Rivalry—competition for the same objective or for superiority in the same field.  Rivalry is what Spirit Week is all about.  Four grades coming together and battling it out for the praised spot at the top, bragging rights for the rest of the year, and knowing that you outplayed everyone else in the school and brought your grade to the top.

That is how Spirit Week should look and without a doubt would make it the most fun,  although this year Spirit Week looked a little different.  This year we witnessed grades clapping for other grades and even writing cheers supporting the other grades.  Now what is the point of that?  We are supposed to be competing not uniting.

This is just one week out of the entire school year where each class can try there hardest to insult, demoralize or do whatever else to the other classes.  But with this new forced sense of “positivity” this becomes impossible.  During spirit week, classes were required to show their cheers to ASB advisor Matt Hall before using them during the rallies.  If Hall did not feel that the cheers were appropriate he would not allow the class to use them.

    While Hall should be monitoring the cheers for anything truly harmful, this should not include anything that is just the slightest bit mean.  Classes deserve the right to make whatever cheers they want and use them against the other classes, provided they are appropriate (no racial slurs, swear words, etc.).  If the class does not mind losing points for their cheers then they should by all means use the cheer.
Spirit week has worked for years like this and there have been no major incidents.  So if the the system has worked in the past, what is the point of changing it?  I have heard no cheer, at my two years at Paly, that has been so over the top it should be taken away, and the ones that are mean towards my grade, we all shake off and continue on.
Usually when there is a mean cheer, there is even a slight chuckle throughout the crowd, so if people are not taking mean cheers seriously and just shrug them off, there is no reason why we should be censored from using the cheers that we want to use.

On another point, spirit week has been a tradition at Paly for years.  It is the one week where each grades gets to go head to head and shout their brains out with mean comments toward everyone else in the school.  And with so much stress at Paly, students should not have this fun aspect of the school year be taken away from them.  People deserve to have fun during a week that is supposed to be fun.  But, having fun gets more difficult without our right to use mean cheers.

While classes this year did eventually start using positive cheers and clapping instead of booing, the point of positivity did not seem to actually get across.  The cheers all seemed incredibly sarcastic.  The grades were each using positive cheers, while also finding a way to get around the rules, and still hint at being mean.  So, if grades are finding ways to get around all of the rules that were placed, what is the point?

While spirit week is supposed to be fun and positive, people do not seem to care when cheers are negative and directed at their grade. So the system should go back to normal and if a grade wants to lose points, then let them loose points.  There is no reason that high school students should not be allowed to make their own decisions and be censored for comments that are not deemed inappropriate.  And anyway, in the end no matter what we say to each other, we are still all friends.  Right?

Hall was not available to comment on this issue.