Pupilpath Outage, Day 45

January 17, 2022

Dear Diary,

I have lost track of the days since PupilPath has been down. Weeks ago, when we first heard, none of us envisioned the perils that would lie in store. My peers are getting antsy. There are rumors flying about the shutdown: someone hacked the mainframe in order to write a love letter to Principal Yu, or the website crashed because it couldn’t stand that half the freshmen were failing biology. Most of the student body believed that it was the Russian hackers. If that’s true, I’d like to personally thank them.

I feel like I’m getting off track.

The teachers have to do attendance manually again. It seems to be a reawakening for some of them. One of my teachers had to be coaxed into checking off the first name in the attendance list and was so overwhelmed that they burst into tears and spent the rest of the day putting up flyers preaching the euphoria of writing something by hand for the first time in years. The next day, the computer lab was found trashed, though the aforementioned teacher is denying involvement.

The fear that Pupilpath will be lost entirely and never come back has teachers on edge. Some are asking us to self-report old grades so they can have another copy, just in case. And what are Stuyvesant students except the human reincarnations of exhausted racoons whose only cravings are academic validation? When asked by my third period teacher to self-report our grades, the person sitting in front of me whispered, “Do you think if I report a 92, it’ll be believable?” They then added, “I feel like I need at least one grade to be bad so they don’t suspect me.” I shrugged because I had thought that turning in everything as a 100 would be more believable. Doesn’t it show consistency? Then, I remembered that the only comment from them on my marking period two report card was “do better <3.”

My Global Studies class is convinced that if we all report straight A’s, there’s nothing the teacher can do about it. Someone mentioned that that makes it even less believable. That sparked the idea that only one of us should report a 100, and the others should tell the truth so that there is at least one person who gets something out of this. It then transitioned into a snowball fight for victory—except the snowballs were textbooks.

I heard someone crying in the Hudson staircase (out of happiness, for once). Their average was 68.95, and it hadn’t been rounded up before the whole fiasco. It’s a worthy cause to shed some tears for. People are also talking about what might happen if PupilPath never comes back up. I think that JupiterEd is a good option, but others seem to think that it’s easier for all the grades to be put in a Google Docs shared with the entire student body. It might all get lost at once, but that seems unlikely. Big websites that large communities count on for everyday use would never just suddenly go down for weeks at a time, right? There’s been an email going around saying that the third marking period report card might just be what’s left over from what the teachers remember. Someone told me there won’t even be a homeroom day for it—everybody’s report cards will just be pasted as flyers around school. It will be a scavenger hunt to find yours.

January 18, 2022

Dear Diary,

I just woke up.

PupilPath is back up.

May God have mercy on us all. Or Hallelujah.