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Promoting Healthy Eating–The Great Cannection

By  Enrico Shippole, VI Form

Imagine that I’m standing in front of you with a large grocery bag and that I’m going to offer to make you a dessert. From my bag, I would extract sugar, salt, three dyes (red 40, yellow 5, blue 1), and petroleum oil. Yes, petroleum oil is in many of our baked goods. I could keep going but I’ll lose your interest somewhere in the litany of the other 30 additives and preservatives.

I love food; I grew up in an Italian family, where gatherings happened around the kitchen table with real, fresh food. Today, it seems that too many family gatherings happen at a fast food counter. (more…)

A Small Difference Worth Doing

By Brittany Andrea, V Form

When I first heard of the OutReach 360 Dominican Republic trip, I thought it was a glorified vacation. A large

IMG_0783group of Saint Markers going down to a beautiful Caribbean island, going to the beach, and playing with the most adorable kids for a week sounded like fun. I didn’t have the opportunity to go until this year, my junior year, and what I would actually experience shamed my ignorant first impressions.

On one very small level, my first impression was accurate.  There ended up being plenty of time to go to the beach because we stayed by the water’s edge. We got to play with the children every day; I threw a baseball with a semi-pro pitcher whom I expect to sign with a (more…)

Robotics and Collaboration: A Symbiotic Relationship

By Seung Jae (Ryan) Lee, V Form

Fish4At our Gray Colloquium Day on March 27th, we were fortunate to have Don Bossi, president of FIRST Robotics, as our morning keynote speaker. FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, seeks to inspire young students to take an interest in robotics and encourages collaboration and cooperation. St. Mark’s has developed an intricate and intimate relationship with FIRST over the last four years. Thanks to the generous support from the school, the St. Mark’s Robotics Team with the team name Gone Fishin’ and a team number 3566 has finished its fourth season. Every year, the robotics team competes in the FIRST Robotics Competition (more…)

AP French: Capturing the Plight of the Homeless in Paris (SDF)

By Griffin Starkey, VI Form and Aly Skelly, VI Form & Mary Lane, VI Form, Anya Harter, V Form, and Riona Reeves, VI Form

From Dr. Stephen Lynch: the assignment for my AP French class was to create videos that captured the plight of the homeless (SDF = sans domicile fixe) in Paris. They could create a documentary — a journalist interviewing the homeless of Paris about their challenges and what they hoped for OR a conversation between homeless people talking about their difficult lives. We read articles about the homeless problem in France and watched and discussed YouTube videos from French news about this growing problem — the economic, human, social factors. (more…)

Seeing Is Believing: Learning to Draw in Studio I

By Barbara Putnam, Art Faculty

We go to school to learn how to learn. We develop physical, emotional, and perceptual skills that allow us to leave behind what we once thought were limitations. I have always loved teaching the real beginners in Studio I– those students who are convinced that they have no eye and think they have nothing in common with those around them who mysteriously, eloquently, translate thoughts and observations onto sheets of paper. Most of us remember painting as children but learning to “speak” in a more sophisticated visual language means embracing a wholly new enterprise, similar to constructing that first meaningful conversation in a foreign language.
I asked students in this year’s Studio I class to deconstruct a myth about Studio Art: that you are either born with “it” or not and to describe what may be a recent or a distant memory about the process of learning to see. Included are samples of their early work followed by a drawing completed just after spring break.

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An Interview with Our Resident Poet

Julie Geng, V Form, Interviews Sarah McCann, English Faculty

Q: Hi Ms. McCann. Thank you for letting me interview you. To start off, could you please talk a little bit about when and how you discovered your passion for poetry?

A: Sure. I actually love words always, and my parents read to us. And we told stories to each other, and all sorts of things. But I didn’t really know anything about poetry until I was forced to write a poem in fifth grade. And it was really my teacher that opened up that territory for me because I needed that encouragement. And he wrote (more…)