'Voyages' launches tech trip at AHS

As about 150 parents and students filed into the Lowe Auditorium on Thursday, Jan. 14, for Arlington High School's first music tech concert, "Sonic Voyages I," they were greeted with a stylish graphic of a never-ending street.

This display -- one of many, as reflected in the images with this story -- captured the very nature of the concert and gave audience members the sense of starting their journey in the first place.

Like entrepreneurial Davids facing down fiscal Goliaths, students from Ian MacKay’s economics class at Arlington High School offer a heartwarming tale of fear turned to victory. At the first New England International Economic Summit, seniors Vojtech Klinger, Sara Ahmed, Jennifer Lawrence and Sean Boyle took the coveted top spot of grand champions.

The unanimous reaction to the win was shock.

“By the time [the announcer] was calling the grand champion, I had given up,” said Ahmed, whose group represented Indonesia throughout the conference. “I sat for two seconds, and it didn’t register in my brain. Then I was like, ‘Wait, that’s us!’”

Turned to a life of Japanese scholarship

He spent the next four years working there in a hastily constructed hangarlike building. Along with other Ivy League recruits, he worked to make sense of stacks of intercepted Japanese messages, equipped only with a Japanese dictionary and a pad of paper.

“And our feeble knowledge,” the Arlington resident adds with a wry laugh as he sits in his office at Harvard.

What does “assembly” mean to a high school student? Many at Arlington High School think of a long, monotonous lecture about staying in school or obeying school rules. But Andrea Razi, the social worker and intervention coordinator at AHS, organized an assembly for Health and Safety Day this fall that gave the word a strikingly fresh meaning.

Jordan Burnham, 20, delivered a gripping message to students and faculty members at AHS: His struggles with depression led to a suicide attempt two years ago -- a leap from a ninth-story bedroom. Miraculously, after he was in a coma for five days, he lived. He broke multiple bones, including his jaw. He couldn’t eat solid foods or speak for several months, but he held on to life. He still does.

In the large auditorium that is Old Hall, with its hundreds of small desks and lofty light-blue walls, a man of medium stature sits at a table at the front of the room. Soon, the hall is filled with hundreds of gossiping, excited students, and this man, David Kim, takes on the Herculean role of Arlington High School’s only permanent substitute teacher.

Since teachers are surprisingly human, absences often become unavoidable. Even with one or two missing teachers in a given day, Kim faces hundreds of students single-handedly. In doing so, “getting things done” has taken a backseat to simply keeping order.

In an attempt to create fluidity in both the students' and Kim’s schedules, a series of new rules have been enacted in Old Hall that have the room looking vastly different than it has in past years. Students are now allowed to use iPods, a well-received factor that has Molly Kennedy-Spencer, an AHS junior, feeling as if “the school has found common ground with the students.”

Kim also supports the idea. He believes music can help kids be productive, saying iPods “could be used to blot out conversations noise and keep working.”

The new rules are not all fun and games, however; the transition from classroom-based studies to a large, single hall has come with skipping and tardiness.

To alleviate pressures of monitoring and accounting for students, kids must sit with their classes in organized rows. Although fully rational, it is quite the transition from the “laissez-faire” environment of prior years, where desks were randomly arranged and noise level was not the substitute’s personal concern.

Besides the rules, there is an emotional change in the participants of Old Hall.

“There’s just something about being crowded into a large room under minimal supervision," Kim says. "There’s a physiological element that’s scary for the students, because they’re in a noisy environment -- not only with their own class, but several classes, and it would be harder to concentrate through that.”

Volume is certainly not a factor that is easily disregarded, even for the most diligent and concentrating of workers. Noise level is a problem that is accentuated by the structural features of Old Hall, with the wide, tall room being a catalyst to a roar not unlike that at a professional football game.

Controlling noise is only the tip of the iceberg of Kim’s responsibilities in Old Hall.

“I have become much more a flow-management person than I was as a substitute,” he states. “I have duties that are more directing people to the right place at the beginning of the period. I have the role of being responsible to put in the data as I finish my check off sheets. I have the informal role to coordinate when teachers can arrive and put them in context of the situation.”

Attendance alone takes at least half the period, during which, as a substitute teacher of four years at AHS, Kim would rather direct his efforts into helping students with work. “The kids I knew on a classroom basis probably already sense that I don’t have the same time to smile, kid around,” he says sadly.

Students have found moments away from friends and schoolwork to sympathize with Old Hall’s head honcho. “It is an absurdly tough, seriously undervalued position,” comments Chris Opie, an AHS Junior. Even such strong words can be considered an understatement.

On an average day, Old Hall sees at least two absent classes per period, a minimum of 50 students. Based completely on unforeseen absences, Kim receives a notification of absent teachers about 15 minutes before the start of the school day, during which he must organize attendance and scheduling. “I fear I will be mechanized into a continual, narrowly defined management role,” Kim says.

With a few months of school already checked off their calendars, students are adapting to Old Hall. “I have seen kids being calmer, getting to their seats faster,” says Kennedy-Spencer, who has Old Hall on her weekly schedule.

Even minor improvements can significantly change the course of Kim’s day, relieving him of stress that directs his energy away from the students and into systematic organization. So what does Kim want to help him deal with the new changes in Old Hall?

“A printer. Unless they get a printer in Old Hall itself, attendance taking will continue to take up most of the time,” Kim says humbly. Perhaps a printer would be an earned gift to a man who takes on one of AHS’s most strenuous positions on a daily basis.

The writer, a junior, is a member of the AHS honors journalism class.

Twenty-nine student organizations had displays ready to attract students in the Blue Gym for Club Day. Some, like Sam Mintz, signed up for the first time.

Mintz, a junior, put his name down for Imagine, the literary magazine. He said his friends "highly recommended it." In addition, he said, signing up helps "to pad the college app with as many clubs and activities as possible."

Imagine is an award-winning publication, said Leah Richardson, the club's faculty adviser. It received the highest award from the National Council of Teachers in English in 2008, which would surely impress college admissions officers.