child promoted to a more powerful position, and so they can become the parent’s confidant.”
And these families don’t exist in a vacuum. From Schumann’s perspective, modern cultural shifts advocating for inclusivity and diversity have brought more attention to the matter — a reminder that at the very least, “the norm” has become more expansive than once suggested.
“There is a lot of diversity in families,” Schumann said. “We kind of compare ourselves to what we think we’re supposed to be doing. But I also think that now, there’s a little bit more representation of, ‘Oh, a family isn’t always two parents and a child and a dog and a white picket fence.’”
Director Angela Gulner and film studies teacher
Mark Scheibmeir have worked together to produce a new horror film.
By Kiran Parikh and Luke Nguyen
The word beldham has many meanings: an old hag, a beautiful lady, a monster that feeds on children.
For screenwriter and director Angela Gulner, it means something else entirely.
“The Beldham,” a psychological horror film, isn’t built around some sudden horrific happening, social experiment or undead uprising.
It’s inspired by Gulner’s grandmother.
“When my (grandmother’s health) started declining fairly rapidly and I saw how my mom and my aunt reacted to her health failing, I saw that role reversal that so often happens between parent and child,” Gulner said. “All of the feelings that I felt while seeing the relationship between mother and daughters change is what’s really underneath the film.”
The feature follows Harper, a single mother, returning with her 6-month-old child to her mother’s family home. Struggling with postpartum depression (depression after childbirth), she starts to believe that there’s an evil, supernatural presence that is living in the house and trying to steal her baby. As the movie continues, Harper’s anxiety and paranoia grow as she struggles to protect her child and faces the skepticism of her housemates.
Gulner began writing the script in early 2021, going through countless drafts before landing on one that she felt encapsulated the heavy themes she sought to convey. Even so, when it finally was time to film, Gulner was still making changes.
“I was probably making tweaks to the script on set to be honest,” Gulner said. “Being my first feature, it’s scary to put my art out into the world (or) anything that I’ve made and worked on.”
Shooting began in Feb. 2023, and without a substantial budget, Gulner had to keep it to 15 days. For reference, shooting on a typical set takes months.
“It was a whirlwind,” Gulner said. “We only had 10 days to prepare, and that meant we really
had to show up super, super prepared and know exactly what we needed to get done that day. Having actors that were pros — really well prepared and that could just show up, get into it and go — was super essential.”
Gulner and her cinematographer, Ksusha Genenfeld, designed the film’s visual language in a way that simultaneously followed the tight schedule and added to the visuals.
Rather than using the time-consuming traditional tech-
When you’re making art, feeling safe enough to make a mistake or try something that doesn’t work is really important.
Angela Gulner Director of “The Beldham”
niques of wide shots followed by close-ups on every character, Gulner and Genenfeld focused on the lead actress and played with negative space, reinforcing the idea that Harper was confined and stuck within the house.
“I was nervous working with Patricia Heaton, who has Emmys, and Corbin Bernsen, who’s been working in the industry for 40 years,” Gulner said. “It can be intimidating. Having Mark there and two of my best friends in leading roles was just really grounding for
STUDENTS, from Page 15
“It makes me feel at home, even if I take my meds and really try to focus, when I go somewhere else,” Ratcliff said. “It doesn’t have to be Central Market, but (being in public) makes me take initiative. When I’m in a formal place, I have to take my own initiative and do the work.”
However, balance is still an issue that students with ADHD have to overcome. Whether it’s school, sports or friends, trying to maintain a balanced schedule brings many challenges. Ratcliff, however, tries to make the best of his multiple responsibilities.
“It’s really hard to balance sometimes, but I think sports help in the sense that they are my break from school because sports are my break before I have to go home and do all my work,” Ratcliff said.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, taking breaks for relaxing hobbies is essential to relieve the pressures of school and improve mental stability.
“I’ll go in and paint during free periods sometimes, I think that whole room and everything is just a good mental break from work,” Ratcliff said.
While sports are physicially demanding, Ratcliff, a committed row-
er, finds comfort in the intensity.
“Rowing is probably my favorite thing I do,” Ratcliff said. “Just being out in the water and being kind of away from all the stresses of school is extremely helpful.”
With so many challenges, the school tries to offer as much support as possible to ensure that all students are manage their lives.
“The counseling office has done an incredible job, especially since they’re the ones that really diagnosed me and finished my tests,” Ratcliff said.
Ratcliff emphasizes the quality of the school’s wellness center, as they were able to help him get
me and helped me feel safe and confident enough to really go for it on set.”
Gulner’s husband, film studies teacher Mark Scheibmeir, was an instrumental part in the making of “The Beldham,” which will be released onto streaming platforms Nov. 7. Scheibmeir was the producer who, according to Gulner, “made it all happen.”
Being a producer meant a number of different things. He did the financial heavy lifting for the project, allowing Gulner to focus on being present with the actors at all times. In post-production, his experience with editing greatly supported the creative shaping of the film.
“I was involved in pretty much every step of the journey, whether it’s giving notes to her on the writing, raising money for the film, helping decide who the crew would be, helping with the editing process or managing sales and distribution,” Scheibmeir said. “I was always there, not just as a sounding board, but also leading the charge occasionally.”
But just as importantly, with Scheibmeir around, Gulner felt comfortable.
The Beldham began its festival run in Oct. 2024, premiering at the 57th Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, and it later screened at the Austin Film Festival later that month.
“Hopefully, if I’ve done my job right, you can rewatch the film and have a totally different experience watching it than you did the first time because you know what’s actually happening versus what we’re presenting is happening,” Gulner said. “One of the classic references for this kind of film is “The Sixth Sense.” There’s this huge twist out at the end that reframes everything we see.”
For Gulner, that element of reinterpretation isn’t just part of the story. It reflects how she approaches filmmaking itself. She sees each creative choice as a risk that might change the film’s meaning once the full picture comes together.
“When you’re making art, feeling safe enough to make a mistake or try something that doesn’t work is really important,” Gulner said. “If you don’t feel brave enough to take a risk, then the outcome isn’t very interesting.”
the help he needed when outside sources were unable to do the same.
“I actually tested negative at a different testing place, but they didn’t do half of the procedure they were supposed to,” Ratcliff said. “So when Dr. Bonsu and Ms. Petchersky did that, they said that I actually did (have ADHD), and they diagnosed me.”
Outside of school, Ratcliff uses different types of studying methods that help him remain focused and not drift off from his work. Ratcliff believes that these methods help him focus the most.
“Putting myself on a countdown every time before I study helps,”
Ratcliff said. “I set a timer for 15 minutes beforehand, and when that’s done, I’m counting down to when I’m going to really start and lock in for studying, however long that is.”
For Ratcliff, the desire to succeed motivates him to intentionally focus and overcome challenges. While part of that motivation is extrinsic, his main goal is to better himself.
“(Having) such an increase in my performance comes from my motivation to just better myself and get bettter (at) everything,” Ratcliff said.
Rhett Miller ‘89 stayed true to his sound — now his band, the Old 97’s, is being honored for a lifetime of authenticity.
By Wyatt Auer and Alex Calder
Rhett Miller ‘89, lead vocalist and primary songwriter for his band the Old 97’s, received the Americana Music Lifetime Achievement Award in Nashville, Tennessee, in mid-September. The Old 97’s is a band that focuses on Americana music, which is a blend of country, folk and gospel.
Miller’s journey from a student at the school to an acclaimed musician has not been linear. As a student, Miller’s commitment to music and creative writing, albeit at the expense of math and science, helped him receive a scholarship to the Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
After just one semester, however, Miller found that his true calling wasn’t in academia.
“I realized, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing?’” Miller said “Music is what I am meant to do.”
Dropping out to pursue music full-time was a gamble, but a one guided by a lesson he learned early on: “believe in yourself.”
“I made it so that I either had to succeed in music or live in squalor,” Miller said. “I lived in squalor for my early 20s, but by the time I was about 28, I started making enough money to properly feed myself and live in a place that didn’t come with a bunch of cockroaches for roommates.”
That early leap of faith set the tone for the rest of his career. Miller has seen the music industry transform around him through decades of performing, but the mindset that carried him through changing times remains the same.
“My experience making music was different then compared to a young person now starting out in the music industry,” Miller said. “When I started, CDs were the medium. Now, that is not part of the job. Live performance winds up being the biggest revenue stream in my industry, more so now than ever, because the music is basically given away for free to the streaming services.”
As the landscape shifted, Miller found that staying true to himself mattered more than chasing trends.
“The moments I found throughout my career where it could have gone very wrong are the moments
where I was tempted to try and do something for the sake of commercial success rather than artistic authenticity,” Miller said. However, that commitment to authenticity hasn’t always been easy. In an industry built on audience approval, Miller admits that it can be hard not to question himself. Still, the confidence he first learned at school continues to guide him through those moments of doubt.
Holding onto that belief has taught Miller that fulfillment in music comes from persistence, not praise.
While he appreciates the recognition from the music industry, that was never Miller’s only goal or intention. He and the band have been performing together for over 32 years.
“If there’s any lesson in the Old 97’s getting the kind of recognition we’ve been getting this deep into our career, it’s that you’re not trying to play the lottery; it’s definitely
about playing the long game,” Miller said. “Treating every gig like this is the moment, like every record is the only record.”
That commitment to the long game has defined the Old 97’s from the start — a band that’s thrived outside the boundaries of radio hits and awards.
“My band has never been the kind of band that gets Grammy nominations or really any kind of award recognition because we’re weird,” Miller said. “The band itself is sonically challenging; we’re very loud and fast in a way that most pop music or Americana music is not. My lyrics tend to be literate, convoluted and thorny in a way that, again, most pop and Americana music isn’t.”
Although his band is slightly unorthodox, Miller stays true to his beliefs and believes that commitment will help him realize his goals. He currently teaches at the New School in Greenwich Village, where his
There’s a lot of ‘No rest for the wicked’ in my life. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Rhett Miller ‘89 Lead Singer for the Old 97’s
daughter attends. Between his busy schedule shuttling between New York and Nashville, it can be difficult to enjoy dinner with his family and escape the often-chaotic life of creating music.
“There’s a lot of ‘no rest for the wicked’ in my life,” Miller said.“But I wouldn’t have it any other way. You know, I feel like St Mark’s taught me really well: to work really hard, stay up late and wake up early.”
Even so, Miller still loves all things music. He performs, writes and teaches music.
“They say that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life,” Miller said. “I’m the father of two young adults. I’ve got a career that I’m really proud of, and even though I still have to work really hard to pay my mortgage every month. I like working hard. So what do I care? This is fun.”
By Ben Yi
Outside the chapel, night falls quietly. Inside, candles flicker, and the sound of the choir fills the building.
Evensong happens once every month and always on the last Sunday of the month. Last month’s Evensong was on Sept. 28 and featured several solos.
This month’s Evensong was held on Oct. 26.
“It’s a pretty cool chance to get to hear the choir do what they do and sing some wonderful music, ” Organist and Choir Teacher Glenn Stroh said.“It’s just a nice atmosphere to come together and have a calm musical experience.”
This month’s Evensong, however, will look a little different.
“We have a documentary crew
coming from the United Kingdom to film the choir for about a week in class rehearsals,” Stroh said.
“Then they’ll film again on Saturday morning when we all gather together with our organist, Dr. Malcolm Matthews from UNT (University of North Texas), and our professional scholars (who sing with us).”
This documentary about Evensong will feature the school choir as well as many other choirs from the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe.
“The documentary is focused on Evensong throughout the world, and so there are a lot of institutions in the United Kingdom, where the tradition comes from and is most prevalent,” Stroh said.
“But also, a choir from the Netherlands is participating. We are
the only American choir that gets to be part of this major documentary, so it’s exciting for St Mark’s and for our voices in the choir program too.”
The music this month is also particularly special, as it’s written by a famous British composer, Herbert Howells.
Howells, one of Britain’s most celebrated 20th-century composers, wrote extensively for church choirs. His music is known for blending traditional Anglican harmonies with a sense of modern expressiveness.
For the choir, performing his work in an American chapel adds another layer of meaning — a fusion of British tradition and American artistry
“It’s centered around a set of pieces that were written for a
It’s a pretty cool chance to get to hear the choir do what they do and sing some wonderful music. It’s a nice atmosphere to come together and have a calm musical experience.
Glenn Stroh Organist and Choir Teacher
church in Dallas,” Stroh said. “He wrote this piece of music that’s really extraordinary. (It) incorporates elements from jazz, blues and true American art forms in this setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, which is what we sing every Evensong. (It’s) that same text, but different artist and different composers are putting their mark on it and putting their spin on it.”
The piece bridges British and American musical traditions, giving it special meaning for the school choir.
“It’s like uncovering a piece that not many people know about,” Stroh said. “It’s a way of rediscovering and shining light on something that’s really a wonderful piece of music.”
expand kids’ cultural knowledge at a young age.
Starting with African folk tales the year before, the teachers showed their blend of creativity and collaboration during the second-grade fine arts evening, a night where the students showcase the art, music and drama projects that they have worked on all year.
By Grayson Kirby and Nolan Driesse
Eager to broaden the horizons of second-grade students, drama teacher Kineta Massey and art teacher Suzuko Davis traveled to Japan this past summer to learn about the country’s culture and incorporate it into the Lower School classroom. The second-grade curriculum used to be Greek-based, but last year, Massey and Davis wanted to change it to incorporate folk tales from around the world and foster creative curriculum that will
“We told African folktales, and Mr. Kheshtinejad (the Lower School music teacher) did African drumming with the boys,” Davis said.“We also did some African textile weaving and used that to help make the backdrop of the play.”
While African culture was already a unique addition to the curriculum, this year Massey and Davis wanted to take it to another level.
In Japanese culture, they decided to take a trip there to experience and observe the country’s culture firsthand. After experiencing different art workshops and watching plays
throughout the trip, Massey and Davis felt inspired to bring pieces of Japan back to the school.
“We are going to do some shabori dying with the kids and some Japanese print making,” Davis said. “We are also going to do some oniara, which is like the Japanese version of a gargoyle.”
Massey is also using her takeaways from the trip to not only foster fun and creativity but also to help connect boys to the Path to Manhood mission. These plays aren’t just folk tales; they also serve as a cautionary tale for the younger generation to learn from.
“There is the Terrible Eek, which is a play about miscommunication and people misinterpreting each other,” Massey said. “Urashima Taro is another story where a boy goes down under the sea to live there, and when he comes back, 300 years have passed. It’s a tale of the passing of time.”
While these stories serve as guidelines on how to deal with certain issues, such as miscommunication and growing up, there are other Japanese tales that teach different lessons.
For example, the tale of Momotoro is about a family who wants a baby, and a peach boy is born instead. The boy helps protect people who have had things stolen from them, giving the younger marksmen a lesson on ethics.
The last play,“The Boy Who Drew Cats,” is about a boy who is obsessed with drawing cats and isn’t able to find his place in the world. He ends up at a temple where there is a rat goblin that has to be fought, and he uses his skill of drawing cats to fight the goblin and save the town.
Massey and Davis hope that boys will learn that every person has a unique talent or value, and
This is the character and leadership where we talk about—everybody doing what helps the entire society. They do it for the good of all.
that being different has benefits.
The main point of the trip may have been to add to this year’s curriculum and learn more about Japanese culture, but the two teachers enjoyed the sightseeing as well.
“You can see the ocean, and the landscape is just different,” Davis said. “I had one of those ‘Aha!’ moments where I could see the way Hokusai (a renowned Japanese artist) depicts water while it’s hitting against the shore. It was incredible.”
Additionally, the teachers were impressed with the cultural tradition of people doing good deeds. On their visit, Massey and Davis noticed how astonishingly safe and clean Japan was.
“You’re very safe. People leave their bags and their stuff will still be there when they come back,” Massey said. “It’s incredibly clean. There’s really no trash anywhere, and you will see people out in the street cleaning up things.”
The teachers were impressed by the sense of community and plan on implementing it in the classroom. A whole community putting forth their best efforts and radiating good throughout the world is something they admired. Massey and Davis hope to imitate Japan’s cultural values and spread them throughout the school.
“Japan has the character and leadership we talk about here—everybody doing what helps the entire society,” Massey said.“They do it for the good of all.”
After a successful trip full of eye-opening experiences that gave a new sense of cultural awareness, Massey and Davis hope to expand the curriculum even further in the future, not just by introducing new projects but also by combining Japanese culture and The Path to Manhood.
By Lucas Pei
A girl ventures into a world full of fantastical creatures. But when she must decide between staying there or returning to her old home, whatever her decision is, she knows it’s… “A Train Away.”
This is the title of senior Jackson Barnes’ first book, published on Sept. 8 by Laureate Life Press.
Ever since he was young, Barnes has been a big fan of fantasy novels.
“One (collection) that I always like to tell people about is Narnia. I had the whole collection,” Barnes said. “My dad got it for me one Christmas when I was around 10, and I just ended up reading all of it.”
One of his biggest inspirations
was during his freshman year, when he was assigned a short story to write in English.
“I got way too into it, and it was very long,” Barnes said. “I went to Mr. Morris’ office, and I handed him my short story, super proud, but he told me that I went over the limit, so he didn’t give me a great grade on it.”
But he didn’t let this discourage him.
“I was kind of upset, and I wanted to do better,” Barnes said.
“I spent the rest of the week trying to write that short story and just make it the best it could be.”
He started working on his book at the end of his sophomore year.
“On days where I was really
swamped, I got around 30 minutes (of writing) in,” Barnes said. “On average, I got two hours. If I was really feeling myself, I went ahead and did three.”
However, even though Barnes had meticulously planned the story out beforehand, he still struggled with writer’s block.
“I came to one chapter where I just couldn’t think of anything for the life of me,” Barnes said. “It just felt so stale and uninteresting. I just moved on to the next one. Then I kept coming back to that same chapter, and I just couldn’t figure out what to do with it.”
Even after he was done writing by the end of his junior year, there were still months of editing ahead.
“The editing process was boring and really, really repetitive,” Barnes said. “You get sick of reading your own writing after a while, and you start looking at everything three, four times over. It’s not great, but it’s necessary.”
Though Barnes wants to pursue an engineering degree, he is confident that creative writing is and always will be a big part of his life.
“Creative writing is a great outlet for a lot of different things,” Barnes said. “I think people should take some time out of their day to throw up ideas on paper. It can really help you reflect on yourself and confront different ideas you might be struggling with.”
Amid senior-year stress, students turn to DJing as a creative outlet and new form of self-expression.
By Shiv Bhandari
In between college applications, AP classes and meetings with their little buddies, some seniors have picked up DJing as a way to loosen up and let off steam during a challenging and stressful time.
Some, like senior Rocco Renda, have even gone so far as to perform sets in front of friends at events or, more often, in the senior lounge, where students assemble to learn different techniques from one another and enjoy the creative freedom.
Before DJing, Renda had never played an instrument, but for the past three months, he’s practiced daily to improve his skills. Rather than trying to create the most intricate mixes, Renda tries to focus on challenges he can tackle with his current skills.
“This was totally new to me,” Renda said. “I’m really into house music, and I’ve always listened, but I was never in the band or (orchestra); I never did any of that. I mostly learned by watching clips of other people.”
Renda traces his first spark of interest in DJing to the beginning of the school year.
“It was in the senior lounge,” Renda said. “I was watching this group called The Chainsmokers DJing at a fraternity party, and it seemed really, really cool. I just started researching how they got into it, and that’s how I started the whole DJ thing.”
After practicing online and with his friends’ boards, the control decks DJs manage while mixing, Renda eventually bought his own board and began to experiment with developing his own style, going beyond the simple YouTube tutorials he watched and initially copied.
“My main piece of equipment is my board, the DDJ Rev 1,” Renda said. “Then there’s software, Serado Pro, that comes behind it, which is almost more important than the board when it comes to mixing.
After close to two months of consistent practice, Renda decided to take his talents outside of the senior lounge for the first time, DJing
for a set in his friend’s house
Do what makes you happy. If you think DJing is your thing, then why not try it? Borrow your friend’s board. Try it out.
Rocco Renda Senior
“I was nervous, and I obviously messed up and made mistakes, but the whole point, especially since it was the first time, was to hide them from the audience,” Renda said. “I just tried to map out what songs I wanted to play, what order to play them in and what transitions I wanted to use. Of course, you’ll hear something and know you messed up, but most of the time, you’re the only one who knows that, so I just kept on going.”
After three months and a couple of proper performances, Renda has seen a drastic change in the way he now sees music and approaches broader subjects as a whole.
“It’s changed how I listen to music,” Renda said. “I can understand what’s going on. I was never really into the creativity side of things, but now I’m more open to less math-based (areas) because there’s no real answer in DJing. It’s all how
you think and how you want it to sound. The creativity there has definitely opened my eyes.”
Renda sees DJing as one of many skills he has picked up over his years at school.
He’s not afraid to pursue novel activities that attract him, and he encourages anyone with even a slight interest to give it a go, even if it might seem strange at first.
“Picking up a new hobby is always great,” Renda said. “I’ve had a couple of past hobbies. I was really interested in Rubik’s Cubes and chess, and I think this is the next big thing. Do what makes you happy. If you think DJing is your thing, then why not try it? Borrow your friend’s board. Try it out.”
Three months ago, Renda had no experience at all with DJing. Words like loops, stems and boards were foreign to him, and his lack of formal musical training didn’t particularly give him an upper hand.
By Dominic Liaw
One spark, three instagram posts and dozens of practices later, Eli Thorne travels across the metroplex, performing emotional music with his band, ilearnedtotalkinspring, which recently was named Best New Band by the Dallas Observer.
Thorne discovered his love for music from a young age, playing covers of rock songs with different kids. When his friend from Booker T. Washington School for the Performing and Visual Arts approached him, Thorne found a different passion.
“(My friend) said he wanted to make a band of a specific genre of music I really never listened to,” Thorne said. “And I said, ‘You know what? Sure.’”
Twelve months before starting the band, Thorne wasn’t even exposed to the genre.
“Immediately, I was like ‘This is not my usual stuff.’ But music is music,” Thorne said. “Even if it’s maybe
the worst thing you’ve ever heard in your ears, someone else in the world will like it.”
Thorne’s band quickly evolved into a more significant part of his life.
“My band is really important to me because music is my way of expression,” Thorne said.“I’d always done performances with this place called School of Rock, but with starting your own band, it’s all in your hands.”
Even as a drummer, one of the supporting instruments in a band, Thorne always wanted to assume a leading role and play his own music. He had written countless songs, but he lacked the network and supporting cast to share his passions with the world.
“Being in this band is really important because it finally gave me an outlet for that,” Thorne said.
Since then, Thorne has continued his work as a drummer, supporting other bands and individual artists with their projects, and has also begun to put out the songs he’s
My band is really important to me because music is my way of expression. I’d always done performances with this place called School of Rock, but with starting your own band, it’s all in your own hands.
Eli Thorne Junior
written for guitar and piano.
Even more, Thorne feels as if exploring and exposing himself to a new genre of music through his band had other positive benefits.
“I’ve never really played music that I haven’t really listened to,” Thorne said. “Doing so not only gave me another source of creativity, but honestly, made me a better instrumentalist as well.”
And using this new opportunity, Thorne has decided to aim higher and try to share his personal message with an audience on Spotify. However, as a completely new band on the high school scene, promoting awareness for their concerts and tours was a struggle. Thanks to social media, Thorne’s band had a solution.
“We decided to make an Instagram account, and we did a really good job of promoting our first project,” Thorne said. “ For a completely ‘do-it-yourself’ band who records in home studios and stuff, we’ve gained a pretty solid platform.” Through their Instagram posts
Today, he’s a confident DJ who hopes to continue this new hobby years into the future.
“I’m for sure going to bring my board to college, and I want to keep getting better and better,” Renda said. “If that ends up at a point where I can actually perform decently for money, then that would be really cool.”
Renda supports the up-andcoming DJing scene here at the school, and he hopes that boys can work together to form a unique community of student-DJs.
“I think it’s awesome,” Renda said. “If everyone can figure it out, that’d be really cool because everyone would have their own style. And if you can listen to people who are proficient in mixing in their own way, you can pick up stuff from them.”
and promotions, ilearnedtotalkinspring evolved into a regularly performing band with a following of almost 500 fans.
Even with the uncertainty of a high school band, especially with the imminent graduation of some of the band members, Thorne and the band continue to travel around Dallas and share their work with the city.
“We’ve got two shows in Denton, and we’ve got one booked in this one venue called Rubber Gloves that could help us reach a lot more people,” Thorne said. “We’ve met a lot of really awesome people there who appreciate and support us, and that also helps us keep going,”
The sense of community they’ve found during their journey reflects their broader goal as artists—to connect through sound and meaning.
“We’re making music for anyone who wants to hear it,” Thorne said. “And our hope is that it’ll mean something to someone else out there.”
The second part promises to adapt the play’s second act with cinematic visuals and broader scope.
REVIEW
Armaan Newaskar Reviews Editor
For many people, Pokémon is an important childhood memory. The franchise is titanic, and through the games, shows and cards, children across the world have been captivated by these fantastical creatures. The heart of the franchise is the games, which appear to have mastered the recipe for profit. With Pokemon Legends: Z-A, however, the formula was changed up in ways that weren’t really necessary.
The traditional formula of a Pokemon game is that the player has a ‘region’ which they explore. Along the way, they fight evil organizations, catch Pokémon and become the champion. Pokémon Legends: Z-A takes a different approach. There is no ‘region’ in this game. The whole game occurs in Lumiose City, a location from another game. Z-A adds detail to the city, but that doesn’t make up for the loss of being able to explore an entire country.
Previous games had cities like Lumiose, as well as towns built within volcanoes, ruins with prehistoric creatures and enchanted forests. The increase in detail doesn’t make up for the loss in variety and creativity. Even the increase in detail is questionable, as graphics on some windows and buildings are janky. This is an unfortunate trend with the past few games, the franchise is so big that regardless of quality, the sales will be good.
The positives for Z-A are an altered combat system and new forms, called mega evolutions, for some classic pokemon. These modifications, while worth praise, don’t detract from the game’s flaws. Worst of all, the game costs $70, and there’s an entire DLC which costs an additional 30. Accessing several of the game’s new forms demands another 20. A consumer could end up paying $120 for a mediocre product, and while the game has fun aspects to it, the pros don’t outweigh the cons.
The highly anticipated sequel to Zootopia promises to build on the original’s intriguing world and premise.
This November, the show returns for one final time to bring this magnetic story to a close.
Armaan Newaskar Reviews Editor
Three years ago, Peacemaker season one burst onto the scene with blinding momentum. The superhero show took the relatively niche Suicide Squad member Peacemaker and turned him into an icon. What made the vigilante iconic was his unique approach to justice, humour and John Cena’s iconic performance. Three years later, season two arrived and exceeded all expectations.
Prior to season 2, renowned director James Gunn, who directed five episodes of season one, took helm of the project and enveloped it within his new cinematic universe. In recent years, Gunn has become the co-CEO of DC studios. With every new project, he has proved that he is worthy of the role. From “Suicide Squad” to this year’s “Superman,” Gunn has been firing on all cylinders, delivering products of the utmost quality. Peacemaker season two might be his best work yet.
Peacemaker season 2 is a careful character study which breaks down the iconic anti hero and forces him to confront his internal issues. The first season was a whirlwind of violence and humor, but the second season adds to that with deep character work. The season delves into Peacemaker’s issues with his dad his struggle with self worth and guilt. Unlike other superheroes, Peacemaker kills his enemies and the moral consequences of this come to bite him literally and emotionally.
On a larger scale the season delves into multiversal territory, connecting it with the extended DC Cinematic Universe Gunn leads. Peacemaker ventures into Earth X, an alternate reality where America has been taken over by Nazis. Gunn uses this storyline to make controversial political statements, build tension and break down Peace -
maker’s sense of justice and identity.
For those who enjoyed season 1, season 2 is an excellent improvement. Even for those not interested in superhero shows, Peacemaker is a riveting and dramatic story, elevated with excellent acting, especially from John Cena. The season deals with a lot of plot lines, but it handles
them effectively and efficiently. The season is perfect until the end. While the finale has its positives, it is a step down from the rest of the series because of its lack of focus and conclusiveness. It establishes a strong precedent for season three but handles the end of this season somewhat messily.
All in all, Peacemaker season 2 is a masterclass which
“One Battle After Another” is a deeply important film which weaves exciting action with meaningful commentary on polarization and extremism. It follows an ex-revolutionary, played by the legendary Leonardo Dicaprio, and his journey to save his daughter from a figure of his past, and it deals with complex themes of family, responsibility and cycles of violence. It’s not just an action movie but a political satire and profound character study that can be appreciated on many different levels.
deserves a
of its brilliant fusion of action, comedy, and depth.
Sports Editor Diego Armendariz and Head Writer Christopher Guffey went to Chilango’s Tacos, an authentic Mexican food spot! Scan the QR code to watch their full, in-depth review or head straight to the @remarkernewspaper Instagram.
Though criticisms of SAGE and their lunches are common, it’s important to give the company credit for its sucesses and what it has been able to do.
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With Texas becoming more influential (and controversial) on the national stage, voters here have more power than ever to influence not only their own state’s direction but also the country’s.
EDITORIAL
Living in Texas, hearing some new, controversial move by the state has become pretty routine. Whether it was four years ago with the Heartbeat Act circumventing the now-overruled Roe V. Wade or the recent gerrymandering of election maps, it seems that Texas is always up to something. But for those of us who live here, becoming numb to this growing precedent is extremely dangerous.
See TEXAS, Page 25
EDITORIAL
It’s hard to imagine what our day would be like without lunch. In a day that may not have free periods, it’s that oasis where we get to see our friends again, chat, relax and, of course, enjoy some delicious food.
Sounds great, except one small issue: not everyone thinks that food is delicious, especially according to some Marksmen. The reasons vary, from not liking the daily selections to simply criticizing the taste and preparation, but there is one common thread: the problem, as many argue, lies with SAGE, our food provider.
Picking on SAGE has become somewhat of a common occurrence around campus, especially as boys ask questions about the company’s choices for our lunch. At the end of the day, though, lunch will never be perfect, and Marksmen should give SAGE
more credit for what it has been able to do.
There are two major elements of SAGE’s food that students typically criticize: the meals that they choose to give to us, and how well they’re prepared.
When it comes to meal choice, there are valid criticisms: almost everyone can think of one particular day every cycle that they don’t like, and people have overlap, too.
But there also lies the problem. There really is no satisfying everyone and choosing the exact right meal. There’s also much more consideration that has to go on behind the scenes.
First of all, SAGE has to attempt to create a quality balance of various cuisines so that we aren’t just getting Italian or Tex-Mex every day, although
See SAGE, Page 24
they definitely are more common. To this end, we’ve gotten a pretty good taste of a lot of the world for school lunch. At the same time, they also have to juggle making the meals nutritionally balanced. While it’s up to us as students to take what we want, SAGE offers an impressive variety of (usually) healthy food up front and in areas like the alwaysopen salad and sandwich bar. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, SAGE has to carefully choose foods that work for those with dietary restrictions. While some Marksmen with specific needs still bring their own lunch, they generally tend to have great options through SAGE, allowing them to be included as well. It’s easy to take all of this for granted, but these things are significant, especially compared to other schools’ offerings.
Sebastian Garcia-Toledo Staff Writer
In November of 2024, I signed up for my first program and attended my first meeting of the National Hispanic Institute (NHI), and in all aspects, I should have hated it.
My first experiences with the NHI were everything I would’ve liked to avoid: the activities brought attention to me and the interactions felt fake, or, at the very least, forced. The ideas I was taught went against the logic I had been following my whole life. These doubts lingered even months later, through my final rounds at the Texas Great Debate, where I preached ideas and solutions on ideas I had solidified in my heart. I had gone farther in my category for my region than anyone and made the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight.
But even there, at the pinnacle of what the first year of this program had in store, I still questioned: “What am I doing here?”
Perhaps through the rhetoric of modern media or the environment that surrounds me, I had fallen into a pit where I categorized my identity as a Latino as a background aspect, something of my reality that was just there. That wasn’t to say that I wasn’t proud, but I placed my care for who I am and where I come from much lower on the ladder of importance. I did that because at the time, I placed more value in being “cool” and passive than standing on what I knew to be true.
Events like Hispanic Heritage Month were just that, just events. I didn’t feel the pride or attachment to them that I do now because I didn’t realize that I was allowing the people who surrounded me to dictate subconsciously how I needed to perceive my identity.
It was only after my time at the Great Debate, thinking upon the four days I had spent there, that I realized this thought pattern. Then I knew that for all my life, I had been allowing these outside influences to have a say on what I was, without actually having formed any belief myself.
The combined opinions of family, friends, strangers and even the President of the United States, had all, regardless of being on purpose, put in a small chip of an idea not of my own making.
And I wanted it to stop.
It was there that I began to remake who I knew myself to be. I reassessed what actually mattered to me, taking from the lessons of the National Hispanic Institute and applying my interpretation of them to my life. I realized that, actually, I cared a lot about what was happening to my people, and this time, I actually had something to say. I now knew that my identity was for me solely to define, because I am the only person who actually has a say. I no longer believe that it is possible to be passive on the issues that press my community, because the truth simply matters more. NHI did not make my identity, but it made me aware that I had to make my own.
I’ll end with this: People will say many things about who you’re supposed to be, but you are the only person who will ever have the authority to decide your identity.
SAGE
IT’S TIME from Page 23
When compared to other schools, it’s much clearer how strong our lunch really is. Many private schools around Dallas use dining companies like SAGE for their lunch services, but typically offer less. This even extends to Hockaday, our closest peer, who also found SAGE to be the best option for themselves, yet who actually have less options at their lunches than we do.
That’s to say nothing about how our
Students, when they notice problems, should absolutely make active attempts to constructively criticize and provide advice, as opposed to just tearing down the company without knowing the full picture.
lunch stacks up to that of public school. As anyone who used to go to a public school can likely attest, the food there is not only more limited and noticeably less healthy but also suffers much more from issues of
being mass-produced and quickly reheated. Comparatively speaking, lunches here are vastly superior.
However, longtime students of the school have also pointed to another potential issue with SAGE and one that is grounded in some more experience. Some remember when the school had its own food in-house without using the company. Many students argue that those lunches in years past were better than the ones now.
Obviously, this is an opinon that’s hard to verify. It’s grounded in actual experience, but it could also be chalked up to nostalgia. However, this take does seem to be a valid criticism of the school’s switch to SAGE, if true.
That being said, it’s also worth considering the reasons to use a dining company in the first place. As mentioned previously, a number of private schools like Hockaday also use SAGE itself or a similar service, so our school is not alone in this respect.
While it can come at the expense of the quality , freshness and some degree of customizability in the meals, the savings and economies of scale created by companies like SAGE matter a lot. It means that we have a pretty consistent lunch service and without breaking the bank as a school. So, while there are some losses in not making our own food, it carries a lot of benefits as well.
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It’s also easy to forget that they have to do things beyond just lunches. They manage snack after school and catering for any number of special events, such as meetings in the dining rooms and events where parents or alumni come to campus. Having a company with routine experience in these areas lessens the school’s burden significantly.
This is not to say that SAGE is perfect or that it was definitely the right move for our school to use its services. But it does tend to receive overcriticism for the issues it has and underrecognition for the benefits it provides for us.
Students, when they notice problems, should absolutely make active attempts to constructively criticize and provide advice, as opposed to just tearing down the company without knowing the full picture. A few years ago, SAGE actually opened up a feedback area where students could write their feedback on notepads. When presented with this opportunity, most of us wrote gibberish or borderline obscenity. That is obviously not the way to go about things, and if we want SAGE to change, we shouldn’t actively discourage their attempts to listen to us. Let’s be respectful of the work they do, and particularly to the hardworking employees who feed and serve us everyday. And when we find issues, let’s talk about them the right way.
With a unique Halloween-based theme, this year’s Coffee Houses started on a great note.
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With significant participation across the school, this Spirit Week was a pretty major success.
On top of being moved last second, unfortunate mistakes and a second-half collapse led the Lions to defeat on Thursday despite a competitive first half.
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Similar to the old monotony breakers, Lion’s Pauses have provided a nice community time respite.
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Unfortunately, it just couldn’t quite live up to the momentous occasion.
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The yearly event brought joy to Lower Schoolers and their pets alike but unfortunately lacked much senior
VOTING from Page 23
Texas has always had the potential for this kind of evolution — after all, it’s been the country’s biggest red state for almost 30 years now. Naturally, Texas’ moves and decisions have an outsized impact on the national discourse. But it’s become truly unique in recent years how much it has been able to stand out as a firebrand on the national stage. It has influenced other states to take similar actions, sometimes even egging them on or encouraging them to do so. And, as its efforts become successful, the Texas government seems more emboldened than ever to dive headfirst into more controversy.
Just five years ago, Texas was at the forefront of challenges to the 2020 presidential election. In a stunning move, the state, led by attorney general and current Senate hopeful Ken Paxton, sued another state, Pennsylvania, over its election laws in an attempt to overturn and call into question the results of the election. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, but it made headlines nonetheless and clearly demonstrated Texas’s willingness to act on a national level. But this case had ripple effects beyond Texas — 18 other attorney generals lined up in quick succession to support the case shortly after its filing, demonstrating Texas’s national influence. Texas officials also exhibited an almost brazen desire to jump into the issue and be at the head of the charge, setting a precedent that would only continue.
Fast forward a few more months, and Texas then began to consider Senate Bill 8, better known now as the Texas Heartbeat Act. It proposed a radical new way to tackle the contentious issue of abortion: altogether circumventing the Roe precedent and enforcing abortion restrictions via individual citizens suing abortion providers. The impact of the bill was major and went beyond typical politics; even major companies like Uber and Lyft promised to assist drivers who might have gotten sued
under the terms of the law. Even before the Supreme Court decided against national abortion protections, the Act dealt a significant blow to them in Texas, and soon after for other states who decided to follow suit like Idaho and Oklahoma. Once again, Texas reaffirmed its desire to not only take radical action but also be a proud national leader in doing so.
Just a few months ago, Texas went back on the offensive with its redistricting laws widely criticized as attempts to gerrymander five Democratic seats in the House. On top of having the potential to shift the political balance of the House in future elections, Texas has once again set off a trend for other states. Notably, California directly challenged Texas’s attempts by threatening to engage in its own gerrymandering. Now, a number of states have either verbally or actually begun the process of what seems to be a redistricting arms race, with Texas being the spark that started the fire.
And below the surface, these changes are creating difficulties across Texas, particularly for judges. Due to the amount of controversial state laws passed, state and federal judges throughout Texas have been forced to make major, controversial rulings with national implications. Suddenly, these judges are thrust into the spotlight, their decision now being pivotal to a major national issue. This has also made the problem worse, though, as the state has engaged in “judge shopping” — the practice of intentionally filing a lawsuit to a predictable judge with the expectation they will produce the desired ruling. In many cases, these rulings have then been overturned by a higher court, but not without controversy and uncertainty first.
Numerous other groups, like businesses, local officials, lawyers and especially everyday citizens have had similar trouble dealing with Texas’s controversial moves. With certain laws in a state of limbo between enforcement and being struck down, these groups have to make careful decisions on how to move forward. The Heartbeat Act was probably the most significant example
Every decision we make and every state politician that we decide to vote for has major repercussions on states beyond our own and the entire nation.
of this issue: almost everyone involved had to face extreme uncertainty as to whether the law would even remain in place and what that meant for them, effectively creating enforcement through paralysis.
As a Texas resident, these kinds of events have become somewhat routine. This is just how our state is, it seems. But it is critical to not forget the implications this fact carries for Texans and Texas voters. Every decision we make and every state politician that we decide to vote for has major repercussions on states beyond our own and the entire nation. What we decide here will end up affecting people across the country, and that is a major responsibility. A voter who votes in a Texas state election is really voting for much more than just that.
Also, these new developments are creating a new image for Texas as a pretty radical state and firebrand that isn’t afraid to engage in controversy, or in some cases, egg it on and encourage other states to follow along. Texans and Texas voters also need to consider what impact their state politicians are having on the image of their state and what it means to be a Texan.
Obviously, we have our own opinions as a state, and we have the full right to express them just like the citizens of any other state. But running headfirst into controversy is clearly not a good development for our state and has already begun to damage its reputation. Texas voters need to consider what their vote means, especially when voter turnout is often at or below 50% at the state level and noticeably less than in national elections. A vote in Texas means much more than one in almost any other state, and we ought to treat it as such.
There’s a number of ways you could describe me these past two months. ‘Tired,’ though, may be the most consistently accurate one.
Taking hard classes, being in leadership positions, taking care of college apps and still trying to have some semblance of a life isn’t easy. And it’s definitely been wearing me down since August. For the most part, though, I’m fortunate to usually have enough energy within me to make it and push through to the next day of the grind.
Key word: usually. There actually has been one enemy that has threatened my productivity more than any other. No, it’s not a hard class. It’s not even the stress of a particular college or my most timeconsuming extracurricular. It’s an old friend and someone who helped me for a long, long time. It’s my bed.
Understandable, right? But it’s really hard to capture the effect it can have on me. I’m feeling alive, full of energy and ready to do the three hours of work I have ahead of me. Then I want to be comfortable, so I sit in bed for a bit and get some blankets on. Fast forward maybe half an hour, and my laptop’s still open — but I’m fast asleep.
The wave of tiredness that hits me is unlike anything else. Through experience, I’ve learned, it’s not even doing tiring or busy things that makes me want to sleep. As long as I stay away from the bed, I can probably stay up for 24 hours straight. I can wake up early and spend the whole day studying and working and exercising and I won’t feel tired. Then, as soon as I just touch my bed, I’m on my way to being out like a light.
It’s been a slow process of realization, but eventually, I decided I finally needed to take action against the number one threat to getting my work done. Too many mornings, I had woken up to realize what had happened just a few hours ago.
At first, it was just waiting to get in bed a little longer. And I did notice some improvement, just not enough. Especially on long nights, even getting in a couple hours before I needed to sleep meant that I was waking up at seven in the morning covered in sweat and with assignments still left to do.
The next step in the process was ditching my bed altogether, and refusing to get near it until I had a critical mass of work done. This, as it turns out, ended up working far better. Usually, I could make it through the last task or two before the inevitable wave of exhaustion washed over me.
The couch is now my new “comfy” place, but I even have to be careful there as to not allow myself to get too comfortable, lest I start falling asleep again. Otherwise, you’ll find me working at my desk and absolutely not looking behind me, because that’s where my bed is.
And now that I reflect on this change, I’ve kind of realized that the bed has actually been part of the problem the whole time. I just hadn’t had a year yet that pushed my sleep to the brink quite like this year has. A part of me now wishes I had made this change earlier.
I’ll see how much this is going to help me going forward, but I’m pretty sure not falling asleep every third night will be pretty helpful as my college deadlines really start to ramp up. For now, my bed has been defeated in this battle.
I very much look forward, though, to Christmas break. As I finally get an escape from school and as my last college deadlines show up in the rearview mirror, I’ll be able to reconcile with my beloved bed again. Then I’ll let it win the war.
SSponsored by Corindo Martin, Reform United enhances athletes’ skills in the offseason.
When the nurses asked me what I did for fun as they changed my saline drip, I told them I played water polo.
For the first few weeks after transverse myelitis hospitalized me, I couldn’t raise my water bottle to my mouth for a drink. I couldn’t hold a pen steady enough to write my history test.
But as soon as I was able to walk without needing assistance, I showed up to practice.
I knew that I couldn’t play. I just wanted to feel like I was part of the team again.
And when my teammates asked me why I kept showing up, I shrugged my shoulders and jokingly said something about wanting to make sure the team wasn’t falling apart without me.
But somewhere inside of me, I knew the real answer. I was just scared of it.
Deep down, I went because I felt like I had to. Because I didn’t know who I was without my sport.
But now, sitting on the sidelines, that identity was taken away from me.
I’m no stranger to injuries: I’ve had shoulder problems every single year since I was 13, excluding my sophomore year, when I was hospitalized with transverse myelitis, which interrupted nerve signals between my brain and my body.
Visiting orthopedic surgeons has become routine. I’ve talked to my doctor so much that I call him uncle. I’ve gone through at least a dozen resistance bands by now.
But buying resistance bands over and over again isn’t the worst part of getting injured.
The worst part, the part that weighs on me as I watch my team celebrate win after win, is living in the space between healthy and injured. Being able to jump in and practice with the guys but not being able to show why I deserve to be on the team.
Trying to avoid another shoulder dislocation, I wore a brace during my junior year, and while it gave me confidence in my body, it impacted my abilities as a player.
But when I took it off, the anxiety was unmanageable.
Either way, I was embarrassed by my abilities and grieving the player I used to be. Brutally, I believed that I was a liability. Nothing more.
But I still suited up every day. I still went on the travel trips, splurged on the Buc-ee’s runs and laughed with my teammates as we photoshopped pictures of one another.
Sure, I still missed shots, lost races and made mistakes. My teammates didn’t magically fix my shoulder. But they made the grief manageable. Assured me when I had my head buried in my hands.
They made me feel wanted.
When people ask me what I do, I still say I play water polo.
And if anyone ever asks me why I keep returning to it, even though I know the consequences, I’ll give them the real answer.
That I’m not here for the glory or for the trophies or the crazy plays that make it onto Instagram.
I’m here for the people who still see me as a part of the team, even when I can’t see that myself.
With an increase in research, the school has worked on making an effective protocol PAGE 30
The ReMarker
Many sports such as wrestling and football often require rapid weight changes to meet requirements.
Junior Blaize Schuhmacher has loved football his whole life. Now as the starting quarterback he gets to carry out his life long passion
By Wes Jackson
When Blaize Schuhmacher first stood on the sidelines holding a clipboard as a freshman, signaling plays for the varsity offense, few would have guessed he’d be the one commanding that same huddle just two years later.
But even then, the young quarterback wasn’t waiting for his moment; he was preparing for it.
“I’ve played quarterback my whole life,” Schuhmacher said. “Freshman year I was the third string. I got to do dummy signals for varsity, then sophomore year I was the backup. I just kept putting in work, getting stronger, and earned the spot.”
The quarterback position carries a heavy weight. It’s a role that needs precision and control under pressure, both in the pocket and in the locker room. Schuhmacher knew that the path wouldn’t be easy.
“Definetely the biggest challenge was competition,” Schuhmacher said. “A lot of people go out for quarterback, and it’s a
We asked around campus for some hot takes. Here are our favorites.
really hard position to play. I had to stay locked in, gain weight and work hard. Luckily, I had help from people around me.”
Those who’ve watched him grow say that work ethic is what sets Schuhmacher apart.
“Blaize has probably worked the most out of anyone on our team,” running back David Dickson, one of his closest friends, said. “He’s always asking us to come throw with him, and always getting reps with his quarterback coach. From ninth grade to now, everything he’s gotten is deserved.”
It wasn’t just the training that enhanced Schuhmacher’s skillset; it was the sacrifices.
While many athletes juggle multiple sports, Schuhmacher made a pivotal decision that accelerated his football growth.
“I stopped playing lacrosse so I could lift in the spring,” Schuhmacher said. “That really helped me gain a lot of weight and strength. I don’t think I would be able to do that if I was running around on the lacrosse field all day.”
That discipline soon began to show on the field. One of Schuhmacher’s earliest standout moments came during his freshman year, when the JV team pulled off an upset win over rival ESD.
“That game really stood out,” Schuhmacher said. “It was the first time a JV team has beaten ESD in like nine years. That’s when I felt like, yeah, this is for
me.”
To his teammates, Schuhmacher’s impact goes beyond his accomplishments. Dickson, who has lined up behind him in the backfield countless times, describes him as an encouraging leader and loyal friend.
“As a quarterback, he’s got a great arm and he’s really smart with his reads,” Dickson said. “But as a teammate, he’s even better. Whenever I make a mistake or someone else does, he encourages us to do better. He keeps us going.”
That balance of holding teammates accountable while lifting them up is something Schuhmacher takes pride in.
“I think being a leader is keeping everyone calm when things go wrong,” Schuhmacher said. “Never hanging your head, always staying positive, and holding people accountable. Everyone’s got a job to do, and I try to make sure we’re all locked in.”
From the coaching perspective, Schuhmacher’s leadership has grown along with his physical and mental development. Head coach Harry Flaherty has seen this growth firsthand.
“Blaize has worked really hard,” Flaherty said. “He’s improved a lot physically; stronger, bigger, better body-control, but what stands out is his mental growth. Playing quarterback at this level requires mastering the schematic side of the game, and he’s become a real student of it.”
See Junior, Page 27
Sponsored by Corindo Martin, students created Reform United to enhance their skills in the offseason.
By Diego Armendariz and Alex Calder
When Ben Adams ’24 founded Reform United, he wanted to create a new way of playing soccer.
Unlike many professionally managed club soccer teams, Reform United is almost entirely player-run, with players handling fee collecting, uniform designing, tournament registration and the creation of training routine that fits the schedule of 18 busy high schoolers.
It’s no easy task, but the group, led by senior team managers Christian Denis and Ollie Morgan, as well as junior team manager Cristian Duarte, has stepped into the role and helped.
Coached by former varsity soccer coach Corindo Martin, Reform United gives players from St. Mark’s and other schools in the Dallas area an opportunity to train in an environment centered on growth and development.
“It’s such a neat idea because it is so student-driven,” Martin
said. “I’m the adult, and I’m there because you have to have an adult somewhere in the process. I do coach the team, but as far as the logistics of running the team, that’s left to the players.”
Adams had a vision, and with a lot of heart and a little help, he brought Reform United to life.
Starting a team from scratch is no small feat, and one of the biggest challenges was recruiting players who believed in the mission as much as the founders did.
The leaders of Reform United spent much of their summer networking, reaching out to potential players and pitching the team to other high schoolers across the area.
“The boys did a wonderful job,” Martin said. “They recruited and found talented players from St. Mark’s and other schools to join the team.”
It can be hard, especially for younger students, to see a project through from start to finish.
But that wasn’t an issue for Adams and his team, who have built something that continues to grow in both skill and spirit.
The Reform United community extends far beyond the soccer field. It provides an opportunity to build close bonds with players both inside and outside the school’s community.
“We always invite the oth-
We always invite the other kids from Greenhill and ESD out to go get Torchy’s so that we can bond together. I think I’m as close with them as I am with some of my friends at St. Mark’s.
Cristian
Duarte
Junior
er kids from Greenhill and ESD out to go get Torchy’s so that we can bond together,” Duarte said.
“I think I’m about as close with them as I am with some of my friends at St Mark’s. It really is about a community expanding further than St. Marks.”
For Martin, it provides an opportunity to get back into coaching and take a break from his day-to-day life as a math teacher.
He’s a big advocate for focusing not solely on the raw talent and ability of his athletes, but on the development they display within the sport as they spend more time with it.
“The thing I appreciate is that I’ve gotten to see kids who’ve played with us for two or three seasons. Where they were when they were freshmen or sophomores to where they are now and their level of development is amazing.” Martin said.
Martin believes players not only develop into better athletes, but by stepping into leadership roles, the boys gain valuable experience that will help them handle responsibility in the future.
“Besides the whole soccer thing, there are some real valuable lessons for the boys. If they put their mind to something, they can achieve anything they want to do,” Martin said.
For the leaders of the team, it
QUARTERBACK, from Page 26
Flaherty said Schuhmacher’s curiosity and attention to detail help him take control of the offense.
“You can tell he loves football,” Flaherty said. “He’s excited for whatever new installation we have, and he makes sure everyone on the offense knows what they’re doing.”
Confidence, Flaherty adds, has been huge to Schuhmacher’s growth.
“Like anything, experience breeds confidence,” Flaherty said. “It’s one thing to think about playing the quarterback position well, but another to go out and do it. He’s adjusted well to the speed of varsity, and he’s getting more comfortable every
week.”
Even through tough games and learning moments, Schuhmacher has stayed resilient.
Flaherty explains this is what defines great players.
“He’s had ups and downs, some really good games and some he wishes he could have back,” Flaherty said. “But he’s been totally unfazed. That resilience is what you want in a quarterback.”
Off the field, Schuhmacher’s personality is just as appealing as his presence in the backfield.
“Blaize off the field is my best friend,” Dickson said. “He’s a good man and fun to be around. He always makes the mood better whenever I feel down. He helps everyone feel like they have a role.”
These qualities of leadership and consistency have made Schuhmacher a cornerstone for the team’s community.
“I think it’s hard for a team if the quarterback isn’t a leader,” Flaherty said. “But Blaize shows everyday that he’s as invested as anyone. He prepares in the weight room, he studies film, and he cares about his teammates’ success. That builds trust.”
Schuhmacher’s story is still being written.
As his first year starting on varsity, he knows there is still room to grow, but his foundation is already built from love of the game.
“I don’t think I ever doubted reaching this position,” Schuhmacher said. “What keeps me
Blaize off the field is my best friend. He’s a good man and fun to be around. He always makes the mood better whenever I feel down. He helps everyone feel like they have a role.”
David Dickson
Junior
can be hard to step out in front of your friends and tell them they need to “lock in,” but it’s crucial to keep the team running smoothly.
“The most difficult part is just being taken seriously. These are your friends, it’s hard to put your foot down and tell them things,” Duarte said. “It’s awkward to say, ‘Hey, you need to update your payment.’”
The goal for Adams and Martin is to continue this team for as long as possible.
Every summer, they meet to make sure they’re aligned on the business plan for the upcoming season.
“We certainly want to keep this going, but we understand that it takes some work, and you have to put that work in,” Martin said. “When Ben comes back in the summer, we talk about the future – who’ll lead, who’ll help, and how to keep the program moving forward.”
As the Reform United season comes to an end, the legacy left behind by Ben Adams is significant.
Each year, a new group of students will step up to lead the team, carrying forward its focus on camaraderie, player development, and leadership both on and off the field.
going is just the love of football. It’s fun, I want to play well, and I want to keep getting better.” When asked for advice he’d give to younger students chasing the same dream, Schuhmacher’s advice came with no hesitation.
“Always work hard,” Schuhmacher said. “The older you get, the harder you’ll have to work. Whatever you can do when you’re younger goes a long way. You’ll regret it later if you don’t put the work in.”
For St. Mark’s, that mindset has already begun to shape the team’s name.
A name built around discipline, chemistry, and a quarterback who’s earned every snap.
Nolan Driesse Staff Writer
The referee drew a curved line on the grass to show how close I could get to the upcoming corner kick. I reluctantly lined up with my hands behind my back, and if I had known where the soccer ball would end up, I would have covered my head. But I didn’t.
The ball went straight toward my head and hit me, sports goggles and all. The referee’s whistle, coaches running out to check on me, worried parents, an ice pack for my head and vomiting later — it all went by in a blur. And this would only be the first time.
Two years later, I’m standing a few feet away from my friend during a basketball game. He was supposed to pass it in to me… when I was looking. My coach was talking to me, and when I turned my head back around, the basketball met me square in the face.
I shook it off and kept playing. A few hours later, I was at the park running around with my friends playing catch, when I first started feeling weird. When I got home, I told my parents, “It feels like a tennis ball is bouncing back and forth in my head.” They vividly remember me slurring my words while telling them – a sign of a concussion.
I had to deal with a month of recovery and tons of missed school. Loud noises and bright lights were countered with headphones and sunglasses. It took my young fourth-grade brain a whole month to recover from the blow.
Then, during freshman year, I walked up behind my friends in the quad before chapel, and one of them swung his head back on accident and hit me right below the eye. Sharp pain, but not a thought of a concussion in my mind. Fifteen minutes later, during chapel, my eyes were swimming, unable to stay still and focus on the lesson.
A doctor’s appointment, a diagnosis, a few hard days of not participating in class, eyes unable to focus, no sports for several weeks – it was all becoming a familiar experience.
Okay, a bad start to freshman year, let’s make it concussion-free through the end of this year.
Easier said than done. During baseball tryouts in February, I was standing at shortstop, waiting to catch the throw down to second while another teammate stole the base.
The throw was off-target, so I jumped to my left and caught it. Expecting to land back on the ground and continue playing, my teammate’s shoulder had other ideas, dealing a crushing blow to my jaw.
Instead of taking a month off and taking care of my head, I worked through the constant headaches. Eventually, about three weeks after my feeble attempt to keep going, the pain took over. My pile of make-up work grew every day I took off.
Not only was I behind in schoolwork, but I also missed the first several baseball games. Nothing is harder for me than watching my favorite sport from the sidelines. I started feeling down about my proneness to concussions. None of these injuries are my fault anyway. Why do they keep happening to me?
I began to try everything I could to help recover and prevent the severity of possible future concussions. From hyperbaric chambers and acupuncture to migraine medicine prescribed by my doctor, I tried it all. The treatments may not have helped my concussion, but they helped my peace of mind.
Going on seven concussion-free months, I can’t help but think about CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy). Reading stories about the tragic lives of people with CTE, I see their lives spiral out of control and end abruptly.
Worry nudges a door open in the back of my mind, telling me the same will happen to me. Should I quit sports? How do I keep my head safe?
Quitting sports would be the last resort, if it ever came to that. I can never imagine not being able to play the sports I love because my brain can’t take it anymore.
While it is unlikely I will get another concussion or end up with CTE, the thought still looms in the back of my mind.
Over the past decade, awareness and precaution regarding concussions have increased. With this wave of new research, the school has worked tirelessy to improve protocol.
By Sam Morse
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were approximately 214,110 TBI (traumatic brain injury) related hospitalizations in 2020 and 69,473 TBI-related deaths in 2021.
The most vulnerable age to sustain a concussion is between ages 9-22.
Males are nearly two times more likely to be hospitalized and three times more likely to die from a TBI than females.
A mild TBI, commonly known as a concussion, is a relatively common occurrence for these demographics.
During a concussion, the jello-like brain is shaken and bounces around inside the skull. When the brain jostles around, it stretches the connective tissue inside, creating an imbalance in the nerve cells and sending the brain into an energy crisis.
Experiencing a concussion can be concerning for both the victim and the people watching.
The symptoms can be just as frightening. Losing consciousness. Disorientation. Brain fog. Unfocused eyes. Slowed reactions. Slurred speech.
These symptoms vary between people and can’t determine the severity of the concussion alone.
“The saying in the field is that if you’ve seen one concussion, you’ve seen one concussion, because no two are identical,” UTSouthwestern Clinical Neuropsychologist C. Munro
Cullum said.
If treated correctly and quickly, concussions have little to no long-term effects, as only 10 percent of concussion patients experience symptoms 30 days after impact.
However, if neglected and unchecked, they can permanently alter the brain’s working capabilities.
At a 12-year school like this one, concussions are inevitable. All boys. Ages 6-18. Various places for physical activity. Pent-up energy of kids. A wide variety of contact sports. Brains not fully developed.
The possibility of a blow to the head is endless, almost inevitable.
However, for over a decade, faculty such as nurse Julie Doerge, head athletic trainer Matt Hjertstedt, strength and conditioning coach Kevin Dilworth and Dr. James Carl Sterling have been working continuously to improve the concussion rates at St. Mark’s.
Before the school’s concussion protocol was introduced, there was little to no awareness or precaution regarding concussions.
“At that point, somebody could, if they weren’t knocked unconscious, go back in the game. The protocol was, ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’” Hjertstedt said.
Even in the academic world, before the program, concussed students would go to class as if they were healed, then fail their tests and, in turn, tank their grades.
As national awareness for concussions escalated, the faculty realized that a new form of precaution was needed.
“I think there was a culture change within athletics,” Hjertstedt said. “There were a lot of rule changes, but also the techniques changed. When I started here, you tackled someone by putting your head into the person’s belly. Now, you put your head off to the side, wrap up and alligator roll.”
This culture change is not only seen in football.
Information from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
While concussed, patients can be sensitive to light or even noise. To limit the effects of these symptoms, patients often stay in dark rooms or wear sunglasses.
become
For example, lacrosse has become more of a finesse sport as opposed to a pure contact sport.
Additionally, wrestling has reserved times during matches to inspect injuries and determine if someone sustained a concussion or not.
The school’s protocol allows the trainers and nurses to work together to help each individual student recover as efficiently and effectively as possible. The protocol focuses on the patient seeking medical attention from a physician following at least 24 hours of rest.
Failing to seek medical attention is often a mistake made by people who experience a blow to the head.
Headaches are the most common symptoms for concussions. Usually, this symptom is combatted by simple rest.
Many patients tend to have shortened tempers and heightened anxiety and emotions.
“There’s several million concussions a year that are reported, and we think there’s probably twice that occurring where they’re not getting reported into record reporting systems, ” Cullum said. “A lot of people don’t even realize they’ve had a concussion. They say, ‘My head hurts. I see stars. I feel dizzy. But it’s no big deal. I’ll just go home and go to bed or whatever.’”
In addition to new technologies such as the imPACT test, the protocol also relies heavily on daily communication and honesty between the faculty and the patient, which is commonly a problem in concussion recovery.
“A number of studies have suggested that girls may report more symptoms,” Cullum said. “Now, are they really experiencing more symptoms, or are they more willing to admit the symptoms than adolescent males? Men tend to feel invincible to the world and don’t want to admit it, saying ‘Oh, I’m fine. I’m fine. I don’t have any symptoms’ even though they’re stumbling.”
Despite these challenges, the small, all-boys community of St. Mark’s supports the recovery process.
Not only do boys statistically recover faster than girls, but the all-boys community cre -
ates a more honest environment and the small student population allows for more individual care.
“I’m lucky because I’m here. I know most of the boys, so I know how they normally would respond,” Hjertstedt said.
Because of this mix of advantages, St. Mark’s recovery protocol is regarded as effective.
In addition, Dilworth has incorporated neck-strengthening into workouts, improving concussion rates across all sports.
In fact, only one-third of concussions across campus are from athletics, whereas the other two-thirds are from recreational play, most commonly during middle school free time.
Furthermore, only one concussion has occurred across all four St. Mark’s football teams this year.
Meanwhile, Junior Dylan Bosita is well-acquainted with concussions, having sustained one documented concussion along with various other blows to the head, all before middle school.
Slamming his face into a metal door frame: laceration between the eyes.
Smashing his face into a brick wall playing “imaginary” football: laceration in the same exact place between the eyes.
The wall was the endzone.
Hit in the head by the closing back door of an SUV.
Despite all these blows to the head, Bosita’s most impactful head injury was the most benign.
While in the lunch line, one of his fellow third-grade classmates jerked back in the line behind him, hitting Bosita’s head from behind. Something was wrong.
Seeing stars, Bosita’s head throbbed in pain as he went to Doerge.
Following the protocol, Bosita was sent home and then saw a physician who diagnosed him with a concussion. The following two weeks were a struggle for Bosita. Avoid sensory. No school. No sports. No phone. No video games. No direct sunlight.
“Imagine telling a third grader to sit in a dark room all day and not do anything,” Bosita said. “I
wasn’t even allowed to listen to music.”
Bosita was restricted from doing many things, except for one: listening to the sports radio.
Bosita was lying in darkness when his dad found him sulking.
His dad told him that he was lucky because he could listen to all the MLB playoff games.
“I would sit and listen all day,” Bosita said. “When (my dad) came home from work, he would hang out with me and listen to Dodgers games, until they lost in the World Series to the Houston Astros… I really appreciate the opportunity I had to sit with my dad and talk about sports in a dark room.”
While following the Return to Learn policy that the concussion protocol requires, Bosita received immense amounts of support and help, readjusting to school and making up two weeks of assignments.
Although he was happy to be back, Bosita decided to make a difficult sacrifice due to his concussion: lacrosse.
“I really did enjoy the camaraderie with teammates and the opportunities to lay people out when they had the ball,” Bosita said. “Unfortunately, my family made the decision to stop collision sports, so I never played tackle football and I stopped playing lacrosse.”
According to Cullum, having multiple concussions, if treated correctly, has no correlation to the severity of long-term effects, if any at all.
Despite experiencing multiple concussion-like injuries, Bosita has seen no effects on his cognitive ability.
On the other hand, Senior Nolan Chu only needed one concussion to sustain certain losses of memory. Sophomore year. Fourth period.
He knows that it was the fourth period because all fire drills happen during then.
Physical Education. Football.
Senior Sebastian Gonzalez was the quarterback. He remembers that.
Chu and another classmate jump up to fight for a reception.
Everything following that mo -
ment is erased from his memory, left with only his friends’ accounts to fill in the gaps.
“He slammed me to the ground,” Chu said.“I hit the back of my head on the ground. I got knocked out for like 15-20 seconds. (My friends) thought I was faking it because apparently I was snoring.”
Waking up dazed in the middle of the field, Chu sat up to see an empty field, except for P.E. Coach Trey Whitty standing beside him.
Aside from a slight headache, Chu felt normal, just a little disoriented.
While everyone else left for the fire drill, Chu stayed on the field as Trainer Matt Hjertstedt rushed to help him.
Chu followed the concussion procedure as expected.
Going home, resting, and seeing a physician where they gave him various eye tracking tests before slowly returning to school.
“They had a flashcard and I had to look back and forth between straightforward flashcards,” Chu said. “I felt that it was kind of unnecessary… I felt fine.”
When Chu returned to school, he could only attend class and didn’t take notes.
And with the end of the semester rapidly approaching and a week of make-up work, Chu’s return to school was stressful, ultimately causing his grades to drop.
“I think I went back a little too soon, honestly,” Chu said.“I still had a little bit of a headache. My mom said, ‘just go back to get back into it’... but I was there just sitting in class, not taking notes.”
Now a Senior, Chu has returned to normal.
But even today, the moments before and the months after his concussion are a blur.
He doesn’t clearly remember his eye-tracking tests.
He doesn’t clearly remember the events after he returned to consciousness.
The classes during his return to school are foggy.
Every time he tries to remember the football game, the memories come to him in spurts covered in a yellow tint.
Even though he feels normal, his friends have occasionally told him otherwise.
“I’d say I’m the same person, but other people have said that I’m not,” Chu said. “People brought it up a lot last year, saying, ‘Nolan (Chu) has CTE’ (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), so I act differently. But I have no idea. Maybe people perceive me differently.”
Chu was relatively quiet during his freshman and sophomore year, eventually becoming more talkative over his junior and senior years.
Although his concussion hap -
pened amidst this change, he is unsure if the concussion was what caused it.
“I don’t know if I really changed inside,” Chu said. “I guess I felt more confident or something. I feel like something changed in my mind.”
The definition of CTE is a progressive neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head impacts, typically sustained during contact sports or other activities involving repetitive brain trauma.
CTE is hard to diagnose and takes decades to determine its long-term effects.
Despite popular belief, most mental health problems that arise from concussions stem from anxiety.
The saying in the field is that if you’ve seen one concussion, you’ve seen one concussion, because no two are identical.”
C. Munro Cullum Clinical Neuro-psychologist
“There is some anxiety about getting CTE. There’s some worry about developing depression,” Cullum said. “We think that it’s more people worrying and interpreting that, ‘Oh my gosh. I had those concussions 20 years ago. Now I’m worried about how my memory is going to be now that I’m in my 60s. A lot of it is just worrying. Most of those people look fine when we study them, and there’s not a lot of excessive depression, there’s not excessive anxiety.”
BY THE NUMBERS
Information from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Korey Stringer Institute.
3.8
Athletes experiment with different dietary strategies to boost performance.
By Weston Chance and Jake Pinnell
For serious athletes, preparation is everything. While lifting hard or watching film often take center stage, dieting is a key aspect that seems to fly under the radar. From a lineman bulking up to a wrestler cutting weight for a bout, food intake and eating habits are critical to performance in virtually every sport.
Strength and Conditioning Coach Kevin Dilworth, a former professional track athlete, knows firsthand the importance of dieting correctly for athletes.
Dilworth says eating clean foods at consistent times and their water
intake are of the utmost importance for athletes trying to maximize their potential.
While principles like that are true across the board, the difference in dietary habits of some athletes is night and day.
“A wrestler that’s trying to cut weight wouldn’t do the same thing as a lineman that’s trying to gain weight,” Dilworth said. “We always want our linemen’s plates to be big.”
There are potential dangers to both ends of the spectrum.
“Wrestlers who cut too much risk losing muscle,” Dilworth said. “And for linemen, eating too much high cholesterol and fried foods will slow you down.”
Senior offensive lineman Matei Oprea has worked closely with Dilworth to build a diet that works for him.
“We really focus on having a plan,” Oprea said. “Things to avoid, things to really target, and overall trying to build healthy habits.”
I’m
really tired all the time and it can be a little harder to focus in class. It’s really a drain mentally.”
Ferris Gotlich Sophomore
For a lineman like Oprea, extra meals and high doses of protein and carbohydrates afford the energy necessary to compete at a high level throughout the season. During the offseason and the summer leading up to competition, the consumtion varies.
‘The way I’ve approached it is that the offseason is your time to bulk up,” Oprea said. “You’re not as worried about being in shape for your sport, so you’re really just trying to gain as much strength as possible.”
Last offseason, Oprea climbed to around 290 pounds. Then, during summer workouts, he quickly shed 10 pounds as he got into game shape and honed in on his diet. Oprea intends to maintain that weight for the rest of the season.
Football often calls for yearly weight fluctuations, but those pale in comparison to the drastic weight changes wrestlers undergo in just a couple of weeks, sometimes even days.
By Ben Yi
When water polo players Odran Fitzgerald and David Li graduated from the school in 2020, neither one of them ever imagined they’d be back in the pool so soon.
After being coached in the community for so many years, now, they find themselves at the new pool, in the Zierk Athletic Center, coaching and giving back to the very community they were once a part of.
Fitzgerald graduated from SMU and came back to coach water polo in 2022 after having not touched the sport in over a year.
“I’ve been involved with the
sport, since playing at St Mark’s, and then with Pegasus, which is the main Dallas (water polo) club who’s associated with St Mark’s water polo, and then another big person in water polo here in Dallas,” Fitzgerald said. “I wanted to get back into it and get back into that community. It’s changed over the couple of years that I’ve been coaching.”
Despite now being a full-time engineer, Fitzgerald is still finding ways to give back to the team and is currently coaching a recreational middle school water polo team about two to three days a week.
“I think it’s really just for the joy and for watching kids grow up
and really learn to be themselves and learn to become better men playing a sport, playing water polo, the challenging sport that it is,” Fitzgerald said. “You really learn who someone is, learn who you are. And that’s, for me, that’s, that’s the main thing.”
Li, went to the University of Toronto and is also currently coaching water polo at 10600.
For most of his college career, Li didn’t know what he wanted to do as a person or as a student and found himself extremely lost.
“Everyone says you should think about your dreams, think about what you want. And I thought about all of it, and I didn’t
Sophomore wrestler Ferris Gotlich follows a meticulous regimen to make weight for competition.
“The week before, I’ll start to be in a calorie deficit. Then the week of, on Monday, I’ll have as much protein as I can eat. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I’ll try to cut my protein down and have foods that don’t have a lot of fat and salt, and I’ll be drinking a lot of water because on Thursday and Friday I won’t drink much water,” Gotlich said.
Because practices like this can be dangerous if performed improperly, all wrestlers coordinate with our athletic staff.
“We have to do a weight certification that takes our body fat,” Gotlich said,“Then we’ll see Trainer Matt and he’ll tell us what our limit is to cut down to.”
Wrestlers see the impact of this diet in all facets of life.
“I’m really tired all the time and it can be a little harder to focus in class.” Gotlich said. “It’s really a drain mentally, really intense.”
In recent years, fitness influencers have flocked to social media to share their personal food plans. Many have attracted large followings by proposing alternative and often obscure diets. Last December, Junior rower Walker Stevens saw a variation of the carnivore diet on Tik Tok and decided to give it a try.
“People were saying that it’s a great way to boost your energy,” Stevens said. “I did it primarily for crew because I was relying a lot on caffeine and energy drinks to carry me through the day.”
Stevens felt the carnivore diet could mitigate his reliance on caffeine, provide him with a clean source of energy, and greatly reduce his intake of processed foods. While these benefits all sounded great, Stevens ultimately found there were some serious drawbacks.
“I thought the problem with it was a lack of carbohydrates,” Stevens said. “In most diets, you have bread, rice, and other grains, but in this diet, sweet potatoes were the only type of carbs I got, so it was really restrictive.”
After a month, Stevens felt less energized than before and discovered through his Whoop Fitness Band that his blood pressure had dropped. Although he does not recommend this diet to anyone, Stevens feels there are intense diets out there that can be beneficial.
“If I found a kind of hybrid carnivore diet that didn’t have any processed sugar in it, I’d definitely try that,” Stevens said.
From trendy tiktok diets to rapid weight fluctuations, athletes can go to extremes to maximize their performance. Staying healthy, talking to trainers and coaches, and knowing your limits are crucial during these processes.
“The most important thing is to listen to your body,” Dilworth said.
actually know what I wanted,” Li said. “There are the obvious answers, everyone wants money and security and things like that. It feels weird saying it out loud, but what people wanted, like security and money, wasn’t really worth it to me. It wasn’t worth the price.”
For Li, the best way of finding his own purpose was in creating meaningful relationships with others, as well as giving and assigning values to others in his community, instead of going down a regular career path that wouldn’t have any significance toward him.
“You need something that you are good at. And I felt like I was
pretty good at water polo.” Li said.
The current players on the team have all felt the impact of receiving coaching from former St. Mark’s players who understand the school and are able to connect with the players in a way that traditional coaches can’t.
“I think it’s cool that water polo is so deeply rooted in the community that alumni have returned to help foster the new generation of players,” said sophomore Sebastian Medina. “It means a lot to us, and we’re grateful to have them here.”
Cricket, a sport watched by billions around the world, never gained much popularity within the U.S. Now, with growing investment and exposure, cricket is starting to take flight
By Ronit Kongara and Archer Wilburn
A group of 4-year olds and 5-year olds crowd around an instructor, eager to learn all about a new sport. Holding tiny wooden bats, they swing again and again, having the time of their lives. Even as the sun starts to set and their parents call them to go back home, they stay there, trying harder and harder to hit the red leather ball farther than anyone else.
Cricket, a sport watched by 2.5 billion people across 100 countries, has huge popularity within countries such as India, Pakistan, England, Australia, and South Africa. But, within the US, cricket originally started as a major sport but had faded into obscurity over time.
“We don’t really think about cricket much in the U.S., baseball is really the sport that we focus on. Cricket used to be our most popular sport, but that changed during the Revolutionary War when we were trying to decouple from English influence.” Andrew Minick, Associate at Perot Jain, the firm that owns the Texas Super Kings cricket team, said.
But now, cricket is finding a home within the United States, especially in Texas. With the introduction of cricket into the 2028 Olympics and the major coverage of the underdog story of the USA Men’s Cricket Team’s in the T20 World Cup, cricket has found its way into more and more homes in the U.S., and cricket promotors are taking advantage of that. Within the past three years, the U.S. has seen the rise of two different national cricket leagues, Major League Cricket (MLC), the league the Super Kings compete in, and the National Cricket League (NCL).
But, in order to make cricket appealing to the American audience, both leagues have had to adapt. According to Malini Basu, the media representative for the NCL, the shorter, faster format of
their Sixty Strikes Tournament was made to appeal to the American audience, one that is just getting into the sport. In order to get younger viewers, the league has focused on grassroots programs, hoping to build interest and talent within the U.S.
“We’re bringing it to after school programs. We’re going to make it in summer programs like teaching it from a very young and early age, so kids can feel empowered to get into cricket,” Basu said. “We’re partnering with Parks and Recs, having pop up clinics, community leagues to build that interest.”
For Basu, growing up with a sport is what makes it so special, so these grassroot efforts are meant to make cricket special to the American audience. And so far, Basu has seen some tremendous impact.
“We took Brian Lara to a school in South Dallas, and we went to go teach cricket to hundreds of kids. And they were, they were so moved by this. They were like ‘oh my God, we want to learn cricket,’” Basu said. “We also did little cricket camps where we’re teaching kids, four to five year olds, how to play. They were also so touched. It was getting dark, and they have a curfew, but they didn’t want to go home.”
We also did little cricket camps where we’re teaching kids, four to five year olds, how to play. It was getting dark, and they have a curfew, but they didn’t want to go home
Malini Basu Media Representative of the National Cricket League
But the impact isn’t just limited to the American audience.
High school and college cricket players within the U.S. before didn’t have a clear path to becoming professional, but now with the MLC and NCL, US talent now has a space to develop and flourish.
“Rohit Sharma is an example. He was raised here in Frisco, and now he’s one of the star players for the Dallas Lone Stars. We’ve got a ton of American players coming into the league,” Basu said.
In order to build a league, popularity and media spread is important, but investment is a huge part of being able to establish anything. For Minick, a key driver of investment was the immense potential that cricket had within the American market.
“Cricket is the second most popular sport in the world, and the U.S. is the world’s largest media market. If you put the second most popular sport in the world combined with the largest media market, good things should happen as a result of that,” Minick said.
For the growth of cricket within the US specifically, Minick believes there are two major factors: a diaspora of people from cricket-loving countries and an in-
By Jake Pinnell
A team composed mostly of underclassmen in a sport where consistency and discipline is so important sounds like a recipe for disaster. But thanks to a strong sense of brotherhood, respect and accountability, the cross country team has been making consistent progress, setting themselves up for a bright, freshmen-led future. Varsity cross country coach Ryan Hershner says it all starts months before the runners line up for the first time.
“This year we had a better showing in summer attendance, and there’s a direct translation in our sport of just being present at practice and reaping the rewards
of it,” Hershner said.
Hershner attributes this better attendance to a strong sense of camaraderie and underclassmen leadership on the team.
“We have a good community. They’re not just friends because they run cross country,” Hershner said. “They actually hang out with each other outside of school. That helps with the team chemistry and helps them put the team first by being able to run for each other.”
Sophomore Lawson Boutrous feels the same way.
“We are our own group. We hang out a lot outside of practice,” Boutrous said. “Last Saturday, after we ran, we did a community service project with each other. We do a lot of things as a team.
It’s really unique having so many young people. We only have one scorer that’s an upperclassman.”
Lawson
Boutrous Sophomore
where, especially if it’s optional, it just increases our bonds because we’re choosing, especially in the summer, to wake up at 6 A.M. and go to school just to run. Seeing that you’re not the only one that’s doing that is special.”
The team is half freshmen and a third sophomores. He says the fact that the team is so young puts him in an interesting position of leadership.
“It’s really unique having so many young people,” Boutrous said. “We only have one scorer that’s an upperclassman. It’s definitely a cool experience. As a sophomore. I’m technically an upper classman in terms of the team.” Boutrous said.
Both Boutrous and Hershner
crease in investment into sports in general. And that growth has been significant.
For just the NCL, in just their second year, they have hit benchmarks of 10 million viewers, thousands of participants, and media stations across 50 countries broadcasting their tournaments. For cricket in general, there are over 30 stadiums across the U.S. and multiple major, minor, collegiate and even local leagues popping up.
But even though cricket’s rise has been meteoric, Minick believes there is still a long way to go. Paralleling cricket to Major League Soccer, Minick says that building popularity and a fan base will take time.
“Major League Soccer was started in the early 90s, but it wasn’t really until the last five years that the sport started to take off in the U.S.,” Minick said. “So for cricket, it will probably still take a good 10 to 15 years for us to see similar growth.”
But in the meantime, both leagues will continue to drive participation up to build up their audiences.
“People are seeing it, and they want to learn it,” Basu said. “Once you watch it and understand it, you’re hooked.”
see a bright future ahead for the program.
“The fact that we were so young gives us so much potential,” Boutrous said. “It really increases our confidence in the team.”
Hershner was especially excited about the potential that this team’s younger guys hold.
“This is one of the best freshman classes I’ve seen during my time here,” Hershner said. “They’re committed.”
Having a team built on genuine friendship and mutual respect for each other lays the foundation for success, especially when that is able to be successfully led by the underclassmen of the team.
Last week, students across campus enjoyed the homecoming festivites. A spirit week, the Homecoming football game and a pep rally all led up to the Homecoming dance on Oct. 25 at Edison’s.
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