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BY STEPHANIE LU AND AURELIA YANG
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efore the first Apple computer was created, there stood a valley of small towns and two-lane roads, replete with the fresh fragrance of apricot and plum trees. Silicon Valley is built on the graveyard of those trees. At the turn of the 20th century, the valley was primarily agrarian, with valley transportation outside of large cities limited to horseback. Despite the rural background, the valley managed to put down significant roots in technological innovation: Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation in Palo Alto and created the world’s first global radio communication system, eventually signing a contract with the Navy in 1912. Continued Navy influence, and the technology it brought, came in the form of Naval Air Station Moffet Field in Santa Clara County, which opened in 1933. Technology firms set up shop near the air base, and when the Navy moved out, the NACA--NASA’s predecessor--moved in. A host of aerospace firms also moved in to serve the NACA, bringing with them an influx of engineers and scientists. Despite these early advances in technology, Cupertino remained a town of ranches and estate vineyards well into the mid-1960s; San Jose remained largely agricultural until the 1960s as well. Even then the Santa Clara Valley was still known as the Valley of Heart’s
Delight, a fertile basin famous for its mild climate and its thousands of acres of blooming orchards that older residents can. “As a kid I enjoyed hiking or walking through the local orchards or vacant lots,” said Kurt Euler, a long-time Silicon Valley resident who attended John Muir Elementary, Miller Middle and Lynbrook. “One thing I particularly enjoyed was the amount of butterflies in those days. I recall running around with a butterfly net. Very few butterflies now, since all the fruit trees are gone.” Social studies teacher David Pugh, who graduated from Cupertino High school in the 1960s and has resided in the area since, recalls similar memories. “There was a gap between all the little towns--Campbell, San Jose, Sunnyvale--with just orchards in between,” said Pugh. “Stelling Road was a two-lane road--a lot of these were just two lanes-and once you went across Saratoga-Sunnyvale, you were in the countryside, you were really in the sticks. There was the occasional orchard and the house, and that was it. Stelling was a country road, hardly any traffic, no stop signs or anything like that.” A popular summer job for high schoolers, Pugh also remembered, was working at a fruit packing plant that stood where Armadillo Willy’s is now. “I couldn’t get in--I wanted to, but there was a big demand for see HISTORY page 2
NEWS//
Senior research paper to be replaced next year
BY SOPHIA LING AND WILLIAM GUO
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his year, the Lynbrook history department announced its decision to cancel the annual senior research project to revise its objective and content. While current seniors may rejoice over the omission of one of the more intensive assignments of their high school career, history teachers are currently working on creating an alternative project for the 2016-2017 school year. The change in curriculum was due to overlapping requirements in both the English and history research papers. Since the history research paper was created five years ago, both history and English teachers observed that students were given unnecessary stress under the weight of two large projects. The two projects also paralleled each other in different aspects, as both focus on topics regarding
research and writing complex theses. “We want to make sure we’re getting a meaningful product, [and] that students see value in it,” said History Department Chair Nate Martell. “In the recent years we’ve run into more anecdotal evidence that the projects in other classes have grown increasingly similar to the ones we were doing.” Redundancy is one of the main issues that influenced this decision. The original purpose of the research project was so that students could learn how to conduct research and condense their findings into a paper defending an argument, which is an essential skill incoming college students are often unprepared for. Over the course of the past few years, the new Common Core standards have emphasized the application of researchrelated skills to better prepare high school students.
“I think having the research paper would have given a lot of experience for college because we will be writing [many] of these by the time we graduate college,” said senior Kriya Giresh. The history department’s main focus for the new project is to reduce an unnecessary workload while challenging students’ research abilities. Although nothing is fully established yet, current juniors should expect an improved research-based history assignment for their senior year. “While [the project is] in the process of being rethought, there are no guarantees as to what it actually might be in the future,” said English Department Chair Robert Richmond. “The research part won’t go away and the writing won’t go away; we would still emphasize all of those skills, but perhaps in a different format.”
EQUESTRIAN// pg. 13 SHIVATEJA VEMIREDDY - EPIC