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Category Archives: 2019-2020 v.04
Globalization Through Glow Sticks
By Andria Bao, III Form
Globalization Through Glow Sticks
Editor’s Note: For this assignment, III form students in The Global Seminar (TGS) were asked to create an infographic that could tell the story of globalization through a chosen product.
Johns Hopkins Medicine and Healthcare Summit: A Kean Fellowship Grant
By Cara Mulcahey, V Form
Johns Hopkins Medicine and Healthcare Summit: A Kean Fellowship Grant
Editor’s Note: This opportunity and article were made possible by the Kean Fellowship Grant. Kean Fellowships will be conferred upon a small number of highly well-qualified students who propose and undertake independent research and study in the field of public service, exploring meaningful domestic public policy issues. Once selected, and on the basis of their topic, Fellows will work with a faculty mentor and find meaningful connections with academicians and leaders in the field of public policy. The Fellowship will engage the students in cutting edge topics and in a manner that is serious and capitalizes upon what they have learned at St Mark’s. Project proposals for the Kean Fellowship might take the form of a capstone project, a senior project, independent study and/or may include summer work .
Over the summer, I spent a week and a half at a medicine and healthcare summit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. The summit, run by the program Ambassador Leaders, was meant to help prepare me for my journey to become a doctor. The leaders of the summit brought in undergraduate students majoring in STEM fields, current medical school students, and numerous doctors for Q&A sessions. These sessions enhanced our understanding of the admission processes and prepared us for each step of becoming part of the medical field. Session facilitators also brought in doctors and nurses to teach us different medical procedures and tasks such as suturing, CPR/AED, checking vitals and reflexes, and stopping choking. Additionally, we traveled to the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center to become certified in stopping life-threatening bleeding, a skill that can prevent countless deaths.
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Gender Inequality and Unreliable Narration: Two Paragraphs on The Great Gatsby
By Felicity Keyzer-Pollard and Lina Zhang, V Form
Gender Inequality and Unreliable Narration: Two Paragraphs on The Great Gatsby
The Inherent Unreliability of Nick Carraway
By Felicity Keyzer-Pollard
Whether intentional or not, Nick Carraway’s first-person narration of The Great Gatsby dictates every aspect of the novel leading to an innate unreliability. Initially, Fitzgerald attempts to present Nick to the reader as a reliable narrator by highlighting his belief in “reserving judgments,” and letting the reader feel as if Nick is a voice of reason in a convoluted society (2). Nevertheless, it is vital to recognize that even reliable narrators can distort the very core of a novel. This distortion becomes apparent as Nick presents Jay Gatsby, the novel’s eponymous character. Initially, he describes Gatsby as nearly god-like by chronicling his persona by the “whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world” (Fitzgerald 44). This verbiage around Gatsby sets up the larger-than-life persona of him that the majority of characters believe to be true. However, this narration is not entirely authentic. Nick narrates The Great Gatsby from a future perspective, meaning he already knew the truth about Gatsby. While Nick attempts to remain impartial when explaining how James Gatz became the infamous Jay Gatsby, he already acknowledges that “Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself” (Fitzgerald 98). His decision to withhold this information, whether intentional or not, misleads the reader. This choice means that when Nick tells Gatsby he “can’t repeat the past,” he is highlighting one of the critical flaws in his own narration (Fitzgerald 110). Nick is telling this story in an attempt to recount the past. However, in Nick’s own words, he is unable to accomplish this. The narration style that Fitzgerald chodse cast Nick into the role of an unreliable narrator regardless of intention. Consequently, the inherent unreliability of Nick Carraway’s narration fundamentally shapes the reader’s understanding of The Great Gatsby.
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What is Folk Music?
By Mr. Richard “Nick” Noble, ’76, Communications Department
What is Folk Music?
Editor’s Note: This article was previously published at WICN.org.
Essays with questions for titles can be annoying. They are often an excuse for the author to preach his or her opinion with passionate, proselytizing vehemence as if picking a fight with potential readers genuinely curious about the answer. I hope this won’t be one of those, but quite honestly I can make no guarantees. If I had a dollar for every time I have been asked this question in the twelve-plus years I have been hosting THE FOLK REVIVAL, I would have retired a rich man long ago. For a long time, I stopped trying to answer the question “What is Folk Music?” because when I did, it invariably started an argument. People, it seemed, almost always asked the question having their answer already in mind. And their answers—strongly held opinions and beliefs—were often quite disparate.
Go ahead: Google it. Even everyone’s go-to, Wikipedia, can’t make up its mind. The very first line of its “Folk Music” entry has to equivocate:
This article is about traditional, non-commercial folk music. For the 20th-century style associated with a wide variety of subgenres, see Contemporary folk music. “Folk Songs” and “Folksinger” redirect here. For other uses, see Folk Songs (disambiguation) and Folksinger (disambiguation). (Wikipedia)
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Listen to the Echo of Silence: Sound in Salinger’s Nine Stories
By Sam Wang, V Form
Listen to the Echo of Silence: Sound in Salinger’s Nine Stories
J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories opens with a Zen koan: “We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?” Reading through the book, the audience may find the unusual plots and characters do not make sense when interpreted logically. The only breakthrough to these unresolved and thought-provoking endings of Salinger’s stories is through reflecting on “the sound of one hand clapping,” to break the logic and hear the impossible sound.
In the first story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the conversation between Seymour, a veteran of the war, and the little girl Sybil seems random but profound. For instance, Seymour talks to Sybil in a nonsensical way. When asking where is Sybil from, Seymour playfully annoys her by asking, “Is that anywhere near Whirly Wood, Connecticut, by any chance” (Salinger 21). Seymour suggests to Sybil what they can do after going to the water: “we’ll see if we can catch a bananafish,” and when Sybil mentions another child, Sharon Lipschutz, Seymour says to himself, “how the name comes up. Mixing memory and desire” (Salinger 19). The audience may find Seymour strange at first sight. However, looking back to his interaction with Sybil after knowing about Seymour’s suicide at the end, these words may intrigue the audience to think about their connotations. Seymour implies his suffering in the postwar society by bananafish, and he longs for spiritual salvation by Sybil, an innocent child, when almost everyone around him is acting like a bananafish.
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Visual Representations of the Relationship Between Oral and Written History in Atlantic World
By Tess Barrett, Levi McAllister, and Daniella Pozo, IV Form
Visual Representations of the Relationship Between Oral and Written History in Atlantic World
Instructor’s Note from Ms. Killeen: Atlantic World, a history elective, recently explored the story of Sundiata. This epic of a Western African king from the 1200s was relayed orally for hundreds of years because Ancient Mali was a non-literate society. In the modern Western world, we tend to trust the written word more than traditional storytelling, but Mali’s griots (historians and storytellers) would argue that oral history, which is kept closer to the heart and is therefore connected to people, is more truthful. After reading Sundiata and some Western secondary sources, students were asked to create a visual display describing the history of Ancient Mali. With a few guiding questions—Can we know what really happened? Which parts of the story are true in detail, and which are true in spirit? Does the African story have a different emphasis than the Western ones? What is important to each culture and why?—and the requirement that the project be “visual,” each student was given the freedom to demonstrate their learning in their own way.
Tess, Daniella and Levi said that they liked having the freedom to express their ideas while they were challenged by the task of representing both sides fairly and equally. Ultimately, they came to recognize the value of oral history in its own right, and to question our predisposition to automatically trust the written word.
Daniella’s Poster
LEO 