Features

Eric Valenti

Staff Writer

SLA’s end of year programming starts soon, with Week Without Walls starting June 4rd and Field Day the next week, on Monday, June 11th. Both of these activities take a lot of planning from the faculty and staff of SLA Center City, and The students appreciate the grand gesture of planning something for the community to enjoy. Most schools don’t devote a week of spectacular activities for students, or at least that’s what most think.

Junior Ashley DeLaCruz appreciates the alternative programming.

“Once the classes are over some people don’t have things to do so it helps students hang out with their friends. Others just want to leave for vacation but they feel compelled to stay.”

Week Without Walls appears to be a time where students can connect with their friends and perform team building activities while having fun. Sessions this year include “Hikey, Hikey”, where students hike, write on, where students write creatively and no walls, where students walk with dogs. SLA, however, is not the only school who has special programming like this.

Central High school does something quite similar to Week Without Walls, Symposiums. Junior Andre Pak attends Central and explained the program to SLAMedia.

“After finals, the schools hold Symposiums for two days, where students are free to explore their interests by participating in these fun activities in place of classes. They can range from rock climbing, learning sign language, or petting dogs.”

It was interesting to discover that the infamous Central High school knows how to have fun and do things that are not only entertaining but informative as well, especially by the end of the year.

Junior Sadie Squillaciotti attends Furness High School and shared their own special programming.

“Well at the end of the year everything starts to wind down a little, we have our annual Multicultural Fair which is always fun. Our school is very diverse, so everybody brings food from their culture, and the school makes an entire day of everybody eating and doing activities. And when grades actually close we play games and watch movies.” Squillaciotti stated.

The cultural fest seems like a unique and new experience for students to learn and immerse themselves in new and appreciative cultures.

DeLaCruz stated, “We should have possibly a cooking class or maybe go to a Phillies game. I would like to see SLA do something out of their comfort zone.

Amelia Benamara

Staff Writer

There are a number of challenges that come with traveling abroad in general, imagine a school. From March 12 to March 20 at SLA Main Campus, nine students caught a plane to Costa Rica. This trip consisted of completing a community service projects in a community where SLA students dug into the grounds of the Bribri community to provide an easier access to electricity and water for the residents of that area.

Language Barriers

The language barrier is one of the most obvious of the challenges of studying abroad. Overcoming a language barrier may mean you’re struggling to learn a new language or you simply thought you were fluent, but find you’re unable to understand the strong local accent. Even if you’re studying in a country where you speak the same language, there are other hurdles to clear. For example, slang phrases that are popular or hip will seem strange.

“Initially I was nervous about the language barrier since my ability to speak Spanish is little. Although going there, while using the few words I knew along with new ones that I’ve learned was easier than I thought. The people were very kind and understood, using gestures with us and giving us many smiles.”

On April 13th SLA Center City also hosted an abroad trip to Germany where ten students stayed with a host family for ten days. Unlike Costa Rica, the Germany students, fortunately, get to see their hosts one final time when they fly to the United States in the month of October 2018.

In March of this year, Polish students from Torun to stay with 10 slambassadors, including Junior Eric Valenti, that attend the Science Leadership Academy for one week. “When Marceli arrived from Torun, Poland on his international trip, I was his host family for one week. Sometimes there was a bit of a language barrier, and many of the other students couldn’t understand him, including me.”

It is hard to have a general conversation about simple things with foreign host students is also very difficult to keep up with due to the language barrier. Valenti admits that he himself wasn’t familiar with the communication he had with his host student. in the U.S. Speaking for someone else wasn’t fair to Marceli because he would use very little words to describe his experiences when in reality he wanted to describe so much more but couldn’t.

Support Network

Your usual ‘support network’ of family and friends will be hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Even if you weren’t previously aware of how important they were, now is when you’ll find out.

Junior Meymey Seng explained, “On the third day of the trip, I started to miss home, since there was no electricity, meaning I was not able to contact home. Although a couple days after we went into the city, I was able to contact my family as a sense of reassurance. At the same time, I knew I didn’t want to leave because you can always miss two places at once.“

This challenge is likely to be felt most especially true for the first few days of studying abroad. But then, you will build up a new support network and after a while of that experience outside of your original environment.

Cross-Cultural Barriers

As foreigners, these teens do not know the local culture and its unwritten rules. Mistakes were made, however, according to the students themselves, it was another opportunity to learn from cultural misunderstandings.

Junior Jayla Wright gives her perspective on her experience, “Americans tend to have darker humor than Germans, for example, I said “I want to die” in a sarcastic manner not expecting they’d take it in very serious and personal fashion.

Going to a new environment, even for just a few days, you are in a way forced in a way to fit into the new surroundings in a rushed process. Even “casual violence” is looked at as a forbidden action, for example, laser tag in Germany is not permitted.

Not only will these encounters and newfound knowledge prepare these students for possible future abroad trips, but also for other new experiences with a different area of culture — not necessarily related to school associated trips.

The Return

Meymey Seng was among the group of students who have been chosen to attend the 10 day trip to Costa Rica. She gives insight on the difficulties she had with school assignments and projects, “Having to catch up on a lot of work before the trip or even having to do a bunch of work as soon as you come back.”

Meymey admits that even with all of the notes she has received she still found it extremely difficult to keep up with the lessons when she returned. As you can imagine, being present for the lesson is completely different from keeping up with it nearly 4,000 miles away.

Farewells

No matter how long the trip is, the day before catching that flight back home, you will feel the heaviness of staying forever and not being able to speak the words “goodbye” to those who have made the trip unforgettable despite the barriers.

“Jordan Edelheit, our camp trip coordinator, shared one of her poems during our final moments together, ‘Traveling is not fun because it is a job of many hellos and goodbyes.’ ”

Eric Valenti

Staff Writer

SLA’s lunch line has been an ongoing issue for years, until now. Within two months, cutting in the lunch has been minimized. Fewer students have been seen cutting or creating huge clumps of people in the line.

Before these big changes to the lunch line were put into effect, advisors were expected to show a short slide presentation explaining what the issue at lunch is and how student government is going to handle the change. One new measure that has reduced the chaos of the lunch line is the new divider. The divider stands at the front of the line because this is where most students cut. It helps people see students who attempt to cut. The second measure is the patrollers. They stand at the front of the line and they report if any student cuts in the line. Though there isn’t a patroller at the end of the line most of the cutting occurs in the front. The patrollers were selected by senior and student body president Tamir Harper.

“I personally selected students that I thought were interested, but also students began to hear about becoming a monitor. They came up and asked me about it and we began to add them to the spreadsheet. After they did three bands of monitoring they got a discount on their prom ticket,” Harper explained.

These hand selected individuals receive several perks for their work. Besides the reduced pricing in prom tickets, monitors gain roughly fifteen dollars after three bands. However, this money can only be used for SLA affiliated fees, such as senior dues. But being a monitor isn’t always easy, according to Junior Autumn Lor:

The lunch line has seen improvement and the line appears to not have huge groups of students as it did before.

Sanaa Scott-Wheeler

Staff Writer

In the weeks leading up to April 3rd,  a flyer appeared on social media platforms advertising that day  as “National Punish a Muslim Day.”

The flyer originated from the United Kingdom, and there were many acts of violence that occurred there. However, there was also great concern about attacks in the United States, especially due to Trump’s anti-Muslim policies., and

While no SLA students were attacked on this day, the event prompted reflection on the Muslim student body. “Punish A Muslim Day” is an extreme example of the microaggression and prejudice they deal with on a daily basis. Sophomore Naseem Hameid, who is American-born with family from Palestine, reported that ¨I thought national punish a Muslim day was stupid and when you think about it, it was disrespectful.”

¨People preach about respecting one another but at the same time will disrespect someone just like them¨.

Sophomore Koule Doucoure, who moved to Philadelphia from Niger in 2015, was also freaked out by the ¨event¨.

¨At first I was like, I´m not going to school. I told my cousin and she said ´you´re just going to give up your religion to something like this?´ When I came to school I was a little scared but I know the SLA community wouldn’t allow that to happen.¨

Most people find comfort in how diverse SLA is and that there is a little bit of everyone here so there are shared experiences.  One of the biggest fears on April 3rd was alienation. For years, Muslims in Philadelphia have tried to coexist with everyone else, to only receive backlash.

Sophomore Samera Baksh, who is Bengali-American, told the story of her family’s first experiences in the United States as an example.

¨When my mom came to America a month later it was 9/11 so she would come out of the house and people would yell ¨oh you f*cking terrorist¨ ¨you muslim¨ ¨go back to your country¨ my mom would try to act American so she wouldn’t wear cultural clothes or the hijab — my mom is light skinned so she could pass as American.¨

When Hameid was asked if he had ever been discriminated against because of his religion, his response was  ¨In middle school they would call me slurs like ´sand nigger´ ´bomber´ ´terrorist´¨.

Baksh has not been targeted in the same way, but still remains wary about what could happen. ¨I´ve never been scared here because I need to show people who I am, but I was scared for my mom wherever she goes,” Baksh said, “She takes my brother and I’m scared for them to hurt him too.¨

Freshman Ami Doumbia says ¨Usually most schools are afraid to talk about these types of things because they don´t wanna step on toes or because or because they don´t  know enough, but that’s not helping anybody I believe that if SLA opened itself up to these types of conversations, like we do with other subjects (such as sexuality, race etc.) we can thrive more than we already do.¨

Many students reported that they had never or rarely experienced microaggression in the SLA community, however by giving the Muslim community at SLA more positive recognition, we can set an example for other schools in the city while making our school a safer Haven.