Journey to the Center of the Earth

As of the writing of this article, the COVID-19 pandemic has reached staggering numbers, with nearly 200,000 confirmed cases (6,500 in the U.S.) and just under 8,000 deaths worldwide. A much larger figure still, and one that is impossible to quantify, is the number of lives that the pandemic has affected. In the U.S. alone, President Trump has introduced a month-long travel ban from much of Europe, the Dow Jones industrial average has taken an unprecedented dive, restrictions have been placed on businesses (such as restaurants and movie theaters) involving the congregation of groups of people, and schools and universities across the country (including Poly) have transitioned to an online, "distance-learning" format. Given the unprecedented nature of the coronavirus pandemic, it is difficult to gauge the degree to which the American reaction to the outbreak has been, thus far, appropriate. Certain precautions (such as the restrictions on certain types of businesses) appea

My final plans for my capstone project, which involves teaching a class in agricultural sustainability to 7th-grade Poly students, are now in place. The purpose of the class, which will take place on April 8th, is to teach about the core values of responsibility and stewardship (both local and global), framing it in terms of my experiences working with the agriculturally-focused community of Isona, Spain. The hope is that, by the end of the presentation, students will have a strong understanding of what they can do to better the communities about which they care the most. In an attempt to make the discussion of agricultural sustainability applicable to both my and the students' experiences, the class will involve a variety of activities (such as an image-based guessing game, an olive oil taste test, and a stewardship-related worksheet) designed to encourage the students to think about their roles within their own communities. Due to the way in which the recent coronavirus o

As part of a study of Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway  for my class in AP English Literature, I recently read a critical review of Woolf by Geneviève Brassard entitled "Woolf in Translation". The article centers around Woolf's own argument that the act of translation is in itself a "mutilation" in that translating any work necessarily augments the societal and cultural connotations of that work (for more, see my previous blog post " The Flaws of Translation "). For instance, Brassard describes the way in which a simple mistranslated pronoun in the Polish version of Woolf's Orlando  all but destroyed the book's feminist undertones, and how Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges' translations of several of Woolf's essays into Spanish entirely ignored the distinctive class system of 1920s England in which Woolf was writing. Ultimately, what Brassard advocates in the context of translation can be applied to how we treat cross-

Last Sunday, Poly hosted an event that encouraged three international exchange students, all currently spending a year in the US as part of an American Field Service (AFS) study abroad program, to recount their experiences to the wider LA community. The event featured a panel discussion moderated by Poly Global Scholars Jacqueline and Aaron, who invited the exchange students to answer a range of questions relating to the similarities and differences between the cultures of their respective home countries and that of the US. Ultimately, from the great respect shown to the elderly in Bulgaria to the long school hours of Chile to the liberal attitude toward gay rights and race relations in Germany, the exchange students shared a variety of stories that shed valuable light on the diversity of their respective cultures.