“…you must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all.” – John Keating, Dead Poets Society
This time of year can be pretty scary for ISL students. Maybe it’s Halloween approaching or the excessive amount of IAs Y13s have had to complete…Regardless, The High is here to offer you its first issue of the 2024/2025 academic year with a loosely defined “SCARY” theme.
As Editor in Chief, I wanted to discuss the “scary” topic of “finding your voice”. Voicing your opinions or interests can be a great way to escape school stress, societal pressures and the endless hours of brain rot doom scrolling. It helps develop your passions, keeps you motivated and helps alleviate the destructive cycle of losing yourself to the consuming IB diploma. So even though it may be “scary” to voice what matters to you, we can help you to find your voice at The High. Everyone is always welcome!
Whether you are a writer, an artist, or have absolutely no idea, we need you. And honestly, I believe you need us. Each month we can help you discover your interests and how to communicate them effectively. Plus you should not be scared as we are a safe haven with snacks! Our goal is to help students not be afraid to express their voices and opinions no matter how controversial they are.
That is why I was honestly “scared” by some of the feedback our recent survey on The High received. Comments appeared a little harsh from students who did not put their name on this writing. Instead, they took aim at those who are brave enough to share their voices with the school and the community. This saddens me as it highlights a clear fact that students fear expressing their opinions publicly. How can we enact real change unless we are willing to voice our opinions?
So in an effort to fear less, and in the name of enacting change – I shall share with you some of our feedback. Many students seem to believe that The High is “limited” in its topics and lacks “relevance”. To these students who want what they deem more engaging articles… JOIN US SO WE CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN! While we can try our best to diversify as much as possible (I think many of you will find improvements in this issue) we need your involvement to create articles that reflect the interests of the student body. Hopefully, then students will stop saying we are “boring” or “unimportant”. I hope when asking why students don’t read it we will no longer get answers like “Why would I?” or “Don’t want to”. Our goal is to prove comments like; “I’m not sure to be honest, even if they did change it, I feel like I wouldn’t read it” wrong.
That being said, to the constructive commenters, THANK YOU! As a result of your valuable insights, we will try to advertise our issues more and do everything we can to make them more accessible to you. In Issue 110, we have tried to include more topics that students are interested in. We have a sports-related article by Vivann about the Champions League. Andrew and Mai have both written about US politics, which is definitely “scary” at the moment, while Sophie and Tanu show us that AI and deep fakes can also be pretty terrifying. Toby discusses the ethics of the IB diploma and definitely does not “sugarcoat” it. We hope these articles are interesting to you all. We also have added new items to this issue with two creative writing pieces by Edonie and Hanyu and Sera offers students some much-needed advice in her new column.
Other suggestions have been noted and will strive to implement them in upcoming issues.
I hope you enjoy it! As always, our team has worked exceptionally hard to deliver this to you and listen to your feedback as at the end of the day we continue to try to be the “voice of the students”.