Jayla Wright

Brendan Hall

Staff Writer

On November 6, 2018, the midterm elections took place. This was an opportunity to elect congressmen, senators, and governors.

Several voting aged seniors at Science Leadership Academy discussed the process of registering and whether or not they would be voting in the midterm election.

These 12th graders were eager to use their voting right for the first time.  

“I think that it’s really important that younger people vote. If more young people vote and happen to vote Democrat we can eventually get the house to be equal again,” Green elaborated on her stance on why it is important for young people to use their right of voting.

“I think after seeing the reaction of the 2016 election it made me realize that if I have opportunities and then I can make a change and I learned that my vote does matter. I wanted to partake in that,” SLA student Lauren Nicolella stated about her desire to vote.

“Also something else that helped was the fact that SLA had voting registration opportunities…I’m still glad I had it done because I think it pushed me to do it,” She later clarified.

While both Lauren Nicolella and Taylor Green voted in the midterms. There were also those who were the voting age who chose not to vote.   

“I don’t know much about it…people who know about it should [vote] there’s nothing worse than people who try to talk about stuff who don’t know what they’re saying,” Raymond Rochester stated when asked on whether or not he would vote.

Despite not registering to vote, he still encouraged that others should participate in the election declaring, “If you feel you know enough to vote, go for it. Let your voice be heard.”

Amelia Benamara

Staff Writer

At 11:55 the imaginary bell of SLA Center City rings, not once but twice in the week of November 5th, 2018. While the students cheered and left early, the teachers and staff ran around, making sure all of their narratives are present as parents swarm their doorways.

It has been said by multiple teachers that Narrative week is the most hectic time all quarter. Math teacher, Bradford Latimer, explains the chaos teachers experience in just that week.

“The timing is always hard for first quarter narratives. As teachers, we are doing interviews for incoming students, grading benchmarks, college recommendation letters due that same week, and on top of all of that, we have a hundred plus narratives to write.” Mr. Latimer reveals.

How do teachers necessarily prepare for hundreds of conferences? SLA uses a method where teachers take time to write unique thoughts, complimenting each student as well as including potential areas of improvement for that Quarter. When conferences are held, the student speaks to their parents or guardian about what each teacher included in their narratives.

What makes SLA report card conferences unique is rather than a conversation between the parents and the advisor, it is a discussion between the student and the parents where the advisor(s) takes notes on what is being said. This way, the student and their guardian have a moment of honesty in the right space.

“At first when I came here I thought it was stupid because kids are going to lie. Then I learned that being in a room with just two adults who know lots about you as a student, in a way pushes you to vent about anything necessary. Rather than easily avoiding the topic at home,” Senior Eric Valenti compliments SLA’s uniqueness.

In SLA, students meet with the advisor the week of conferences to annotate details their teachers made in the narratives worthy enough for them to mention during the conference. This makes sure they are aware and prepared for what they want to mention.

Many students are often unaware of the hard work that is put into each personalized narratives. This year, for Algebra 2 and Calculus students, Mr. Latimer has 105 narratives to write, edit, and merge the grade data for. This takes an average of 16 to 20 hours. PreCalculus teacher, Sunil Reddy, writes a total of 65 narratives in 15 minutes.

Teachers think earlier in the process as they analyze their students to keep track of their work ethic. All of that data helps make the writing process faster because it gives a more precise picture of what the student did (or could have done) to secure their grade.

Prior to the end of the quarter, the PreCalculus teacher, Mr. Reddy, keeps track of how many times students took re-quizzes, how many of those re-quizzes were successful attempts, how many times they came to Office Hours, coupled with the number of missing assignments.

Every staff member writes their narratives differently based on the student, however, the layout is pretty similar. In a narrative, there is a section for personalized comments, areas of strength, and areas of improvement. Others, like Matt Kay, an English teacher, use the copy and paste method to make the process quicker for them, but eventually end up adding some originality to them individually.

“I DEFINITELY WRITE UNIQUE NARRATIVES. Even if some things end up sounding the same, I always type from scratch without copy/pasting comments about the student,” Mr. Reddy makes sure each narrative is special to that person.

For those of you wondering, there is definitely a limited period to write narratives. The way that the calendar works and needing to grade benchmarks resulted in only having one weekend to write the narratives this year. Usually, in the past, there have been two weekends for that.

Teachers do get 4 hours of staff meeting time to write narratives, but, again, that always is the time that ends up needing to be spent grading projects or doing other work that must be done before narratives can be written.

There are also specific, but logical requirements for narratives. Mr. Latimer, who is head of the Academic Standard Committee (ASC), explains that the committee works with teachers on curriculum development to make sure they have the support they need to build their curriculum. Knowing SLA is idiosyncratic to other schools, the ASC organizes staff workshops where the requirements for narratives are explained as well as tips and tricks to make the process feasible, especially for new teachers.

How do teachers juggle grading and narratives all at the end of the quarter? Benchmarks are assigned at the end of the quarter which are also a great portion of the narratives that teachers analyze. Even with their to-do lists full, teachers try to maintain their regular schedules such as meeting with students when needed.

“Part of the reason why that week so hard is because I keep the same schedule. I don’t want my extra requirements to impact what I can do with students so I am still in math lab when I am supposed to be and I still schedule office hours on Tuesdays,” Mr. Latimer explains.

Teachers are very much aware that a good amount of students do not bother to read their narratives, which, as you would think, is a huge disappointment considering the number of hours put into the narratives.

“I have had several students tell me they don’t read all of them which is quite frustrating. But I do hope the vast majority of them read them. Especially because they are given time in an advisory to do so.” Mr. Latimer described the frustration teachers carry.

Just as there is a number of students who do not bother to read narratives, there is also a number of students who do.

“Several students thank teachers every year for crafting unique narratives,” Mr. Reddy told, “I know students know they can read my comments without feeling as though what was said was identical to comments given to them in other courses.”

Among these students, Eric Valenti is one appreciates SLA advisors for pushing them to read and heavily annotate their narratives before their conference.

“My advisor does a good job at pushing our advisory to annotate their annotation, so we’d know what we need to work on and what we need to continue to do in the future, “ Valenti states.

Despite the chaos teachers go through during report card conference week, they work endlessly to polish their work and at the same time juggle other obligations. This is one of the many skills SLA staff carry in such an establishment that runs differently from other School District schools in Philadelphia.

Eric Valenti

A&E Editor

On October 27, 2018, a mass shooting took place at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. Robert Bowers took the life of eleven individuals and caused commotion and heartache in Pennsylvania, especially in the Jewish community.

SLA’s community has been alarmed by the growing number of shootings and the commotion caused by the Pittsburgh shooting, and the Jewish members of the community had a unique perspective to share a Jewish perspective on the shooting.

Senior Avi Cantor gave his initial reaction as well as his mother’s.

“She just broke down and she said there was a shooting there and I had family there. And she knew that my grandfather’s side of the family is native to Homestead which is close to Pittsburgh and a lot of his friends went to that synagogue. And my mom just broke down and said: I don’t know what happened, I don’t know if anyone got hurt so it was like a crazy experience and for the entire weekend we were focused on it the whole time.”

Avi knew someone who was killed in the shooting and his response to the shooting was more political. He blamed Trump for the lack of gun regulations.

He immediately blamed the fact that the synagogue wasn’t armed and I just thought that if I walked into my synagogue and saw armed guards I would feel intimidated and I would feel I wasn’t somewhere safe. A synagogue is a place with a connection to god.”

Robert Bowers motive was fueled by anti-semitic beliefs and ideals. Though it may not be the first time a shooting has happened this year, it was a shooting that brought everyone’s attention because it was at a synagogue. History teacher, Daniel Symonds, believes that the conversation shouldn’t be about that this was a hate crime but about the aggressive pattern of gun violence.

“The conversation should be about what do we do, not let’s double check if this a hate crime. The notion that this is not a hate crime or not a big deal is a fantasy produced by people who don’t believe in gun violence and don’t care about the victims of gun violence. Show me the person that this is not seeing this as a big issue and I’ll show you a moron.” Symonds stated.

The issue that Symonds believes we as a community should focus on is how to prevent shootings in the United States.

Senior Sara Berg believed maybe shootings may never end.

“There’s still so much hate everywhere, especially on the internet but its more casual. I’m not sure if there is a way to end shootings with our current situation.” Berg stated.

People now have succumbed to the fact that mass shootings are starting to become societal norms. Before the shooting at the tree of life synagogue, people believed that shootings were done by people who didn’t feel accepted in society but now shooters appear to be products of violent media.

“Wild hate mongering media has succeeded and has taken some people’s anger in our society and channeled that anger into vicious old school type fo hates such as anti-semitism. What more profound of America than a mass shooting in a Tree of Life synagogue.” Mr. Symonds stated.

Mass shootings are becoming more prevalent and now people have to endure the harm of antisemitic shooters. Though things may look bleak and there may not be an obvious solution, maybe things in our country can change if more people listen to people like Daniel Symmonds:

“What our society needs is more connection to the community. We need more public education, we need more mental health services, we need gun control and we need certain media regulations.”

Zoe Kwasnicki

Staff Writer

On May 13, 2016, the former Obama administration released a nationwide letter on gender identity providing the following definition of gender, “Gender identity refers to an individual’s internal sense of gender. A person’s gender identity may be different from or the same as the person’s sex assigned at birth.” Definitions of the terms “sex assigned at birth”, “transgender”, “transgender male”, “transgender female”, and “gender transition” were also provided.

This action nationally widened the scope of transgender rights by not only informing the public of the transgender community, but supporting and enforcing their ability to live their lives as their rightful gender. This also included protection against medical discrimination.

The response was mixed, to say the least.

Some praised the legislation, saying it was about time. Others called it “unnatural” and an attack on “the religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and independent medical judgment of health care professionals.”

One of the latter was Roger Severino who worked at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank, and wrote for the Daily Signal, a conjoined conservative news outlet with the Heritage Foundation, and now acts as the Director for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services.

So it is not surprising that a recently leaked memo attacking transgender rights circulated under the guidance of Severino. A stark upheaval of the Obama Administration’s definition, the memo proposes defining gender as “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth…The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

While the proposal has not yet passed on the federal level, SLA faculty and students are standing by the trans community with both School Counselor Zoe Siswick and Queer-Straight Alliance Advisor Joshua Block calling the proposal “hateful and unnecessary and not a reliable definition” and “a sad attempt to try and deny how the world really is and how people really are.”

Ms. Siswick does have a somewhat optimistic view on the situation. “I think the great thing is that on the most surface level in terms of here in our building, we will continue to treat our students the way we treat our students right now.”

However, she also admits the mental health of students will definitely be affected: “if someone’s telling you that you’re not who you know you are – that can have real, significant impact on your socio-emotional and also physical health.”

Similar concerns were voiced by Lily Rivera, student leader of the Q.S.A., and Mic Lieberman-Burak, a genderqueer student, who are worried for the health of trans students in SLA who may be unable to receive hormone medication due to discrimination by their physician and/or healthcare provider stating, “For AFAB [Assigned Female At Birth] and AMAB [Assigned Male At Birth] trans people who are far into the process of medically transitioning, this proposed definition does not apply on a physical level. This needs to be acknowledged by medical professionals, in order to provide the most effective healthcare.”

To combat these potential dangers, Mr. Block says the QSA plans to continue to provide educational workshops for teachers and students as well as connecting with other QSAs and LGTBQ+ groups across Philadelphia as well as providing support to those within SLA.

Despite the reassurance of teachers, Rivera expressed concern about what the policy will also mean inside SLA because while SLA may remain a welcoming environment – that does not mean the outside world will.

“SLA students will be angry, and afraid; just as they were when Trump was first elected into office,” she said. “It will definitely change the environment of SLA, for good or for worse, I don’t know yet, and I really don’t hope to get that answer any time soon.”