Editorials
Advancing the Underserved Underclassmen
Walk the halls of Stuyvesant at this time of the year and you’ll always see the same scene: students carrying highlighters in one hand and review books in another. Walk long enough and you’re guaranteed to see almost every brand of review book, from Kaplan to Gruber’s. It’s that time of the year again. The [...]
Though Not in a Green Envelope
While taking the New York City Department of Education’s school student survey earlier this April, The Spectator’s editorial board could not help but note the survey’s ineffectiveness at assessing and pinpointing Stuyvesant’s weaknesses and strengths. The generic questions and five-choice responses cannot serve as accurate indicators of Stuyvesant’s true environment. Consequently, we’ve come up with [...]
No cheers for Stuyvesant?
Try to sing the first few bars of Stuyvesant’s school song. You probably can’t do it. You may not be aware that such a song even exists. You’ve never heard of it, and most probably, you don’t even care that much. And if someone were to ask you for your school’s colors—forget about it. Some [...]
Debugging Programming
The spring semester once again began with an unfortunate, semi-annual ritual: several hundred students glutted the first floor, exhausted guidance counselors filled the auditorium, and administrators scrambled for order amidst the chaos. These are programming changes. Welcome to the front. The programming process not only lacks uniformity but also is full of absurd regulations and [...]
It’s Time For a New Legacy
“What did I do wrong?” It’s a question that many Stuyvesant students find themselves asking come November and April once they receive rejection letters from some of the nation’s top universities. After four years of working hard in one of the best schools in New York City, it’s hard to imagine anything other than a [...]
Gov, Keep the Good Ones
Dear Governor Cuomo, Please don’t take away our good teachers. As Governor and head of the new NY Education Reform Commission, you have the power to make sure that the New York public education system “puts students first,” a phrase you have coined as your main priority for several months now. We have [...]
The State Of The Arts
Stuyvesant has always been considered a math-and-science high school—our extensive science curricula and number of Intel finalists speak for themselves. But when did being a mathematical haven mean that the arts would have to take a back seat in both importance and educational value? Giving up the arts shouldn’t be a necessary sacrifice. It’s not [...]
Degrading Grading
Here at Stuyvesant, we’re all about numbers. Each of the 3,000-odd students who walks our halls carries a jumble of them in his or her head – IDs, OSIS codes, homerooms, the last test score returned, and, of course, a GPA down to the hundredth decimal. And while the average GPA here lingers at around [...]
Leveling The Field
Stuyvesant is lacking. Not that we don’t have enough Intel semifinalists, or Nobel Laureates, or alumni in the president’s inner circle. Rather, we are lacking in a way that becomes starkly evident the moment we step out of our 10-story pillar of prestige and into the streets of New York—a city bursting with the colorful [...]
Regrading Stuy
The beginning of February is report card season at Stuyvesant. The first thing any Stuy student does after receiving their grades is whip out their graphing calculators and determine their GPA, a number that will become as revealing as their Social Security in the months to come. After homeroom, the halls are flooded with students [...]
