Bring Back “Video Homeroom”—Whatever That Was

The Barge. Protesting the RNC. 999 Bouncy Balls. Video Homeroom. The asbestos testers. Sha-booYa Roll Call. The Campbell Soup Mansion. These are all events the Stuyvesant High School Class of ‘05 claims to remember, if you cite their senior shirt. Reading the back of it while folding inventory in the school store feels like interacting with a completely different Stuyvesant—one that has the school spirit to pull off occasions like “Jesus Day,” to even more unfamiliar affairs like walk-outs and sit-ins. As an adventurous student, I have one fear: are we, as cohorts of Stuyvesant students, becoming progressively less interesting? 

I will never know what the Class of ‘05’s website, stuy05.com, led to before it went defunct. And, because of that, I can only imagine that they were really cool. Why aren’t we?

I feel pretty disconnected from Stuyvesant history, and learning about it rarely feels urgent. Outside of the Mnemonics glass cases, with their 2017 fidget spinner on display, it feels too abstract to imagine the lives of students who took our classes before we did. While we have an alumni mentorship program—made possible by a rigorous alumni network, as anyone who’s briefly visited LinkedIn will know—connecting in these spaces feels more motivated by career development than answering questions like “What was it like when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take a case brought up by a Stuyvesant student?”

The Spectator has conducted interviews with alumni of different generations, and various volunteer groups pitch in for alumni reunions. We should continue to do so, but it feels like a student has to go out of their way to find everyday ties to Stuyvesant history—if the inspiration even strikes at all. The problem is that we barely know how many stories we’re losing as more and more days go by without cracking open a yearbook from the ‘80s or even learning where one might find such a book (in the alumni association room!). Do the faces embalmed within those pages look at us with consternation, knowing we never brought back their tradition of “wearing ID cards,” as the seniors 20 years ago claimed they did? Have we lost school spirit simply because we’ve forgotten what’s possible?

There are ways of creating an archive. We have a vast network of people to ask, including faculty members willing to regale us with memories. We hear stories about why there are so many connecting doors between classrooms and how those were used, but we don’t often go far enough to make those anecdotal discussions common knowledge and part of a shared vocabulary that could build our language of spirit. 

Williams College has a wiki site called Willipedia. It’s furnished with a student-developed glossary of words called Williamspeak unique to their school, like “Uncle Eph,” the fictional character who picks up all the expenses on campus. Princeton has one too—dubbed Princeton Panda—but it’s frankly a bit horrifying and tiring to the eyes in the same way Craigslist can be. 

When it comes to making our own, we need look no further than the example of WikiCU, the Columbia University Encyclopedia—a patchwork collection of 4,194 student-written articles and counting, with a featured article about their Tunnel system with maps. The wiki has grown primarily through initiatives like “Wikithons” and initiatives by their engineering club to recruit as many new contributors as possible, which means articles (entertainingly) range in quality from bullet-pointed lists entitled “How to Stay Awake” and “Tenacious Bureaucratic Wrangling,” to an article retelling the controversy behind their “Nutellagate” scandal in 2013. There have been articles each year since 1754, and the university’s administration now cites WikiCU articles when writing about school traditions. A print-out of a WikiCU page was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

 If we don’t record the weird little characteristics of Stuyvesant now in a collaborative, accessible way, we won’t encourage ourselves to collectively make more of those memories in the future, for posterity! After all, we live in interesting times. Is it too future-oriented to believe that students who take their ID pictures years after we graduate will want to know how we reacted? (To the election? To pop culture phenomena? Not just individually, but as a community?)

A Stuyvesant Wiki presents the opportunity to both enshrine and expand existing traditions. The official Wikipedia itself, try as much as I can, won’t always let me add details to our school’s page, calling additions of interest to us and not the outside world “encyclopedic.” But in our wiki, we could investigate and chronicle the history of the artifacts in the glass cases lining our hallways and tape little plaques with QR codes of the articles we create about them. Articles on our wiki could detail the decision process for filling the Mnemonics glass boxes each year or student organizations’ fruitful collaborations with institutions outside of the building.

Who else could Stuyvesant’s own Wiki help? A database of stories and anecdotes would enable members of student organizations to look into their pasts for guidance, whether it be traditions their club had 20 years ago or wise words from former student leaders. Longstanding organizations would be more in touch with the practices (and practical jokes) that their founders dabbled in, and feel a responsibility to do something worth writing about—to pick up the flaming torch left for them and run as far as possible. It wouldn’t feel like each new school year starts from scratch in creating institutional history anymore, because we wouldn’t.

Model UN, and many other clubs, have their seniors conduct “senior speeches” of reflections towards the end of the year, and these oral histories are always recorded but never transcribed—always enjoyed but never memorialized. Recording the lore of student organizations at Stuyvesant, as well as the shifting culture that guides changes in curriculum and school policy, would encourage students to feel part of something much bigger than themselves and emboldened to advocate for changes with the knowledge that it’s been done before. And, with every new year, we wouldn’t be pulling from merely singular experiences when sharing the purpose of a club with freshmen. Instead, we could point to everything that came before.

Not many Stuyvesant students know that, a little over 20 years ago, faculty and students were interviewed about their experiences on or after 9/11 to bring together the individual stories and experiences of the time into something we could process as a community. The result was a collection of monologues called With Their Eyes by Stuyvesant English teacher Annie Thoms. In the introduction, she says, “We heard the stories speak to each other, painting a picture of anger and panic, of hope and strength, of humor and resilience.” We have the opportunity to bring more stories together, helping Stuyvesant become a little more like home for everyone. Let’s take it.