Reflections on Foodstuffs

by David Baum

On Fruit Salad

Fruit Salad: a mysterious concoction containing many mysteries.

Luscious kiwis, tart blueberries, flavorful strawberries – the Fruit Salad encompasses the many facets of fruit culture. The Fruit Salad incorporates a motley assortment of fruits (and occasionally the venerable Mint Leaf, as pictured in the picture) from various ethnic backgrounds. The simple yet complex arrangement of the Fruit Salad reminds us of a somewhat known entity in the vast world of ours: The United States of America. Like the unified republics located in North America, the Fruit Salad seemingly embraces a variety of cultural groups. Yet even more connections can be formulated. Take, for instance, the undeniable fact that the Fruit Salad is often enjoyed at American meals. But the similarities do not end there! Both the Fruit Salad and the United States adhere to the motto E Pluribus Unum, meaning Out of Many, One. We can therefore come to the frightening conclusion: the Fruit Salad is, in fact, American propaganda! The red strawberries and blue blueberries, coupled with the somewhat white-looking pineapple form the three iconic colors of the United States flag. However, what exactly is this government propaganda trying to convery? Why must a dessert delight be forever ruined by the thought of propaganda? These thoughts are exactly what they do not want the populace to think! We can therefore conclude that by continuing to formulate answers to these questions, and thus think about them in the process, we can remain victorious against the governmental opression of the Fruit Salad!

 

On Pasta

Finally, we reach the tantalizing topic of the magnificent pasta.

Throughout the eras, the pasta has tickled the tongues of a myriad of eager food consumers. Yet the true intricacies of the underappreciated grain product evades the common voracious eater. The pasta, coupled with various other foodstuffs often used to complement the pasta, is rarely created with just one shape type. From penne and ziti to farfalle and linguine the pasta’s shapeshifting is quite a curiosity, indeed! In an effort to come to terms with the Italian delight, we must uncover the motive for the pasta’s many forms. A popular explanation supported by studies done at the University of Pastnacity reveal that had the pasta maintained a singular form, the young whippersnappers of the day (see “On Broccoli”) would simply get too bored of the pasta. Although it is unthinkable that the common treat could possibly generate such monotony, the unusual fact has been demonstrated throughout the pasta’s history, though this brief paragraph is not the time to go into such details.

 

On Broccoli

Broccoli: a luscious treat for many a vegetable connoisseur yet an abomination for the average young whippersnappers of the day.

How do we navigate past the palpable disparity between these two perspectives? First, we must fortify our understanding of the majestic vegetable. In the picture, take careful note of the individual green fibers that compose the broccoli as a whole. Only after years of careful evolution could the broccoli manifest such magnificent wonders. The intricacy of the broccoli parts invokes a unique awe unto the eater of the broccoli. However, all is not well! When considered as a food item, the broccoli’s characteristic head may upset some eaters’ tongues. Unfortunately, this questionably viable excuse manufactured by fringe groups for the rejection of broccoli in a meal is often used to stereotype the innocent broccoli. While this conception is disputable, it does provide the youngsters of the day the means to reject the consumption of the simple broccoli.

 

On Good

Before we begin our discusion, a few points must be noted:

• Contrary to popular belief, many foods are in fact rather good
• Cookies (as seen at the bottom) can also be considered rather good

But first we must define good. Unfortunately for us, this commonplace word tends to be rather abstract and often subjective. For instance, while the cookies may seem good to some, others might find the cookies to be bad. Now this new word can normally be taken to be the opposite of good. However, this is not always the case. Regardless, the former is still not defined. And if we truly wish to do so, we must look deeper into the meaning of good and subsequently the cookies. Just what do the cookies mean? Their brown chocolate chips seem to match the brownish texture of the cookies themselves and even the wooden table under the delicious treats. All is not as it seems, however. The juxtaposition of the brown cookies against the greenish background of this page evokes a rather interesting idea: the cookies, in fact, do not exist! And by that logic, we can return to and answer our original question. If our cookies have no meaning, we can conclude that our once venerable word good, in reality, does not convey any meaning at all.

 

E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many One

We now arrive at the quality treat that is the pasta.

Let us delve into the more intricate realm of the broccoli

You know what they say about food: it tends to be rather good.

 

 

The Blog: The HMS Dreadnought

by Emma Taylor

HMS Dreadnought was a revolutionary British battleship, built by HMNB Portsmouth, that changed the face of maritime warfare beginning in World War I. HMS Dreadnought was bigger, faster, armored more heavily, and had greater gun power than any battleship before her. This battleship, completed February 10, 1906, rendered all others of the time obsolete. She was completed in just 366 days, a record still held over one hundred years later.

Some of the most important battles of World War I were the naval battles. A strong naval fleet was crucial to being able to control overseas interests. “Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary who led Britain into the Great War, once observed: ‘What really determines the foreign policy of this country is sea power.’” German U-Boats, battleships, and cargo ships competed with the Royal Navy to dominate the seas during wartime. Although HMS Dreadnought was the only ship to successfully bring down a German U-Boat in wartime, she most importantly sparked a revolution in battleship design. All warships thereafter had bigger guns, more armor, and better engines. Anything else would have been useless after the introduction of this technology.

In honor of this groundbreaking ship, ‘Dreadnought’ became the name for all big-gun warships of her type. A legacy continued long after her scrapping for parts in 1920. Although the HMS Dreadnought was rendered obsolete so soon after her launch, she inspired countless other builders from all over the world for years to come. The Dreadnought was the first to be powered by turbine engines, which became the standard for battleships. Although battleships are no longer built, and have since been replaced by lighter, faster battle cruisers, traces of the Dreadnought can still be found in the emphasis on greater speed and bigger artillery in today’s navies.

Standardized Admissions Tests Reduce Students to a Single Score

Article by Cathy Lee; photograph by Noella Kim

October SAT takers read the following message on the College Board website on Oct. 22: “This site is currently unavailable due to high volume. We are working hard to resolve this issue. Check back later.” The fact that many students were upset after seeing this message shows that standardized testing has become such an integral part of student life. It’s difficult. It’s mandatory. And worst of all, students possess the misconception that it’s critical to gaining entrance to colleges and universities. They are stressed about tests that do not reflect their academic ability.

There are various parts to the exams. The SAT contains critical reading, math, writing and a required essay. The ACT has an additional science section and an optional essay. As students study for these assessments, their preparation has become geared toward “how to take the test well” as opposed to acquiring the reading and mathematical skills that are supposedly tested.

According to its creator the College Board, the SAT was designed to “assess your academic readiness for college” and that the tests “keep pace with what colleges are looking for today, measuring the skills required for success in the 21st century.” But a closer look at the testing content reveals discrepancies with that statement: a 25-minute essay, esoteric vocabulary, grammar rules not enforced by even the pickiest of grammarians, and math questions that can be solved without actual math concepts. Mastery of these questions does not allow someone to succeed in college in the 21st century.

Universities have noticed this as well. Many colleges and universities in the nation have adopted a “test-optional” policy, meaning that students who apply to those schools are not obliged to submit test scores. Such colleges include Loyola University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Bates College, Smith College, Wesleyan University, and most recently, George Washington University. Hampshire College has completely abolished the testing requirement due to the inability of tests to predict student success at a particular college. It focuses instead on essays and letters of recommendation.

Furthermore, test scores do not reflect the other qualities of a student. For example, they do not testify to a candidate’s extracurricular talents. That’s why colleges and universities require applicants to submit more than just a test score, but this benchmark is not necessary at all. An SAT or ACT score is a number, a number generated mostly from luck, test-taking strategy, and convoluted logarithms that calculate a raw score, as opposed to real knowledge. That number, created within a mere three to four hours, does not give any information about a person’s potential for success.

And it’s not fair. Students who can afford to take prep classes have an obvious advantage over those who cannot afford tutoring, as there is a strong correlation between higher test scores and higher family income. And it creates discrimination as well, for Asian students are expected to score higher than, say, African-Americans. Furthermore, stressing out about one standardized test takes away significant portions of a student’s attention towards other activities such as exercising and socializing, both of which beneficially contribute to a person’s physical and mental health.

Students in the 21st century must acquire skills besides the ability to fill out scantrons for meaningless questions, for their capabilities cannot be expressed by a single number.

Epic Fail: A Graduation Speech

Speech by India Koloff; photograph by Noella Kim

Greetings graduates, teachers, parents, fellow El Rodeoians. Congratulations on completing middle school. I want to thank all of the amazing teachers I’ve had as well as our outstanding administration. I’ve gone to El Rodeo since kindergarten, which I actually started with an epic fail. For those of you who don’t know what an epic fail is, it is a mistake that’s so bad it’s funny. Anyways, on the first day of kindergarten, just a few hours after my parents delivered me into the hands of Ms. Blume, they received a call from Susie, the office secretary, because I had forgotten something very important: my underwear. This was a very important lesson. El Rodeo has transformed me from a disobedient wild child into a middle school graduate.

I have made many epic fails along the way, but I survived. I believe that, “If at first you don’t succeed, you’re in good company.” (I don’t know who said that, but I read it on a poster on the wall of Ms. Cramer’s history classroom). Even the most successful people in the world experience epic fails. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because the editor thought he didn’t have a good imagination. Stephen Spielberg was rejected from film school three times. J.K. Rowling was an unemployed single mother living on welfare, who thought that writing a book was easier than finding a job.

All of these people have one thing in common besides their tenacity and brilliance: that is perseverance. They were all willing to learn from their mistakes. Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” This got me thinking about my own mistakes. My failures haven’t led to wild success yet, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t learned from them. For example, when I was in third grade, I studied all week for my math test, checked over my work three times, and then instead of turning the test in, I accidentally threw it in the trash. Sure, I failed the test– but I haven’t thrown a single one away since then.

Everyone here has made mistakes, in their own way. And El Rodeo has been a safe and nurturing place for us to fall down and make these silly mistakes. We have also experienced soaring highs, but more importantly, we’ve gone through the crushing lows together, and that is what has made them tolerable. The only way to learn what to do in life is to learn what not to do, and El Rodeo has been the perfect place to experiment with this.

So I know most of us are hesitant to leave our comfortable home and move on to high school, but the fun is far from over. There are tons of failures still to come. The best we can do is savor each and every one of them, big or small, because any mistake could turn into something amazing. And no doubt the higher we reach, the more epic the fails will be, or the more glorious the success. That was the case for all the people I mentioned earlier, but what about my mistakes? What good came out of those failures? Well, for one thing, they made this speech. So, I say, onward to failure– and then to success. See you in high school!

 

The Blog: On Humanities, Writing, and Things that Don’t Make Sense

Essay by Tessa Rudolph; photograph by Noella Kim

When I was in elementary school my teachers always began the new school year with what they called “Mix and mingle.” Designed mostly to bring the shy kids “out of their shells,” it involved my classmates scurrying around the room with a scavenger hunt of questions to ask each other. “What did you do this summer?” and “What’s your favorite sport?” were pretty typical. And of course, that perennial question of youth: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Every year, it seemed, my classmates had a different response. Singers became doctors became gymnasts. Only I answered proudly and invariably each year: “writer.” At the time, my choice of profession didn’t seem out of the ordinary. It fit in well with the astronauts, actors, professional athletes—all products of what seemed our youthful romanticism.

But as I got older—and my friends became more serious about their futures—I noticed a distance beginning to develop between us. In high school especially, when we were encouraged to plan for these things, they became ambitious, more than they had been in grade school. But it was a different, more concrete kind of ambition: they began to lay out the steps for achieving their goals. I say goals, because that’s what they were—not dreams anymore. Nearly all of them wanted to pursue some sort of science field, and I found our conversations suddenly dominated with talk of AP Biology tests and MIT acceptance rates. You could almost graph their futures, like trajectories or exponential growth. Study hard now, receive high test scores and admission to prestigious research colleges, and then similarly work their way up the ranks in a laboratory. X leads to y leads to z—a straight line, a function, with only one output value for every input.

Then there was me. I hadn’t changed much. The one difference, however, was my growing sense of embarrassment. My greatest aspiration (to become a writer) seemed silly, even juvenile in context. What was the point of literature, of the humanities? My friends would be curing cancer or exploring Mars. I’d be sitting at a computer making up stories.

For a long time this question troubled me, the seeming worthlessness of my greatest dream. You couldn’t plot my future on a graph the way you could my friends’. Writing diligently now could lead to international acclaim, or to personal fulfillment, or to me sitting in my parents’ basement fifteen years from now with no job and no money. A collection of points with no underlying trend: not a function.

Recently, I stumbled across an article in—of all places—Scientific American, written by a literature professor at a polytechnic university. He claims his classes are filled each year with disinterested scientists seeking only to fulfill graduation requirements. Every term, in an attempt to engage his students in the material, he delivers a lecture about his views on literature and its connection to science. As he goes on to state, “The sciences give you certainty. The humanities—at least the way I teach them—give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism.”

The more I thought about it, the more applicable this seemed. I’m definitely not your run-of-the-mill English geek: I was extremely interested in chemistry for a period, and I’ve always liked math. As valuable as they are, the central goal of the sciences is always to discover more functions. After all, the fundamental ideas of Isaac Newton operate under his theory that the natural universe works like a clock, with a predictable reaction to every event. X leads to y leads to z. It’s neat, orderly. It makes sense.

But what if things don’t make sense? What if x applied to y doesn’t always make z and what if the natural logarithm of w isn’t always t, even though that’s what it comes out to on your calculator and that’s what repeated experiments have affirmed? This is where the humanities—writing in particular—come in. Sometimes, in spite of everything, you just have to admit that you don’t know why something happens. You don’t know why x has led to z. You don’t know why z doesn’t always lead back to x.

Now, when my friends talk about their microbiology and their quantum physics, I try to bite back my smile. I know a secret they do not, the secret of the humanities: understanding that you cannot always understand, knowing that you cannot always know. And, I think to myself, in all its messy, function-less chaos, it’s kind of beautiful.