Black Friday leaves shoppers with empty wallets

Caroline Maloney

Staff Writer

Logging onto my online PNC Virtual Wallet account to see a balance of -$1.37 was certainly a great wake up call that I needed to rethink my financial priorities. Staring at the screen in utter disbelief, I asked myself- How did I let this happen? There was only one answer: Black Friday.

 Each year, dedicated and determined shoppers like myself wake up at the earliest of hours with hopes of scoring big deals and steals. Stores like BestBuy, Target, and Walmart introduce “doorbuster” sales to customers, which occur only once a year. Whether one is buying a 55’’ LED HD television or a new handbag, good deals are bound to be found. However, amidst all of the bargains and discounts, it is very easy to drain a bank account in the blink of an eye. I, sadly, learned that the hard way.

 Numerous New Hope-Solebury students have also taken advantage of the sales. Junior Taylor Selbst said that her experience was great. “I bought a lot of new clothes, but spent too much money,” she said.

 Junior Molly Rothblat said that she “ had the intention of buying gifts for my family and friends, yet that didn’t seem to work out. I got some great deals for myself, however.”

 Junior John Sharkey says the best deal he bought all day was a full set of all Harry Potter DVDs from Amazon.com. “The sale sent me straight to flavortown.” John said, explaining that sales such as these occur not very often.

 Students, such as Sharkey, choose to skip the long lines and grouchy shoppers and take a more virtual route: online shopping.

 Junior Caroline Rubino said, “I did most of my shopping online. It’s easier.”

 Online shopping has been a trend for shoppers to resort to, and there now is a holiday dedicated to online shopping, otherwise known as Cyber Monday.

  Whether online or in store, manage your dough wisely next year with hopes of scoring big. Spending money is fun, especially when you love to shop, but make sure to be extra careful and cautious on this holiday in order to avoid seeing negative signs in your bank account statement.

Are People Starting To Celebrate The Holidays Too Early?

Charlotte Haigh and Victoria Siano

News Editors

The holiday season has always been an extremely popular time of the year. With so many different events: Christmas, Hanukkah, and even the start of the new year, it is hard not to get wrapped up in all of the excitement. With the exuberance, though, also comes a desire to make the holidays last longer.

  This hope is understandable. With all of the stress and pain of daily life, it is only natural to crave an extension of the joyous spirit that always ensues this time of year. The ways people have done so have ironically only managed to diminish holiday spirit while also annoying those that want to take the holidays one at time.

 For one, many retailers have taken to advertising commercials and decorating their storefronts with mistletoe and jingle bells far before the holiday has even arrived. Even television stations start celebrating too early, such as Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas, which begins on Nov. 1.

 With such an early start, people have come to lose the true excitement and spirit that this time of year always brings. People tire of Christmas music sooner, purchase gifts earlier, and decorate faster, so that by the time the holidays actually come around, they have become old news. As much as people want the holidays to be around forever, they tend to get old really quickly.

 This early start to the celebration has also taken to undermining the holidays before it, like Halloween and Thanksgiving. You can hardly ever find a store that sells decorations for these two holidays without having a section filled with Christmas goods right beside it. Nordstrom is one of the few stores that has vowed to only put decorations for holidays out after the previous holiday has ended.

 Every holiday should have its own chance in the spotlight, so take the time to appreciate the joy that each celebration brings.

Social Media is Toxic

Riley Brennan and Katie Hunt

Staff Writer

Social media is normally a fun way for people to communicate, share, and browse, but it may actually be detrimental to our health and well being. It’s no secret that social media has changed the way our world operates. It has opened the doors to limitless opportunities, letting people experience other parts of the world and communicate with friends without having to leave their homes. But is it possible that society depends too heavily on social media, to the point where it’s gotten unhealthy? Unfortunately, thanks to recent studies, we know that it has; the social media craze has gotten to the point of addiction.

 Social media has changed the way people interact with one another. When hanging out with friends, more often than not everyone is accompanied by their phones. Chances are, phones make many appearances throughout the time friends are together. And sadly, in some cases more time is spent snapchatting a friend across the room than actually talking to him or her.

 Socializing with people has gotten tougher with everyone starting at their phones or focusing on taking a picture to post on a variety of different social media platforms.

 These apps and websites are designed to entertain and entice people, so are we  really to blame? In some ways yes; after all, we are the ones signing up for these websites. But there was no warning about Instagram being unhealthy when we made accounts. Can we actually be held accountable for being obsessed with something we didn’t know would become addictive?

 Obviously addiction is a negative attribute to social media, but the list of downsides doesn’t stop there. Too much social media can cause people to suffer mentally, which can then lead to serious issues. In order to avoid the negative attributes of social media, limit the amount of time you spend on it. Social media can be great, as long as you know when to turn it off.

Are some lives more valuable than others?

Lexi Anderson
News Editor

The night of November 13th brought ISIS to the Western world for the first time as attacks left hundreds either dead or wounded, a tragedy that has resulted in the love and mourning of people from every corner of the world.

 In light of the Paris attacks, support has spread from one side of the globe to the other, the world has been blanketed by the French flag, with the Empire State Building and Sydney Opera house donning its colors in solace. Facebook even went as far as providing a safety check for the French, which provided them a way to see if their family and friends were safe, allowing them to rest easy during the distressing time.

 The Paris attacks were of course a tragedy, there is no denying that these are dark times. Obviously, the love and support being provided by the media and people all over the globe is well deserved and appreciated, but the problem lies in the media coverage and the corresponding outpouring of love that has not been granted to countries such as Beirut, Nigeria, and Baghdad.

 In Beirut specifically, 40 died and over 200 were wounded when two ISIS operatives blew themselves up in a crowded marketplace, just one day before the attack in Paris. This attack is the worst Beirut has seen in many years, and yet the attention and coverage of the attack has been vastly different than in Paris.

 The attack in Paris was described as an attack on the youth, people simply enjoying their night out at a concert, while the attack in Beirut was seen as ISIS striking a war ridden area, containing supporters of Bashar-al Assad’s regime. Beirut, however, isn’t just that. It’s a diverse area containing people of all different countries and religions. People from all these different groups were killed in the suicide bombing, not just a certain group. Women, children, and elderly were lost but somehow this event isn’t deemed as an “attack on humanity.”

 There was no Facebook safety check, no colors of the Lebanese flag projected on signature architecture or used as a filter for everyone's profile picture. It is understandable that Paris hits us closer to home, but it’s simply unfair that one group of people deserves less collective mourning than another.

 Places like Beirut, Iraq, Syria, and many more have been collectively expected to live with bombings, mass killings, death. The West has deemed these events as a usual occurrence, the grieving the world may have felt is overshadowed by the conditioned apathy felt towards these places of war. How long does it take for a tragedies to become ordinary?

 It is a tragedy in itself that apparently where you live determines the amount of compassion you deserve.

 Yes, the attack on Paris was an attack on humanity, and it deserves all the love it is receiving, but all of the tragedies around the world, all the mass killings, whether weekly, monthly, or yearly, whether in Beirut, Syria, Baghdad, Nigeria, Cameroon, Iraq, or Paris, are attacks on humanity.

Don’t forget your compassion, a life is a life.

Quarterly exams brings even more stress to the end of the quarter

Bailey Hendricks

Features Editor

The first marking period has made its way to the end. As usual the end of the marking period brings a cram of tests, homework, and projects. Students tirelessly work to make sure they get everything in on time and make sure their grades are up to their standards. However, this year things are changing. The introduction of the Quarterly Exams, brought a new look to the marking period’s end.

The Quarterly Exams have been introduced in efforts to create less stress for students around the midterm and final exams. Rather than two exams worth 10% of your final grade, four smaller tests will be administered after each marking period each worth 5% of your final grade. While the idea seems optimistic, not all students feel the same.

Junior Elizabeth Both says she does not  “personally like the quarterlies, but it gives you more of a chance to rise up from a bad grade unlike the midterm and finals format.” The new format, being worth only five percent of your grade, gives you a better chance to recover from a bad grade on one of the four exams. Senior Hannah Mui says, “ I think the quarterlies are not good for seniors especially with sending mid year grades to colleges, the tests can bring down the student’s overall grades. It is also a new format to get used to at the very end of our high school career.”

While the students understand the logic behind the testing, it is still difficult to add in even more tests in an already stressful time. The last week of the quarter is stressful enough and with some student taking more than four or five tests in that week it becomes even more stressful. The idea of smaller tests is helpful, but when administered during a regular school week when the workloads from other classes remain the same, it is hard to balance homework with studying and other extracurricular and out of school activities. The Quarterly exams will still add up to 20% of your final grade for each class, so many students are still feeling the same pressure to perform at their best.

The secret behind overtesting students

Jackie Gouris

Arts & Entertainment Editor

As of the 2015-2016 school year, a drastic change has taken place that will affect all students. The addition of quarterly tests will revamp cumulative tests, like midterms and finals. The idea behind quarterlies is to de-emphasize the anxiety around the weight of midterms and finals by splitting up the material and points, says the Dean of Students, Mr. Cook.

He is the man behind this initiative, believing that by having more frequent, smaller summative tests will take some stress out of the process. Still, Mr. Cook thinks that students today are over tested. “There is no magic bullet. People want to know how the students are doing, and this is the best way to do it right now,” Mr. Cook says. President Obama’s administration is saying that today’s students are being over tested, and calling for a reduction in testing.

This year’s graduates, the class of 2016, are the first class to have gone through 1-12 under the No Child Left Behind Act. After twelve years under these regulations, there is now an opposing push to de-emphasize testing. These two new initiatives are contradictory and confusing for students being pulled in all different directions. Instead of looking at arbitrary data that may not be applicable or legislation from people who are far removed from the school system, perhaps educators should look to the people who matter in this situation for answers: the students. Hopefully, all of these changes will be for the better, but in the meantime, students will continue to do what they do best: test.

IPhone 6s amazes Apple users

Heather Borochaner & Joseph Giunta

Staff Writers

 Apple never fails to amaze its customers by showing off what technology can do. Every year, they reveal many new products such as the new iMac, iPad Pro (with a keyboard and Apple Pencil), new designs for the Apple Watch, and the most anticipated of them all, the brand new iPhone 6s/6s Plus, featuring the brand new color, Rose Gold, a brand new iSight 12mp (megapixel) camera that’s capable of shooting 4K video recordings, a brand new 5 mp camera, a new 3D touch, faster LTE speeds, and best of all, the phones don’t start to bend after long exposure to your pockets.

 When I first got the iPhone 6s Plus on the day it was released, I was shocked at how fast it was, including speed improvements on the touch ID compared to the iPhone 6 Plus. The touch ID was 10 times faster! The 3D touch was a very unique feature to have on a phone. It was actually sensing how hard you pressed! The only downfall is that since the iPhone just got released, the developers for all the apps didn’t update their apps to support 3D touch. The new 12 MP camera isn’t that different compared to the previous model, although it does show more detail in the photo and is way more vivid. The camera is also amazing at taking close up photos. The new camera also takes Live Photos which is a new feature only on the Iphone 6s and 6s Plus. If you have it activated it will take a regular photo but when you use 3D touch and press harder on the photo it will show about a 2 second video, 1 second before and 1 second after the photo is taken. The front facing camera is where there is a huge difference. The front facing camera went from 1.2 Megapixels to 5 Megapixels. There is a lot more detail in the photo and the quality is so amazing! When I go on the internet the speed is really fast, everything loads a lot faster.

 When I first opened the phone at the store, I noticed that the phone was a noticeably thicker, also it was also a little heavier. When I felt it in my hand it felt more solid than the previous model. A huge issue I have with this phone is that the battery life isn’t that good compared to the previous model. While the previous model lasted me about a whole day and I still had about 20% extra battery. With the current model I have to charge a couple hours before I go to bed, which is still pretty good because I do use it all day long.

 In conclusion, the iPhone 6s has many amazing features that continue to improve the experience of modern technology, and the downsides of the phone are heavily overshadowed by the positives.