Snapshots of Magnet Life: Silver Quest 2014-15

December 23rd, the day before the start of winter break, is Physics of Music Day, or PoMD for short. Run by Mr. Schafer and Dr. Davis, the two magnet freshmen Physics teachers, PoMD is an opportunity for all 9th graders in the magnet to enjoy some time off from Physics class. Instead of learning about forces and drag, the students perform onstage in the auditorium and watch their peers do the same. The only catch is that they must write up a summary of the performance and how it is related to physics, but for magnet students, thinking up such a connection is a piece of cake. The performances vary greatly in length, style, and... well, shock factor!

Magnets go all over Blair for lunch - some go to the SAC, meet with clubs, and others stay in classrooms on the pretense of being productive. In Room 373 however, a group of Blazers gather around several CRT televisions and take turns passing around battered controllers to face off in various games of the Nintendo franchise Super Smash Bros. Super Smash Bros., originally released in 1999, consists of a series of fighting games featuring fan favorites like Mario, Link, Pikachu, and Kirby.

But Magnets are Magnets, of course. Do we learn all the ins and outs of the games and sit back, content with being subject to the rules? Absolutely not. In spring of 2014, seniors Brynne Edwards, Jake Yamada, and Andrea Zou started the Game Design Club, which is dedicated to learning how to make games, not just play them. But Game Design Club isn’t only about video games – club topics have included story-telling games like Mafia; and club projects have included a Shakespearean Into the Woods-esque Mashup Game and a Fantasy Puzzlepalooza game. Mr. Lodal, the club’s sponsor, is also an avid gamer, a passion he shares with Mr. Schwartz, the sponsor of Board Game Club. Walk into Room 312 and you’ll see – among other things, like a stuffed alligator and hula hoops – a cabinet lovingly filled with board games carefully kept in quality condition. Board Game Club meets Wednesdays during lunch where you can find Mr. Schwartz gesturing frantically at a board game while students gesture frantically back, an organized mess of cards between them. No doubt, the best part of the Magnet gaming scene is its unification of students and teachers over the joys of strategy and combat. Where else would you find teachers and students debating strategic moves as seriously as calculus?

Linguistics Club 2014-15

by Emma Jin '17

Most of the time, if you look in Mr. Rose’s room, you’ll see students listening to a lecture or puzzling over problems. But on Wednesday afternoons, well, the most common activities still tend to be listening to lectures and doing problems, but the lectures are on subjects pertaining to linguistics and the problems are NACLO practice problems—linguistic puzzles. “NACLO stands for North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad,” explains Anna Barth, co-president. “It’s a lot of fun, and there’s no background knowledge in linguistics required to do the problems—it’s mostly pattern recognition and logic skills.” In one of their practice problems, sample sentences were given in English and Ancient Greek, and, after comparing, students tried to translate related sentences from Ancient Greek to English.

This is, of course, on a smaller scale, how artifacts like the Rosetta stone were used to recreate extinct languages. But only a fraction of linguists are concerned with translation. Lecture subjects have ranged from the Indo-European language family to how children acquire language to everybody’s favorite things, puns. Lecturers are students, usually junior Isaac Eaton and co-president Aaron Szabo, or guest speakers. “We’ve had some people go out of their way to come, because they’re all so shocked that a high school has a linguistics club,” Barth says.