Check It Out: Student Edition

It's somehow December, Mountaineers!

The climate's grown cold! Precipitation coruscates across the landscape! Hands and noses are chilly, but hearts glow warmer by the day!

You are about to begin reading the latest edition of your LMC’s newsletter, Check It Out. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to turn off your phone; the feed is always waiting to siphon off your time. Tell your friends right away, “No, I don't want to DM you!” Raise your voice—they won't hear you otherwise—“I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that distraction; speak louder, yell: “I'm beginning to read the latest LMC newsletter!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Set the working world aside and let our penguins be your guide...

It's no secret that West Orange High School prizes its diversity. In our large and inclusive learning community, students and faculty from all demographic backgrounds come together on the daily to celebrate the unique human tapestry we collectively constitute.

Whatever your background or beliefs, however you celebrate the solstice season, your LMC lovingly extends the warmest of holiday greetings to you and yours! May your days be merry and bright, may your sails stay full and your socks stay dry, may the final weeks of this year resound with laughter and joy, and may we return to do it all again in 2024.

Happy holidays and an even happier New Year!

I read a Korean poem

with the line “Today you are the youngest

you will ever be.” Today I am the oldest

I have been. Today we drink

buckwheat tea. Today I have heat

in my apartment. Today I think

about the word chada in Korean.

It means cold. It means to be filled with.

It means to kick. To wear. Today we’re worn.

Today you wear the cold. Your chilled skin.

My heart kicks on my skin. Someone said

winter has broken his windows. The heat inside

and the cold outside sent lightning across glass.

Today my heart wears you like curtains. Today

it fills with you. The window in my room

is full of leaves ready to fall. Chada, you say. It’s tea.

We drink. It is cold outside.

Emily Jungmin Yoon is a poet, translator, editor, and scholar. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco | HarperCollins, 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The book was released in Korean as 우리 종족의 특별한 잔인함 (trans. Han Yujoo, Yolimwon 2020). She is also the author of Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press (selected by Maggie Smith), and the translator and editor of Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019), a chapbook anthology of poems by Korean women writers. Yoon is currently working on a critical manuscript, Enclosed Reading: A Feminist Method for Contemporary Korean and Korean American Women’s Poetry, 1987-2019.

Cotton and snow: both fall softly, but only one bounces when it lands.

Cotton and snow flakes: one melts on your tongue, the other dries it out.

Cotton and snow: while one bolls, the other balls.

We're welcoming the winter with a real doozy of a Makerspace activity! In a simple rhyme:

Here's cotton and here's glue; here's a list of crafts that you might do:

• Make a snow entity by gluing cotton balls together. Add buttons, a carrot nose, and a scarf for details.
• Create a snowy landscape by gluing cotton balls on a blue paper. Cut out trees, houses, and animals from colored paper and glue them on top of the cotton balls.
• Design a snowflake by gluing cotton balls on a cardboard circle. Cut out different shapes from white paper and glue them on the cotton balls to make a unique pattern.
• Craft a penguin by gluing cotton balls on a black paper. Cut out a white belly, eyes, beak, and feet from paper and glue them on the penguin. Add a hat or a scarf for extra fun.
• Make a polar bear by gluing cotton balls on a white paper. Cut out ears, eyes, nose, and a mouth from black paper and glue them on the bear.

Go, creased lightning! We're spending the second week of December creating festive cards of all stripes! Here are some multicultural holiday cardmaking ideas to celebrate the diversity and joy of the season:

• Make a card with a collage of different holiday symbols, such as a menorah, a Christmas tree, a Kwanzaa kinara, a Diwali lamp, and a Chinese lantern.
• Create a card with a world map or a globe on the front. Use colorful markers or paints to highlight the countries or regions where your family and friends celebrate different holidays. Write the names of the holidays and the dates they are celebrated on the map or globe.
• Create a card with a quote or a poem that's meaningful to you. You can either write your own or find one online or in the stacks.
• Make a card with a recipe for a holiday dish. You can either use your own recipe or find one online. Some examples are: latkes for Hanukkah, fruitcake for Christmas, jollof rice for Kwanzaa, kheer for Diwali, tangyuan for Chinese New Year.

We hope these ideas inspire you to create cards that will delight your family and friends. Happy crafting!

Every solstice, our society engages in a spectacle of selfless consumerism, and your LMC is doing its part to promote a perfect balance of mindful consumption and boundless generosity!

To that end, the last Makerspace activity of 2023 is devoted to handmade giftwrap! Customize some craft paper at school, then bring it home to give your presents the gift of a fire fit.

Your librarians have been reaping the benefits of our redesigned Volunteer Program! This program offers students the opportunity to assist their learning community through the LMC; earn hours to satisfy volunteer requirements; serve as leaders among their peers; regularly visit and make use of countless library resources; and foster a love of active citizenship and lifelong learning in themselves and others.

Volunteer opportunities are still available to all WOHS students! The packet linked below contains everything you need to know about volunteering.

Do you love reading? Are you interested in books? Perhaps you enjoy the occasional snack?

Whether you read like a father penguin returning to the ocean (in bulk following a long hiatus) or approach the written word as you would a wayward bird heading for the mountains (allowing it to pass without interruption), the Mountaineer Book Club welcomes you to its December meeting!

The flock's assembling in the LMC Computer Lab on December 13th—won't you join them? Literacy preferred but not mandatory; see Mrs. Binns for more details!

Why trust your most prying anthropological inquiries to a search engine or chatbot when ProQuest's CultureGrams waits at your beck and call? Available in three scrumptious flavors—World Edition, States and Provinces Edition, and Kids Edition—It's no wonder that CultureGrams is every Mountaineer's leading reference for concise and reliable cultural information on the countries of the world.

World Edition contains primary-source reports on 209 countries and territories—including every United Nations member state—focusing on 25 cultural categories, including language, personal appearance, greetings, visiting, family, life cycle, and more.

States and Provinces Editions feature colorful, easy-to-read reports that describe the diversity and history of each U.S. state, the District of Columbia and all 13 provinces of Canada. Each report includes maps, flags and symbols, as well as sections on history, economy, geography, population, indigenous peoples, and recipes.

Kids Edition teaches contains images, historical timelines and fun facts, along with sections on history, population, “life as a kid,” games and sports, education, and more.

Exclusive features include video clips (just like YouTube!) and slideshows (just like Stories!), a worldwide photo gallery, interviews with adults and children, and a unique recipe collection with five local recipes for each country. Plus, infographics, create-your-own data tables, and charts help put dozens of facts into perspective. Generate citations on the fly, play Text-to-Speech audio on demand, or link text to Google Drive or Classroom with the click of a mouse.

Click here or on either photo to dive into CultureGrams!

Struggling to balance the expectations of her immigrant mother with her deep ambivalence about her own place in the world, seventeen-year-old Ocean Sun takes her savings and goes off the grid. In a starred review, Booklist called The Cartographers an “arresting, heartbreaking, and meditative novel.” A haunting and romantic novel about family, friendship, physics, and love, from the acclaimed author of Falling into Place and This Is Where the World Ends.

Seventeen-year-old Ocean Sun, the daughter of a single mom who moved from China to the American Midwest while pregnant with Ocean, has always felt enormous pressure to succeed. After struggling with depression and attempting suicide during her senior year in high school, Ocean moves to New York City, where she has been accepted at a prestigious university, to start fresh. But because she feels so emotionally raw and unmoored (and uncertain about what is real and what is not), she decides to defer and live off her savings until she can get herself together. She also decides not to tell her mother (whom she loves very much but doesn’t want to disappoint) that she is deferring—at least until she absolutely must.

In New York, Ocean moves into an apartment with Georgie and Tashya, two random girls who soon become friends, and gets a job tutoring. She also meets a boy—Constantine Brave (a name that makes her laugh)—late one night on the subway. Constant is a fellow student and a graffiti artist, and Constant and Ocean start corresponding via a Google doc—they discuss physics, philosophy, art, literature, and love. Everything falls apart, though, when Ocean goes home for Thanksgiving, Constant reveals his true character, Georgie and Tashya break up, and the police get involved.

Ocean, Constant, Georgie, and Tashya are all cartographers—mapping out their futures, their dreams, and their paths toward adulthood in this literary, stunning, and heartbreaking novel about finding the strength to control your own destiny.

Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers from industries spanning agriculture to healthcare.

Despite significant Asian American breakthroughs in American politics, arts, and popular culture in the twenty-first century, a profound lack of understanding of Asian American history permeates American culture. Choy traces how anti-Asian violence and its intersection with misogyny and other forms of hatred, the erasure of Asian American experiences and contributions, and Asian American resistance to what has been omitted are prominent themes in Asian American history. This ambitious book is fundamental to understanding the American experience and its existential crises of the early twenty-first century.