By Sidney Brant TikTok is a terrifying platform. Users of the app often acknowledge this with the caveat that yes, it sucks the life out of you and makes any long-term task impossible without a Subway surfers video playing in the background, but it can expose you to so much unique, interesting media that you otherwise wouldn’t have discovered. There are communities formed fully online … Continue reading Why is BookTok So Annoying?
by Sidney Brant McCaskey students take an obligatory chemistry course as sophomores. By the end of the school year, two camps of people emerge–those who forget 6.02 X 1023 and go on with their lives, and those who are left desperate for more knowledge to explain the deceivingly complex processes that compose our entire existence. From the latter emerges a fringe group of students, loyal … Continue reading Meet Mr. Phillips-Cary
by Sidney Brant A father, pulling his bleeding child out of a pile of rubble; a woman, the crotch of her pants bloodied, being forced into a jeep and taken hostage. The images, videos, text blurbs, and news stories that barrage our screens don’t provide information about the war–they are the war. The most recent iteration of the century-old struggle between Israel and Palestine began … Continue reading The optics war underlying the Israel-Hamas conflict
By Sidney Brant As seniors decide whether or not to submit SAT scores, and juniors prepare to take the test for the first time, many students contemplate the same question: what’s the point? It seems ludicrous to spend dozens of hours re-learning freshman year trig and how to apply grammar rules to heinously written passages for questions that may or may not be on a … Continue reading Is the SAT Becoming Obsolete?
AP (advanced placement) and IB (international baccalaureate) classes are both higher level course options offered at McCaskey and are often equivalated. The comparison of the two curricula though, is arbitrary and inaccurate. Although both courses have the same general structure of a college-level class with a nationally or internationally administered test at the end of the year, the differences extend far beyond geography. AP classes … Continue reading Where IB Succeeds and AP Fails: Critical Thinking
Technology is an unavoidable facet of learning in most modern classrooms. For many students, it can be frustrating and even hinder any willingness to learn. Mr. Young, a math teacher at McCaskey East, is trying to change that. In Mr. Young’s classroom, assignments are part of a game facilitated by tech. He creates a game board every week, and students are put into groups to … Continue reading How Mr. Young Uses Technology to Gamify His Classroom
“Everything is made of corn!” This thought has pervaded my brain ever since my class read Michael Pollan’s middle-grade edition of The Omnivore’s Dilemma in the 7th grade. The book explores different food production methods and diets, most of which ultimately end up being majorly inconvenient or unhealthy, to highlight the impact that industrialization has had on the food we eat. Deciding what to eat … Continue reading How Industrialized Food Production Harms Us All
It’s no secret that people are reading less; books and articles have become passe and unstimulating amidst the overwhelming barrage of content that is invariably at our fingertips. Teens and even young children are opting for more short-form online content that can be consumed passively, rather than actively reading books for fun. The decline in reading has left children and young adults with smaller vocabularies, … Continue reading The Lost Art of Reading Books
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