Day 55: July 16, 2016
Governor’s School is the best summer program ever. I went with my sister last summer with 648 gifted students to one of the two campuses in North Carolina. Vanessa and I both were accepted into the Natural Sciences discipline--one of the ten subjects a student can be accepted into. The 325 students at Governor’s School East, along with the absolutely fascinating and amazing teachers, were vibrant and excited to learn as much about each other and the electives as we were about learning about our respective subjects. I went to electives discussing the unjust incarceration system in the US, the queer theory and various LGBT issues, dance figures, and a Turkish movie discussing its terrorism. I played ultimate frisbee (briefly-mainly just chill frisbee :)) in the courtyard, had jam out sessions with the incredibly talented instrumental music students as well as the rest of us who liked to sing collectively, and partook in a euchre (a card game) competition. Oh, I did learn about natural sciences--environmental sciences, chemistry, and physics--and did a fun project called a Scilemma, where my group discovered how much copper was actually in a penny using a spectrophotometer, cool equations, and calibration curves. We found out the composition of a 1960 penny and a 2015 penny. The 1960 penny was composed of 96.11% copper, whereas the 2015 penny was composed of 2.64% copper. This correlated with what the US Mint values were. How cool, right?
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| This shows a calibration curve--the spectrophotometer's maximum absorbance of color (copper absorbs red, thus the more red the dissolved penny solution absorbs, the more copper there is. This is the copper nitrate solution of the 1960 penny. |
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| This is the cailbration curve for the copper nitrate solution of the 2015 penny. Notice that the amount of red light absorbed was much less than that of the 1960 penny. |
So Governor’s School Alumni Day came with much anticipation to see my friends and old teachers. All of us wore our lanyards from the year before, and greeted people we didn’t know form GSE ‘15 with smiles. Vanessa and I met up with a few of our friends, and we saw our chemistry teacher, GSE’s dance teacher, who totally rocks, and our Area 3 (group therapy, self-discovery class basically) teacher. We went to a few current GSE classes, and the natural sciences class had changed the most. This was due to the Scilemma, which, instead of coinciding with environmental sciences, chemistry, or physics, every group had a psychology-based project--current GSE students acting as the subjects of these studies. My friend group moved to meet our Instrumental Music friends. The IM students this year were also absolutely amazing, and we listened to them practice for their concert tonight. Then we headed to the chapel, which is where the choral students sing their days away. The 2015 students were outside the chapel with the awesome choral teacher, singing and beating the rhythm of a song they sang last year. It was beautiful and upbeat--a perfect representation of our time at Governor’s School the summer before.
Elective time! The electives at GSE were always thought-provoking and sought to delve into current issues and come out understanding them a little better. This student-led elective was no different. The big group of alumni and current students alike discussed stereotyping of people, people we haven’t ever met, people we have met once, and maybe even people we know relatively well. The student leaders were superb, introducing the concept of stereotyping and how it in turn makes people defensive, fearful, and changes their behavior from one of their actual selves to an abstract mold created by the judgmental society. Obviously spoken word was used to introduce this issue. Then we discussed as a group how us as individuals have been categorized and assumed. We concluded, with the wise point made by one of the student leaders named Isaac, that we stereotype as a defense mechanism, a way to judge enemies and friends. Terrible, right? Our brains “crave efficiency,” thus we stereotype people in a desperate attempt to find a foolproof pattern to better stereotype them. And it’s affected every single one of us negatively, minorities probably more so, but then we have to think of how straight white males have been wrongly stereotyped too. No one is untouched by this phenomenon, yet many of us are unwilling to continue; it’s so ingrained that we catch ourselves stereotyping and admonish ourselves, but do it time and time again. Awareness is the best way to minimize stereotyping: every time you see someone, check yourself, avoid thinking of an assumption about that person, and keep an open mind. I think of multiple scenarios about that person to create a broad range of possibilities that the person will fall somewhere into. There’s probably a less assumptive way to open my mind, but my method nevertheless helps. And I think of people as individual exceptions--all 7.4 billion of us are exceptions of the facade of stereotypes in the world.
So, after consuming a great deal of soul food at the elective, my friends and I struck up a conversation with two of the outspoken students in the room. We talked with them about Spanish and the different dialects and words we used in our respective countries: Cuba (Sheila, one of the awesome 2016 students), Honduras (Jalarope, another awesome 2016 woman), Puerto Rico and Mexico (Iliana, my hilarious, fun, and wonderful GSE friend), the Dominican Republic (Rachel, a badass and funny GSE friend), and Spain (me and Vanessa). We ended our interesting conversation with hugs and promises to see each other at the instrumental music concert later in the day. Then Rachel, Tyler, Chase, Vanessa, and I went to Jasmin (IF YOU LIVE IN RALEIGH GO), a fantabulous Greek and Lebanese restaurant three minutes walking from Meredith College, the site of GSE. We frequented there last year, and my out-of-city friends were especially happy to go back. Jasmin has a few locations, and take advantage of those :).
The IM concert was, as per usual, awe-inspiring. It was in the evening, and Vanessa and I had gone back to our house to change into formal dance clothes. A group of 2015 students organized a GSE 2015 prom of sorts, and we paid to go and planned to go after the concert. Alas, we didn’t go, because our friends hadn’t paid to go with other plans to hang out. After the beautiful IM concert, where tears were shed and standing ovations were had, our friends and us braved the sky that had decided that it would be a great time to have a huge thunderstorm and pour ocean-amounts of rain onto our heads and streets. Vanessa and I went in our car to Chase’s house, meeting our friends there. Of course there was a gutter on the roof of Chase’s house that created a waterfall onto the walkway. It was very eventful, wet, yet fun. Then we talked with our peeps until midnight and went home, avoiding the particularly flooded roads. A perfect day with perfect people.
