Senior Rant: Random Thoughts
by Dominick Lawton
Senior Staff Writer
Dear lord, they're letting me write one of these? I'm astonished. Touched, even. Anyway, this senior rant will probably be a lot like the music I'm listening to right now (Mr. Bungle, whom I heartily recommend) - choppy, fragmented, connected by few coherent logical threads, and punctuated with occasional bursts of unintelligible shrieking. Here goes!
-If/when you're a junior, don't let anything pressure you to take APs instead of other classes that you might personally find more interesting. Also, for the love of god, DON'T do things like stressing about who you're walking with at senior graduation a year before said graduation takes place. That's just silly.
-This year has seen a significant rise in the overall number of soundoffs at assembly. This can only be a good thing. Public airing of grievances is vital to the health of any community, and the soundoff is an excellent means by which to do just that. Sounding off is satisfying for the sounder-off, and enlightening (sometimes even entertaining!) for the audience. True, an excess of soundoffs might cause assembly to take a bit of a pessimistic turn for a while, but apathy is worse than negativity by almost any standard.
-Burroughs' campus is really lovely in the spring. I just felt like slipping that in somewhere.
-Students should be allowed to use iPods during free periods. Using them in class is obviously a no-no, but all the rationales I've heard from authority figures for banning them during free periods revolve around the idea that listening to an iPod is antisocial and blocks you out from the world around you, stopping you from interacting with other students. The thing is, however, lots of people bond over music, and asking to see someone's iPod or listening to music with them can be as good a way to bond with them as any. Music is, after all, the food of love.
-At various times throughout my Burroughs career, I've heard several students representing several very different ideological backgrounds lamenting that their particular viewpoint was being stifled by a disagreeing majority, and that they found it hard to make their voice heard at Burroughs. I find this problematic for multiple reasons. Sticking up for your personal beliefs in the face of the mass disagreement of your peers is admirable, but projecting that disagreement into some kind of official schoolwide sanction of your ideology is inaccurate, unfair, and makes no sense. Besides, if you really feel like your ideas are underrepresented in the turbulent seas of Burroughs discourse, then do something about it! Give a speech at assembly, submit an article to The World, join Political Forum (or Philosophy Club, or Environmental Awareness...) and talk about it there, put up awareness-raising posters, get a sandwich board and stand in the middle of the quadrangle shouting snappy slogans at passersby - just, please, don't idly complain. (The fact that this whole article is nothing but a series of idle complaints in no way detracts from my point. Honest.)
-Last of all, let's not forget that most of us are extremely privileged kids living extremely privileged lives, and our petty complaints about school are, in general, mere distractions from the enormities of the problems that untold numbers people face every day in the cities, counties, country, and world where we live. Especially when that school is as good as Burroughs.