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November 23, 2024 Login
Opinion

Satire: A Modest Proposal to Fix the Online School Experience

By Jack Wilan, February 15th, 2021

The Berkeley High School (BHS) experience is more than just slogging through your AP Biology material or understanding how the United States is a settler colonialist state with white nationalist and imperialistic tendencies. It’s also the unique experience of beating up a Kiwibot on Rally Day, the metallic taste of the tepid water fountains, or the enjoyment and ecstasy in attempting to make it to Mr. Dejean’s math class on the third floor of the H-Building after a delicious but far away supper at Fire Wings. These experiences are unique to the BHS campus and BHS life. Amidst this pandemic, students need these tactile experiences more than ever – and the taxpayers are still paying for them, which is why I'm delighted to present a brand new 6.5 point plan to delegating in-school services and experiences straight to the doors of BHS students.

Often romanticized in cinema and entertainment, the high school locker is undeniably the most important tool for students in high school. The sheer joy and ecstasy that once accompanied attempting to stuff binders and backpack into the laughably small BHS lockers sit in the memories of BHS graduates and students alike. My plan calls for the airlifting of the lovely floury blue BHS lockers from the C-Building to terribly inaccessible locations in town (such as the middle of the street, public bathhouses, etc.). This will give students the 100 percent real BHS experience of having an unusable locker that doesn’t fit your items, and is nowhere near any of your classes. 

Back in the day, every red-blooded BHS boy experienced intense delight when they found themselves in the pungent gardens of the C2 boys’ bathroom during 4th period. The nostalgic BHS stench of weed and vape is sorely missed online. BHS must hire a man (or woman) named Steven Cincinatti who stinks of chamomile and peaches and has a horrendous smoking problem to make weekly trips to students’ bathrooms and inundate them with that distinct scent of BHS.

We must recognize that when physically at school, students had the privilege of a state of the art fire prevention system in case of a fire on campus. To make up for the lack of this system, my plan calls for the hiring of amateurly trained “fire watching persons,” who will be equipped with binoculars to look into windows of BHS students homes for signs of smoke and an adorable little bell for ringing in case of an emergency. Students will be instructed to leave their doors unlocked for fire safety’s sake.

Generations of BHS freshmen have endured their Freshmen Fridays, eggings, and more. It would be purely criminal to allow these traditions of abuse to end this year. The Jacket’s plan solves this by hiring a team of ill-mannered Class of 2020 graduates, of course easily found in their college Zoom school in any public Berkeley park, to make daily visits to the houses of BHS freshmen and threaten them with mutilation, keelhauling, rumsbagging, and any other number of other horrid bodily treatments. 

There were supposed to be 6.5 segments of the Jacket’s plan for the BHS experience, but in true BUSD fashion, budget cuts eliminated the other 2.5, and so that concludes this plan.