Name: Emma Hall

Position: Managing Editor

Assignment: “Back To The Future 4” & Memetics

My high school experience has not always been prestigious like this district paints itself to be.

Last year, I took a social science class that could be considered not very academically challenging.

I couldn’t pick which of these assignments was the most ridiculous, so I’ll give my top two.

One of the assignments was to write “Back To The Future 4” to emphasize the importance of family, I guess? I wouldn’t know I’ve never seen the movie, but I’m pretty sure that it had nothing at all to do with the prompt. 

The other assignment was to analyze a topic through a specific social scientific lens, and I decided to analyze memes. 

So my friends and I ended up doing an hour long presentation about memetics (the study of memes), analyzing a Stanford paper on memes, and hosting an in-class competition on who could make the best meme. 

Name: John Symak

Position: Staff Writer

Assignment: Memorial project & Build A School

The most ridiculous assignment I’ve ever had is the memorial project in my English class.

You basically have to create a memorial for something of your choice, but we didn’t know why we were doing it, nor what it has to do with English, not to mention no one had any idea what to do.

At the time I’m writing this, I haven’t presented it yet, so pray for past me’s soul and grade. Please.

It’s either that assignment or the time we had to design a school in health class, and pretty much nothing was off limits. 

I put together a school that had Friday off every week but had a longer school day, which I didn’t actually think was a terrible idea.

The point was to design it to show how good mental health worked, but very few groups actually took it seriously, so there tended to be a lot of “the classes do absolutely nothing” sort of stuff.

Name: Conan Maron

Position:  Staff Writer

Assignment: Noises

So in newspaper, we have this assignment called Noises in the Newsrooms where someone on staff gives us a topic and expects four of us to write some cheesy response for a part of the newspaper that honestly 90 percent  of the school doesn’t even read. 

But most of the time only half the noises slots get filled because nobody wants to write one and then editors realize they need to fill this blank space the day before the paper goes to print. 

Then people get forced to write one even though I would rather be spending newspaper doing all the homework that I neglect to do the night before. Right now, I am writing this noises figuring out how I can type out half a page of nonsense to please my editor overlords. Most of the time the noises topics are boring. Like last issue, I couldn’t care less about which teacher was most qualified to perform in a school play. 

What’s even worse is we never have enough space to 

Name: Kiley Borba

Position: Staff Writer

Assignment: Just say NO

Let me get this straight, you’re expecting me, a socially awkward teenager, who doesn’t have a lot of friends and has a hard time talking to people outside a classroom setting, to be in the situation where I am somehow be invited to a party? 

Supposedly because a person or group of people enjoy my presence enough that they would like it outside of school, at this party I may or may not probably having a decent time, talking to people, partaking in whatever is going on at the party, and at the moment one of these people at the party offers me a substance that temporarily tweaks my state of consciousness. 

Whether it be a plant, some fungi or a weird chemical that’ll make me think my limbs are snakes, you want me to not be willing to give my control to be decided by the universe, and “just say no”?

You’re asking a bit too much of me, but I’ll try I guess.