Dear Stuyvesant Class of 2021...WE HAVE ADVICE FOR PHYSICS!

It’s that wonderful time of year again. The weather outside is frightful, and all anyone wants to do is sit around a warm fire with their laptop. With the end of first semester woes such as new schedules being released, students have been looking forward to storming the program change button on Talos and planning out 10 periods of lunch.

Interestingly, the Program Office has actually done something useful. They’re allowing juniors to enjoy some new course selections. Due to the controversial nature of the AP Physics course, juniors will now be allowed to take a different class to fulfill their physics requirements, allowing them to still get that *incredibly* useful Stuyvesant Diploma. All of these courses have been deemed “more worthwhile than Stuyvesant’s current AP Physics curriculum” by the Program Office, the administration, and probably God. Interested juniors should examine the course list below:

Quantum Mechanics

Before one gets frightened by the term “quantum,” know that not only is it just a term slapped on things that sound hard, but in this context, it is simply defined as the makings of the universe and its motion on a minuscule scale. This said, have you ever heard the saying that one must walk before one learns to run? Well, using this logic, it’s only logical to work from small things to big things. Using their previous knowledge of Lagrangian mechanics and amplitude calculus, juniors taking this course will be sure to intimidate AP Physics 1 graders as they use the Schwartz space to find out how a ball rolls down an inclined plane.

AP Kinematics

Seeing that the advent of AP Physics 1 failed to properly introduce hundreds of juniors to this simple introductory topic, the administration felt an uncharacteristic amount of responsibility by creating a non-College-Board-sponsored AP devoted to kinematics. Despite the seemingly laughable name, make absolutely no mistake! Students are expected to easily visualize spaces that are well beyond three-dimensional and derive equations for such spaces. Regents graders will be baffled as students create ground-breaking derivations to figure out when a free-falling ball will land despite failing to understand how to use the reference table to figure out the quark composition of a particle.

Greek I, II, III, IV, AP

Despite the name, these courses will actually outdo Latin in uselessness by only teaching Greek letters. As strange as this might seem, it’s actually much more useful than AP Physics: instead of only learning a bunch of equations involving alphas, thetas, and betas, students will now know what the Greek letters in those equations actually mean. Still, it’s rumored that if you put all of the AP Greek teachers in a room, they might be able to write only four or five words in Greek, which is definitely still more useful than being unable to calculate the ideal speed of a car on a banked ramp that will ensure that the car doesn’t move up or down the ramp.

Script Handwriting

Taught by the bOoMeRs, this class on cursive will ensure that Stuyvesant students know how to write in the handwriting equivalent of Times New Roman! The professor, a 70-year-old woman named Karen Smith, paces up and down the aisles, grumbling about how “you cupcakes don’t know the first thing about academics!” She’s also known for shouting “I DEMAND TO SPEAK TO YOUR LEGAL GUARDIAN” whenever a student offends her. Make sure your parents don’t get to see her at parent-teacher conferences: she’ll be sure to tell them that you are a degenerate youth who is two more incorrect script z’s away from prison and that back in her day, parents gave their wayward youth a real lesson in responsibility involving a thick willow branch and a shed out back.

Scientific Method

Remember how both biology and chemistry spent the first two months of school re-re-reteaching you what the metric system is and how to conduct a proper experiment? It’s now a full class that will also fulfill your *very* nebulous 10-Tech requirement! That’s right, you’ll be mastering conversions between decigrams and micrograms, memorizing all of those stupid yotta/zetta/exa sizes, and out-mathing your math teacher by threatening to convert the question into yoctograms (this is a REAL UNIT) on the test. Don’t forget that your professor drinks Unusually Dark Chocolate Milk, wears Dirty Underwear Definitely Containing Moss, and may or may not be Han Solo in disguise. In addition, the lab component of this class will be composed of increasingly tedious exercises, including attempting to use a zetta-meterstick to measure a grain of sand. But hey, at least you’ll get to do everyone’s favorite clothespin experiment! Pinching a clothespin as your fingers burn with lactic acid has never been more fun.

LaTeX 101

$$Hey\;so\;have\;you\;ever\;wanted\;to\;type\;in\;weird\;italics\;on\;Facebook\;but\;you\;couldn’t\;figure\;out\;how\;to?\;Well,\;now,\;you\;can!\;The\;new\;LaTeX\;(pronounced\;as\;la-tech)\;course\;will\;teach\;anyone\;how\;to\;write\;in\;a\;similar\;fashion\;as\;cool\;mathematicians\;or\;really\;pretentious\;high\;school\;students\;pretending\;to\;know\;a\;lot\;about\;math!\;Be\;sure\;to\;hit\;them\;all\;up\;with\;the\;fun\;activity\;of\;\int e^{-x}dx\;with\;the\;bois!$$