NEWS LITERACY
SUBTLY HUMOROUS TRAITS
About: This is a story I co-authored with Ishani Singh discusses the highly popular Facebook groups Subtle Asian Traits and Subtle Curry Traits. We researched information from a New York Times article along with the statistics we found ourselves on Facebook, and also interviewed an administrator of Subtle Asian Traits for more information.
Facebook, popularized for its ability to find and connect people, has since evolved into a platform for a staple of the MVHS student community: memes.
Within Facebook, there are countless designated groups and pages for posting memes. Among these is a popular group known as Subtle Asian Traits, currently with 883,462 members and hundreds of posts a day. According to The New York Times, it was first created in September by a group of students who attended the same Chinese school in Melbourne.
“The decision to establish the group was quite an impromptu decision with no real organization,” administrator of the group Darren Qiang said in an interview over Messenger. “The idea and the name of the group was actually established after we were inspired by the relatable content from ‘Subtle Private School Traits,’ hence we decided through a long night’s chat to make a Facebook group dedicated to Asian memes instead.”
Junior Catherine Liu joined the group when her friend added her. She comments and tags her friends in posts that she finds relevant.
“I think most of the posts are pretty mild,” Liu said. “They have those typical jokes about how if you’re Asian you got to get those A’s and as a kid, Asian parents always give you Chinese and math [to do].”
A spinoff of this page, Subtle Curry Traits, is gaining popularity as well, with 201,307 members and counting. Subtle Curry Traits is more centered around memes and posts relating to South Asian and Indian lifestyles.
Junior Sowmya Thanvantri, like many of her peers, is an active follower of Subtle Curry traits due to its undeniable relatability.
“Subtle Curry Traits seem like your inside jokes so it always seems more personal to you. It’s just people who are your own age making these memes so it’s a lot funnier,” Thanvantri said. “I can show my parents the memes, I can show my friends the memes.”
In the case of any Facebook page as popular as these two, administrators of the group are entrusted with the role of ensuring the content remains up to par. In fact, according to the New York Times, moderators are busy with over 3,000 posts pouring in daily.
“Being in this group adds another sense of responsibility as everyone on the admin team wants its members to have a good time in the page,” Qiang said. “I guess it also gives us a good sense of satisfaction [that] we were able to make such a huge community where everyone is able to relate with each other and reminisce over the highs and lows of growing up Asian.”
Liu echoes these sentiments, also finding the relatability of the posts in the group to be what makes them so enjoyable.
“It’s things that you always thought [would] only be for yourself or for your family,” Liu said. “But then to find out that it is actually true for a lot of other people, it feels nice to do to like have the effect of shared experiences.”
BOOKED UP
About: This story that I co-wrote with Oishee Misra on how analyzing books impacts the experience of reading it. We got opinions from both teachers and students, to avoid it being too centered on either the positives or the negatives. We also looked up the books read in each year of literature courses from the MVHS website.
Literature remains the only course at MVHS that students must take for all four years of high school. For some, it’s an enjoyable experience, while for others, it does nothing but elicit groans of distaste. Whether the novel is about a tragic love story (‘Romeo and Juliet’), the crumbling society of a group of boys stranded on an uninhabited island (‘Lord of the Flies’) or the post-apocalyptic San Francisco after Earth’s nuclear global war (‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’), these vastly different books do share one thing in common: they are the subject of countless annotations and literary analysis essays.
Literature teacher David Clarke says that the analysis of these books can definitely become boring, but this boredom stems from a variety of factors: for example, the time of day, the teaching style and the interplay between the student and teacher. Some students find certain teaching styles easier to handle, while others find them more challenging.
For instance, Clarke’s teaching style revolves around the psychology of the characters and the author’s conceptions of human interactions and societies. He doesn’t believe there is a tendency to overanalyze the books in his classes, but rather a tendency to analyze the books in a fixed way, such as focusing on certain aspects of the text.
“I’m really less concerned with literary vocabulary and the mechanics of the text,” Clarke said. “I don’t think authors write books to show that they know how to do satire or how to create metaphors, but that’s my own sort of feeling about it.”
Sophomore Roya Ahmadi is in favor of analyzing and interpreting books, but she points out one of her exceptions: Lord of the Flies.
“[For some books] there are things you can definitely analyze,” Ahmadi said. “But I think Lord of the Flies is definitely one of those where it’s the same topic of human nature and community that’s being analyzed over and over again. So in this case, I’d say [my feelings] about it are a little bit more negative.”
According to Clarke, choosing Lord of the Flies as the first book to read sophomore year has a purpose — it is heavy handedly symbolic and relatively simple to look for literary devices and symbolism within.
“I would definitely understand why some kids [face frustration] while reading Lord of the Flies,” Clarke said. “Particularly bright, intuitive students might look at the amount of time being spent on pounding away at stuff that’s pretty obvious to them and feel frustrated.”
Not all students feel this way, however. Sophomore Kavya Patel shares the same sentiments as Ahmadi when it comes to analyzing novels in literature — she loves some of them, such as Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird, but others like Romeo and Juliet weren’t as enjoyable. However, Patel has never thought of analysis as a negative experience.
“It did help me understand the book on a deeper level,” Patel said. “But I don’t think it impacted my enjoyment.”
Before literature teachers teach books in their classes, they generally come to a consensus about which ones to teach. All literature classes at MVHS generally teach the same ones in same courses, such as in Honors American Literature or AP Literature.
“There is no legal requirement that a teacher teach the same books as the other people in that course alike,” Clarke said. “But there is an ethical and professional responsibility that we have to all teach the same books in the same order with the same content assessments.”
To a large extent, there is a lot of free choice when it comes to making decisions about books. However, there are constraints in terms of finances. If teachers were to keep changing books, they would need to constantly buy new books, which in turn becomes a financial concern. However, many students and teachers are content with the current books on the syllabi.
“Especially books like To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, there are things that you can really analyze,” Ahmadi said. “There are a lot of layers to that analysis, so it’s interesting and retargeting different aspects of the book, which makes me like the book. It’s not like ‘Oh, we keep analyzing the same chapter for like, five days,’ which would be boring — but in this case, it’s actually pretty interesting.”
Patel feels the same way and loves literary analysis that has the tendency to be more difficult or allow her delve deep within the book, because that’s what she believes makes a book worth reading.
Similarly, Clarke says he never gets tired of teaching the same books over and over again, even though he has been a teacher for 15 years.
“Ever year, it’s different; the books really change from year to year for me,” Clarke said. “There’s just some books, just like there are some movies, that you would be willing to read over and over again.”
JUST TEACH IT
About: This is a story I co-wrote with Helen Chao on teachers' thoughts regarding their class assignments. We interviewed a department lead who works on the scheduling, along with regular teachers.
As the school year begins, some students find themselves in a panic. They’ve completed their back-to-school shopping: fluorescent highlighters and squeaky-clean erasers are packed away, but there’s one thing that hasn’t gone perfectly to plan: the schedule they’re holding in their hands. Whether it’s a particular class or a requested free period, their schedule isn’t completely what they wanted. Yet, it isn’t just students who deal with this dissatisfaction — teachers, too, are sometimes assigned classes they hadn’t expected or necessarily wanted to teach.
According to AP Literature teacher David Clarke, teachers’ class assignments are determined by student preferences for classes. First, students go through the course selection process which allows the administration to determine how many sections of each class they’ll have. A couple weeks later, department chairs receive an Excel spreadsheet that specifies the number of classes for each course.
On the other side of that process, department chairs and administration send out forms to all the teachers, asking them what courses they would like to teach and their preferred free periods.
“There are two ways things are put on the schedule,” Clarke said. “One is, there are requests the teachers will make, and we try and accommodate them, I want all my courses after lunch … or before lunch, or something like that. And other times, there are things which are put up on the schedule right away, and they just stay there.”
For example, all the ELD courses are second period and all the sheltered courses are third period. The department chairs then try to arrange the schedule around these fixed classes.
“So now what we have is this massive [amount of] data where it says, these are the courses that we need to fill for students and the number of sections,” Clarke said. “These are what the teachers want, this is what the department leads and administration has said, all agreed to as to where certain courses need to go … And then I basically create a spreadsheet, which says, I have, I don’t know, say 20 sections of freshmen [literature] to fill. And then I just say, well, these … teachers are going to teach freshmen.”
Sheltered World Literature teacher Stacey Cler considers the process quite transparent: everyone in the department is allowed to see who is teaching what as Clarke fills in the spreadsheet. Cler does consider herself “the person” chosen to teach Sheltered or ELD classes, but she has no emotional connection to any particular class and would be fine teaching any English course.
“It’s my honor to be a teacher,” Cler said. “I love teaching. You know, I just love being in the classroom [and] being able to teach. I’m not emotionally attached to a certain topic.”
Clarke sends emails asking if a certain teacher wants to teach a particular class, but both Cler and Clarke acknowledge that teachers’ preferences are not the main priority when it comes to organizing classes.
“My first goal when I optimize [the assigning of classes] is I’m going to try and do the greatest good for the greatest number of students,” Clarke said. “Then, I’m going to try and accommodate the teachers. So students always come first.”
As a result, teachers aren’t necessarily able to teach all the classes they would like to teach.
“You can’t please all the people all the time,” Clarke said. “It’s never 100 percent. You can’t make everybody happy. It’s absolutely impossible to make everybody happy. So what you try and do is make sure that everybody gets something and that everybody gives up something at the same time.”
AP Economics teacher Pete Pelkey has experienced said dissatisfaction. When he first came to MVHS, he was assigned to teach AP Government, a class he wasn’t especially excited about. AP Economics grew in popularity, resulting in Pelkey solely teaching AP Economics. Yet once in a while, he returns to teach government.
“You have to change and you have to embrace it,” Pelkey said. “You can’t think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this.’ You gotta go, ‘I’ll do it.’”
Although the system isn’t perfect, Cler isn’t quite sure how it can be improved. She doesn’t fully understand the process herself but is confident that the administrators are doing the best they can do.
Similar to Cler, Pelkey doesn’t know if there’s a better way to assign teachers classes, and it is possible that someone may not be especially interested or the subject they are assigned to. Yet Clarke brings up the point that staff are paid to educate, not necessarily teach only what they want to.
“So that means we need to be willing to sacrifice for [the students …] and I know it doesn’t always work this way,” Clarke said. “But really, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We’re supposed to be doing this for [students]. And we’re paid to do it. So because we’re paid and we have an obligation, we need to sometimes do things which make us unhappy.”
Cler has a slightly different point of view. The amount of happiness she feels teaching does not depend on what specific class she teaches. However, while she strives to be an excellent teacher, she believes it will be better for the kids if there are wide variety of teachers teaching the subject over the years, but ultimately sports the same “for the students” mindset as Clarke.
“Change is always good,” Cler said. “Because we can, you know, like these kids deserve the best people in the entire world.”