Features

Scrolling down the Facebook newsfeed, many people are greeted by a big blue box with white and green letters inside. The link opens up ask.fm, a webpage filled with questions such as who are you best friends? who do you like? and the answers to these questions. The site also contains a text box for people to submit anonymous questions. 

Recently, there has been controversy surrounding the movie “Captain Phillips.” The film paints Phillips as a hero who led his crew through the terror of Somali pirates. Since the movie’s Oct. 11 release, however, anonymous crew members have come forward criticizing his poor leadership and calling the portrayal of Phillips’ character completely inaccurate. In fact, a handful of crew members are sueing Phillips for $50 million, testifying “willful, wanton and conscious disregard for their safety.”

The shadowing program offered at SHS and other high schools such as  Archbishop Mitty is a great opportunity to view a potential school for the future. Junior Claire Strickland was one of the students who found that shadowing at Saratoga High helped her narrow down her choice of school. Strickland shadowed here when she was a freshman at Notre Dame in 2011, following then-freshman Rachel Hull to all of her classes one Friday.

The early 1970s were tumultuous times in South Vietnam, as Suong Nguyen remembers well. North Vietnam was seeking to gain control of the South to impose its communist rule over it. Nguyen, a little girl then, recalls air strikes piercing the twilight calm over Cam Ranh Bay in South Vietnam. The country was in the midst of the Vietnam war.

Here’s how a typical night for sophomore Shrey Desai goes: He does his homework (well, most of it anyway) and then turns on the TV. Then,of course, the ever pressing dilemma of a high school student becomes apparent. There’s nothing good to watch on TV. So instead of whining and cribbing, Desai turns to YouTube and watches a show called “Video Game High School,” which only airs on the Internet. 

With the partition of India in 1947 came bloodshed, riots, despair and one of the largest mass migrations in history. Millions of lives were cut short, and thousands of families were separated

At only 5 years old, Mardi had just begun to realize why she was sitting on the steps of a funeral hall, wearing an itchy, black dress. Her mom had passed away from liver cancer.

There was no time to react. Riding downhill at nearly 30 mph on a bike with faulty brakes, history teacher Jim Chin — then an undergrad at UC Berkeley — didn’t have time to see the pickup truck just around a corner. Seconds later, after an abrupt turn, Chin barreled head-on into the truck’s metal racks. 

Every six years, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) assesses the school’s courses and progress. In the administration’s efforts to collect data for WASC as well as for the school’s own study, teachers this year are visiting colleagues and completing peer evaluations.