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El Cambio Climático no Existe: Poetry as Protest in Advanced Spanish
By Grace Li and Rebecca Wu, V Form
El Cambio Climático no Existe: Poetry as Protest in Advanced Spanish
Assignment Note: In Advanced Spanish Language and Culture, students learned about using art and music as a form of protest. As an assignment, they were tasked with creating a piece of art that reflected their thoughts about an issue in society. The poem is about the importance of speaking out for climate change. It describes what is going on right now and what students could be doing to use their voices to make a positive impact in the world.
El Cambio Climático no Existe
“El cambio climático no existe”
Una afirmación de Trump que es muy triste
El gobierno no ha hecho nada
Por lo tanto la gente está enojada
La falta de progreso
Crea mucho descontento
Y hay muchas protestas
porque no hay otros planetas
Which Woman is the Wicked Witch? Atwood’s Feminist Revision of Witch Hangings
By Catie Summers, V Form
Which Woman is the Wicked Witch? Atwood’s Feminist Revision of Witch Hangings
The inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s poem “Half-Hanged Mary” was drawn from Atwood’s ancestor Mary Webster. Yet, Atwood’s eerie portrayal of a seventeenth-century woman’s battle with death, inner demons, and societal norms is written with a punch of feminist revision. Throughout Atwood’s poem, “Half-Hanged Mary,” particularly in the third and fourth stanzas, the foundation of a true, yet uncanny, occurrence is laced with a feminist revision of the history in question: that of witch-hunting in the seventeenth-century America.
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Knock Knock, Is Anyone Even Listening? Says the Feminist
By Allison Bechard, IV Form
Knock Knock, Is Anyone Even Listening? Says the Feminist
Summary:
Sexism, despite constantly being viewed as a thing of the past, remains a predominant issue, especially in the workplace. Undeniable strides towards equality have been taken, yet females are still oppressed, being granted fewer promotions and less money than their male counterparts.
| Key Points: 1. Males and females tend to receive different and unequal treatment when it comes to applying for jobs. Even though women often meet the same criteria as males and have superior test scores, men still get employed over them. 2. Men often receive more money from the moment they start their careers, leaving women to only earn $0.79 for every $1.00 a male makes. 3. Women are judged by different standards due to common misconceptions and stereotypes placed upon them by the dominant group. Women often find themselves without a sponsor to champion their work causing their careers to stall. 4. Men are reluctant to sponsor these females as they are afraid of losing power, despite this superiority being historical. |
Moana: The Movie that Could Have Been
By Lina Zhang, V Form
Moana: The Movie that Could Have Been
As part of Disney’s revival era animations, Moana details the journey of its eponymous heroine to restore peace and prosperity to her island, a community loosely based upon Samoan culture but also drawn from Polynesian culture as a whole. As Moana is one of the first movies to be made about Polynesian cultures, many see it as representation and awareness for the community and dismiss instances of cultural appropriation or misrepresentation in it as mere unintentional accidents. However, it is important to recognize that while the film promotes the positive message of strong femininity in the character of Moana, it also reinforces the limited and stereotypical narrative that Western audiences have of Pacific Islander cultures. From the culturally-insensitive coconut people to Maui’s controversial body, Moana is the movie that could have done better but didn’t, failing its expectations of cultural representation and perpetuating Disney’s trend of cultural appropriation.
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The Nickel Boys: The Formation and Destruction of Elwood’s Moral Compass
By Nick Sparrow, IV Form
The Nickel Boys: The Formation and Destruction of Elwood’s Moral Compass
Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, The Nickel Boys, is a story based on true events, which follows a bright and promising African-American boy with a strong moral code growing up in the Jim Crow South. The main conflict of the story is his sentence to a reform school where he finds himself facing a racist and corrupt sovereignty, which uses torture to discipline students. Elwood Curtis was on his way to college when nothing but bad luck and prejudice got him arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. Throughout the novel, Elwood seems to be the only person willing to take a stand and face the system, unable to see that everyone else had already been defeated. After his first week of trying to do good at The Nickel School, Elwood is taken to “The White House” where he is flogged until he passes out. He ends up in this situation as a result of his bravery and nobility, which is what ultimately causes Elwood to lose sense of his moral compass and any hope of escape. This novel tells details the ways in which hate, racism, and prejudice will find a way to take good people down, even when they live sincerely and by the book.
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20th Century Psychiatric Hospitals and the Lasting Impacts of Deinstitutionalization
By Skylar Davis, VI Form
20th Century Psychiatric Hospitals and the Lasting Impacts of Deinstitutionalization
Editor’s Note: This paper was completed as a part of the History Research Fellowship, a one-semester course available to sixth form students.
I. Introduction
Few institutions evoke greater horror than the “insane asylums” of the 19th and 20th centuries. Given the stigmatizing media portrayals of such hospitals, most people believe that they had uniformly poor living conditions, practiced barbaric treatments, and employed abusive staff. As a consequence, society now views historic asylums as torturous and inhumane places. This image, however, hides a more complex truth about the value of state mental hospitals.
Prior to the asylum era, the only hospitals in America were general hospitals. During the early 18th century, most individuals diagnosed with mental illnesses lived at home under their families’ care. At the time, communities were reasonably tolerant of individuals who exhibited mild symptoms of mental illness. Those deemed violent and disorderly were sent to either public almshouses or private hospitals, depending on their family’s finances, for professional medical care. This was the beginning of institutionalized mental health care.
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The Portrayal of Russian Military Intervention in Ukraine (2014-current) in Russian Media Outlets
By Yevheniia Dubrova, VI Form
The Portrayal of Russian Military Intervention in Ukraine (2014-current) in Russian Media Outlets
Editor’s Note: This paper was completed as a part of the History Research Fellowship, a one-semester course available to sixth form students.
- Introduction
On April 13, 2014, following the Russian occupation of Crimea, pro-Russian activists seized the City Council building in Makiivka, located in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine. They proclaimed the area part of a newly formed proto-state, the Donetsk People’s Republic. Almost immediately, the Republic’s government restricted public access to all Ukrainian and international TV channels and print media. As Dmytro Tkachenko, an adviser at Ukraine’s Ministry of Information Policy, noted, “Russia [was] doing everything it [could] to cut those people off.” Controlling TV towers in the two regions allowed the separatists to broadcast their propaganda, exaggerating Ukraine’s failures and glorifying their self-declared government. From that day forward, the population of occupied Donbas, including Makiivka, received all of their news solely from local Republican or state-owned Russian media outlets.
I remember that day clearly because it marked the beginning of the aggressive attitudes of pro-Russian supporters, who constituted the vast majority of people in my hometown of Makiivka, towards those supporting Ukraine and its reunification with the region. Never before had I witnessed the propaganda machine working so effectively and disinformation campaigns executed so brilliantly. Russia’s state-controlled media outlets unanimously denied the presence of Russian troops in the region and stated that it was ultra-nationalist Ukrainian government financed by Western politicians who started the war in Donbas for its own benefit. Branding the Ukrainian government a “fascist junta,” the Kremlin portrayed it and the Ukrainian state as “purveyors of fascism, xenophobia,” and violent racism. The horrifying tales of the violence of Ukrainian soldiers that appeared in the news, such as the infamous story about the public crucifixion of a three-year-old boy in Slovyansk, removed any traces of sympathy from the local population towards Ukraine, its government, and its army.
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Decades of Deceit: Bernie Madoff’s Effect on SEC Regulation
By Blake Gattuso, VI Form
Decades of Deceit: Bernie Madoff’s Effect on SEC Regulation
Editor’s Note: This paper was completed as a part of the History Research Fellowship, a one-semester course available to sixth form students.
Seventeen billion dollars lost. Decades of deceit. Bernie Madoff’s fraud forever changed the lives of thousands and impacted the lives of millions.
“It’s a proprietary strategy, I can’t go into great detail,” said Bernie Madoff when he was asked to explain how he made such strong and consistent returns for his investors. This quote from his 2001 interview with Barron’s Magazine held true. Madoff would never go into “great detail” on this topic with anyone. Madoff did not tell investors about the strategy. Not even the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) examiners would get “great detail” about Madoff’s multibillion-dollar hedge fund. For more than thirty years, Madoff ran this scheme. And for more than thirty years, Madoff never went into “great detail” with anyone because his hedge fund was a sixty-five billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, not the top-performing hedge fund which it claimed to be.
Trusted capital markets are fundamental to the functioning of the American economy. Stock markets are places where companies raise capital from investors who buy corporate shares. Without these markets, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the American economy to efficiently allocate capital to productive uses represented in many American, world-leading companies, such as Apple, Google, General Motors, and Boeing. If investors lose faith in these markets and see them as fraudulent, the American economy will suffer.
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