Our New Year’s Resolutions for Stuyvesant
December 20th, 2006
|
Stuyvesant needs help. It’s fat, irritable and dirty, and only the prospect of the upcoming New Year gives it any hope. Below are our resolutions to bring Stuyvesant into 2007 roaring and ready to go.
Improve Our Work Ethic
We know that the Coordinators of Student Affairs (COSAs) work hard all day. Even so, we feel that a third would be a vast improvement. We’re aware that this is a bit greedy (since we got two last year), but why not get one more? With three, the Student Union (SU) can be closed until 4:00 p.m. instead of just 3:30, give less guidance to the new members of the student government and foster a weaker sense of community throughout the school. If the dynamic between them and the SU has been tension-free and efficient for so long, what harm could another COSA do? On that note, we should recognize how great a job the Programming Office is doing and urge them to keep it up. Technical glitches in online programming, borderline offensive error messages and decade-old course descriptions are exactly what we need to to get the perfect schedule. But it isn’t only the Programming Office that is shirking its duties. After all, when the administration decides to take a little vacation, we understand. Only one college trip this semester? Not a big deal. Not hiring a new guidance counselor after months of vacancy? All right with us! Listen, just lay back and keep at what you’ve been doing: installing cameras in the school. Who needs privacy anyway?
Make Freedom a Priority
Speaking of individual liberties, we wholeheartedly support Principal Stanley Teitel’s new security proposals. We can’t think of a more sensible, coherent and well thought-out plan to keep us safe. In fact, this plan allays all our safety concerns—it allows students to lounge about the school in peace. But there’s still the problem of overcrowding: there’s not enough of it. Restricting access to just two-and-a-half floors was a great way to start the school year. But for 2007, the best solution is to remove all books from the library. We can easily create space for at least 500 more kids to congregate. Who really reads, anyway?
Get Healthy
We could all stand to shed a few pounds. We just wish that more Stuyvesant students would take the administration’s hints—we don’t have working escalators for a reason. Running up eight flights of stairs in four minutes is a great way to stay fit! And since the school store doesn’t sell food any more (only grapefruit juice), students need to go to the “dining hall” to get a good meal at Stuyvesant. Soggy, yet stale, cafeteria food has been a mainstay on the fifth floor for a century. Every meal is both, to quote the not-at-all repetitive posters around the lunchroom, “nutritious and delicious.” Mmm, mmm good.
Clean Up Our Act
But let’s not forget the students. They deserve some recognition too; all that apathy must really take it out of them. Some 80 percent of the school didn’t vote in the last student government election. We don’t blame them; the past few have been marred by ballot-counting blunders and questions of foul play. These statistics, however, are the nice, big numbers we like to see. We aim to do anything we can to boost the percentage of those not voting to a round 100 percent. Also, if anything deserves rewarding, it’s the students’ concern for their building. Nothing says “I love Stuy” more than rampant littering and graffiti. The mice population thrives solely on our trash. Maybe we can get Santa to leave students Stuyvesant mice in their stockings. Another great stocking stuffer would be a revamped Web site. Brooklyn Tech made theirs flashy, with banners, slick graphics and a usable interface. We’ve made stuy.edu our own with broken links and bland layouts, but we can do so much more: the blank page is vastly underrated.
These resolutions may seem to be too ambitious, but these are the changes we need for a trim, pleasant and fresh new year. |