If you don’t have much cause to head down to the arts and tech. ed. wing, you might not have noticed the changes that have occurred this year. One of 2014’s new arrivals includes Mrs. Vojacek, our stained glass and ce-ramics teacher.
Mrs. Vojacek (pronounced Voy-ah-check) has taught in the Maple School District in the past. From 1976 to 1989 she jumped around in the district, teaching elementary education and art classes at Iron River Elementary School, Lakeside-Maple, and at the middle school.
From that time until 2001, she taught here at the high school as well as some stained glass classes at WITC. Mrs. Vojacek is back at the high school, and the stu-dents aren’t the only ones pleased to have her here.
She says that the art department has a nicer facility now than it did in previ-ous years, with more room and equipment to meet more students’ needs.
Having lived in Oulu her whole life, Mrs. Vojacek and her husband own a business you just may have heard of:
Oulu Glass. It is located in “downtown Oulu,” near Brule. They’ve been running it for about
thirty years, keeping themselves busy and Parking Lot Update
There is a temporary change in the parking lot system this winter. Due to snow covering the parking lines, rather than attempting to park in your designated space, each row will now be on a “first come, first served” ba-sis. This means that whoever arrives at school first will get the first slot in the row, the second person, slot two, etc. Each row is still limited to the usual number of slots, so you may not move to the next row if your row is “filled.”
Despite these
at-tempts to help regulate parking there is still
some difficulty with stu-dents finding a spot as well as some very tight parking. These issues are not limited to the student
parking slots; this ap-plies to the teacher’s
parking lot as well. Online@ www.nw-tigers.org/the-octagon
Volume 66, Issue 12 December 12, 2014
Today:
Basketball: Boys’ C,V&JV @ Chetek
Saturday: ACT Testing
Monday:
Winter Choral Concert
Art Auction Tuesday:
Basketball: Boys’ C,V&JV @ Ashland Basketball:
Girls’ C,V&JV @ Cumber-land
Thursday: Basketball:
Boys’ V&JV @ Washburn Basketball:
Girls’ C,V&JV @ NHS vs. Spooner
The next debate will be on
Tues-day (December 16), and it will be
concerning the Ferguson indict-ment. Debaters, please gather in-formation before
debating.
“...[Cleopatra is] dumb as dust but
sexy as sin.”
Pg. 2 Wise Words
Pg. 3 Senior Prof’s
Pg. 6 Jurassic World
By Molly Niven
Today’s schedule on the new three day system.
Mrs. Vojacek with past art pieces of students.
‘Mrs. Vojacek’
Continued Pg. 4
‘Up To Date’
Continued Pg. 4
Scientists in Argentina uncovered the fossils of a new dinosaur last month, and are now speculating that it’s the largest dis-covered land animal ev-er.
The fossils belonged to a dinosaur now named Dreadnoughtus schrani and has been classified as a Titanasurian, large quadrupedal herbivores that existed towards the end of the dinosaur’s reign.
Apart from potentially
being the world’s largest land animal, the fossil has been particularly im-portant because of its completeness; the fossils of “super massive” dino-saurs are usually frag-mented, with only a ver-tebrae or two actually being examined, while the fossil of Dread-noughtus is nearly 70% complete! Scientists now have the ability to ana-lyze things they couldn’t even dream of prior to this find.
According to the sci-entists’ estimates the owner of the fossils would have been around 65 tons -- that’s more than the weight of a doz-en elephants and the equivalent of seven T. rexes. In addition to that already stunning fact, paleontologists believe that this Dreadnoughtus was still growing! It al-ready weighed more than
a Boeing 747 and it had-n’t even reached its full potential.
To get to this immense size, an animal would have to eat constantly for nearly its entire life. No time for sleep, no time for exercising, and no time for anything else. It would have had to func-tion on one to two hours of sleep per day to be able to consume enough to keep it going and growing. Imagine your life without being able to do anything except look-ing for and eatlook-ing food. That is the life that Dreadnoughtus lived. Its name, meaning “no fear,” was chosen be-cause at such a huge size, nothing would dare to attack it. The only prob-lem that it had was fall-ing over because, given its extreme size, falling over would spell certain death; its own body
weight would suffocate it within an hour or two. The last part of its name, “schrani,” was given to it after the per-son who provided the funding for the mission, Adam Schran.
Today
Lilli Kovaleski Wyatt Nevin Andrew Sanda Cody Vanbuskirk
12/18
Seth Hill
Happy
Birthday!
Senior Editor/ For-matter: Nik Sauer
Text Editor Brooklyn Smith
Staff Members: Katie Johnson
Emily Gaare J. Gaare Lilli Kovaleski
Molly Niven Kaleb Scharp Richard Schiff Luke Rutten Mena Lindquist
Advisor: Mrs. Thompson
Would a tragedy by any other name sound just as sweet? Last year, in my English class with Mrs. Luostari, the ques-tion was posed: “Is Ro-meo and Juliet still rele-vant in our lives?” To which a classmate quick-ly responded, “No.” I remember being aghast at that response, that our generation did not see how the themes in Shakespeare still ap-peared in our lives. Since the freshman class has just finished reading this story, I felt it was only right to address this topic now.
For starters, Romeo was 17 and Juliet was 13 when they fell in love.
How often do we see older males dating younger females? Quite frequently, especially in high school.
Then there is the issue of “true love” and all the foolish things we do when we are in love. I feel that this is especially relevant to high school-ers since we are so young and still finding our way through life and love. The tragedy warns us, shows us what can hap-pen when we get so blinded by love that we can’t see rationally. This may be a bit of an ex-treme example since the two lovers (spoiler alert) die at the end, and most young couples don’t commit suicide for each
other. Romeo and Juliet was certainly a romance to be remembered. In another room, the sophomore class has also just finished reading an-other tragedy by the bard, Julius Caesar.
Julius Caesar is full of life lessons, as are most tragedies, but the most important one I feel arises from the quote, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves.”
In short, we have a certain amount of control over our own fate. It is a very deep topic that has been present in our lives since the origin of hu-manity, a topic which the bard has presented so beautifully. We are
con-stantly making decisions in our lives that affect our fate and therefore this theme applies to us. Another theme that is also presented in Julius
Caesar is reasoning
things through on your own and not following someone else, a struggle one of the main charac-ters encountered. We are constantly told through-out our lives that we need to think for our-selves and the tale of
Jul-ius Caesar only
reinforc-es that idea.
William Shakespeare has created many master-pieces that still hold an important presence in our lives and we should rec-ognize and appreciate all that.
By Molly Niven
What are your plans af-ter high school?
Go to college to become a dental hygienist.
What is your favorite high school memory? All the memories with the softball family <3.
What do you want for Christmas?
Heat in my car.
Make up your own ques-tion and answer it. What’s your name? Abby Schultz.
If you were stranded on a island and you could only choose three things to have with you, what would you bring and why?
-Sunblock (don’t wanna burn).
-Magic Harry Potter wand (obvious reasons).
-Abraham Lincoln's hat (fashion...duh).
Advice for underclass-men?
Stand up for yourself. Favorite Disney charac-ter?
Olaf.
What will you miss most about high school? The handicap stall in the upstairs bathroom. It’s got a nice view of the parking lot.
What are your plans for after high school? Move to Ireland at some point, get an accent. What is your favorite high school memory? Going to Chanhassen for the first time.
What do you want for Christmas?
Taylor Swift concert tickets.
Make up your own question and answer it. Who is your favorite neighbor? Ricky! If you were stranded on a island and you could only choose three things to have with you, what would you have and why?
1- One Direction for en-tertainment.
2-Lifetime supply of tea from Teavana-that stuff is expensive.
3- A fully staffed Disney Cruise ship-bed, food, pool and a way back
home that is fun.
Advice for underclass-men?
Take art classes, whether you’re good or not- Mr. Hessel is pretty cool. Favorite Disney char-acter?
Sebastian or Terk. What will you miss most about high school?
Not the big XL cook-ies… they’re already gone.
From left to right: Kelly Erkkila, Kyra Kreft, and Abby Schultz. What are your plans
for after high school? I’ve been accepted to St. Scholastica and plan to study psychology and to pole vault for their track team.
What is your favorite high school memory?
I have many, but my fa-vorite is probably track state my junior year. What do you want for Christmas?
College tuition... Make up your own question and answer it. How do you feel about the salt being taken away
at lunch? - I WANT IT BACK! Advice for underclass-men?
Be yourself and if some people don’t appreciate that, you will find people who do.
Favorite Disney charac-ter?
Winnie the Pooh. What will you miss
most about high school?
The ability to talk to so many people so closely. Northwestern is a small school and I know the sense of community will probably be much differ-ent in college.
By Ricky Schiff
Kyra
Kreft
The Mars rover Curiosity has found evidence that Mars had a warm and wet climate two billion years ago. By Nik Sauer and Kaleb Scharp
The northern U.K. is experi-encing intense storms, and many power outages and travel
cancellations have occurred. School Day Update
Last year the change was made from having a mandatory number of school days to a manda-tory number of hours. This change is now offi-cially affecting this 2014 -2015 school year.
Our state requires a certain number of hours that differs throughout each grade level: kinder-garten through sixth grade, 1050 hours; and seventh through high school, 1137 hours. Northwestern High School has a total of 1216.33 instructional hours per year. The total does not include recess, lunch, and passing time. This change allowed us not to have to make up any of the five extra snow days we had last year (we had eight snow days and had only alotted three). According to Mr. High, at the time of the eighth snow day, we still had about seven hours more than the min-imum time required. There is no reason to
means we have a buffer built in. Mr. Lundberg even commented, “Let it snow.”
Upon examination of other states’ required time in school as found on the Education Com-mission of the States website (www.ecs.org), Wisconsin has the most hours in terms of re-quired school time for students overall. Accord-ing to the Wisconsin De-partment of Public In-struction, the hour re-quirement is supposedly based on the average number of hours of the states around Wisconsin. The change from hours to days is sup-posed to allow more flexibility in the school schedule and could pos-sibly allow more schools go to four-day schedules and reduce busing costs. However, as nice as more time off might seem, Wisconsin has al-ways had the reputation of having highly educat-ed people.
Island nations around the globe say climate change could “sink us.”
Poland’s ex-president says his country hosted secret illegal CIA prison camps
for suspected terrorists.
Saudi Arabia’s King Ab-dullah donated $104 mil-lion to Syrian refugees,
potentially feeding roughly 1.7 million.
World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee says Internet should be
a ‘human right.’
Popular illegal down-load site The Pirate Bay is shut down but supporters say it will be online again soon. content doing what they
enjoy.
Mrs. Vojacek usually stains and fuses the glass, and Mr. Vojacek is responsible for blow-ing the glass. Through Oulu Glass they teach different classes such as stained glass and glass blowing classes, open to the public.
Mrs. Vojacek would like any students inter-ested to know that they’re welcome to stop by anytime for a lesson on something they might not get much experience with elsewhere.
If you’re not ready to jump right in, you could attend the Holiday Show and watch a piece of stained glass or blown glass being made. This year will be their 22nd annual open house, stretching from Novem-ber 22 through the first week of January.
Here are some fun facts about Mrs. Vojacek: she and her husband own two hors-es, one donkey, one cat,
(painter and potter) and Anton Vojacek (painter), who have given them five grandchildren. Mrs. Vojacek recently trav-eled to New York to vis-it her son Anton’s first daughter, a baby girl on-ly one month old. When asked her fa-vorite form of art, Mrs. Vojacek unsurprisingly told me it was glass, but that all art is enjoyable and she also likes sculp-ture.
Her favorite artist is Antoni Gaudi, a mosaic artist from Spain. She told me she has always loved art as much as she does now -- she started exploring her interests in high school and was very fond of watercolor for a time, but now it seems that she has found her true passion: making art out of glass.
My dear little mathe-maticians, gather round, I have something you all need to hear: if you plan on taking any math clas-ses where you will need to use a graphing calcu-lator (Algebra II, Pre-Calc., or Calculus) you are at some point going to have to beg your par-ents to spend an absurd amount of coin on this calculator. Pro tip: when you beg, make sure you tell them not to get you a Casio fx-9750GII.
Why? Well, let me tell
you -- if any of these math classes are in your imminent future, none of your math teachers will know how to use a Ca-sio. This will make you instantly bond with any-one in your class that al-so wields the Casio,
re-gardless of whether you initially like that person or not.
At first your calculator will seem all fine and dandy, and you may even make some sassy remark as to how great G-Solve is. Trust me though, your love will fade as you get a reality check; G-Solve does not make up for the fact that you may spend up to two hours at home trying to figure out how on Earth your calculator really works.
You will find yourself thinking, “How I can possibly be able to get the Trap-App onto my
Casio?” And this app is
essential to be able to complete many opera-tions in your advanced-level math class, so you are eternally up a river without a paddle, and this isn’t an ordinary
riv-er; this river has water-falls every ten minutes before arriving at the nice, slow, peaceful part where you almost forget how terrifying the river actually was.
So now that you know this, you’re probably thinking, “Why in the world would I buy a Ca-sio? If it’s so bad, why would you ever do that to yourself intentionally?” If you’re anything like me, you send your par-ents out to do your dirty work for you (a.k.a. buy-ing your school sup-plies). When your par-ents are strolling through the aisles of Walmart or Target, or even Best Buy, they will encounter an array of calculators. Now, if they are at all like most parents, they will go, “Oh, this one is only $50! What a
bar-gain! I’m sure this will work just as well as the Texas Instrument calcu-lator! My little (insert child’s name here) can even use it on his/her SAT/ACT!” Do you see how your life can go so horribly awry? Being the thrifty individuals they are, they will always go for the cheaper option, assuming it’s just a ge-neric version of the cal-culator that’s a whop-ping $109.99, at least.
Hopefully I have suc-cessfully scared you into submission and you are now on your jolly little way to purchase a Texas Instrument calculator. A word to the wise -- ac-company your parents on the school supply shop-ping trip.
What do you wear on your feet? Sneakers, high heels, boots, slippers, or sandals? Now there’s a new type of shoe in the stores: toe shoes! They’re setting trends with their contemporary, bold fashion statements, and for the first time since Skechers, they’re healthy for you to wear! That’s right! Toe shoes are the new best shoe on the market. They combine fashion and functionality in the per-fect mix.
You may think that they look strange be-cause of the five “fingers.” Well ask your-self this: what is the pur-pose of a shoe? It is to
provide support and pro-tection for our feet, but do most shoes do that anymore? No. Society has changed their pur-pose to be more for fash-ion than for anything ac-tually useful.
The human body is born without shoes and is meant to function with-out them. When you put on something that forces them to work differently, things begin to break. Feet should be allowed to move freely -- to sense the shape of the ground and adapt to it. Accord-ing to Andre W., an Am-azon buyer, toe shoes can even help to cure prob-lems involving locomo-tion.“Since I started run-ning in the VFF (toe shoes) my knee issues
are gone! No arch issues as well.”
While looking good can be important in some situations, it’s much more useful to keep your feet healthy and working. Toe shoes do this much more effectively than other types.
For starters, their soles aren’t padded. This en-courages your feet to adopt a more natural step, using the muscles that legs are meant to and keeps you in a healthy posture when you move around. Because your feet are in a natural state, they can use the muscles and tendons running through them much more effectively than in nor-mal shoes.
The human body has
had thousands of years to perfect its shape, so can you really expect pieces of rubber and lace thrown together in a mat-ter of hours to have any chance of competing? Why do you need coils built into your shoes when the arch in your foot can propel you far-ther than any shoe-sized spring? Why should you buy thick-bottomed shoes meant for stability when the natural splay of your toes provides you with more balance than any shoe could?
The reason that these toed-shoes are the best out there is that they keep all the good
attrib-By Luke Rutten By Katie Johnson
“Hold on to your butts, boys and girls,” the park is open…
Well, at least not until June 12, that’s when the fourth movie in the
Ju-rassic Park series,
Juras-sic World, comes out in
theaters.
Steven Spielberg, who directed the first two films, is now the execu-tive producer as he was in the third movie, rather than as the director as he was in the first two. Spielberg revolutionized the film industry with his movies such as Jurassic
Park and Jaws. Spielberg
started filming World
after the 2001 film
Juras-sic Park III; the film was
initially going to be re-leased in the summer of 2005, but it kept being pushed back because of script revisions.
The plot of the movie is as the the title of this article states: “The park is open.” It is now 22 years after the original movie came to a crashing end, in which the dino-saurs were left to live on their own. In the movie, the park has now been made into a fully opera-tional theme park, com-plete with tours, safaris, canoeing and more that people from all around the planet visit. The new park is owned by the Masrani Global Corpora-tion instead of InGen and John Hammond.
Unfortunately, after ten years visitor attend-ance is declining. At the request of the corpora-tion, the park's geneti-cists create a genetically-modified hybrid dinosaur (a velociraptor/T-rex) to remedy this issue; this backfires terribly when
the dangerous dino soons gets loose and roams about the island.
Jurassic World
wel-comes a cast including Chris Pratt (Parks and
Recreation) who plays
Owen, a staff worker at the park who conducts behavioral research on velociraptors. The movie also includes Bryce Dal-las Howard (Spider-Man 3) who plays Claire, and Judy Greer (The
Wed-ding Planner) who plays
as a park visitor.
The trailer for the movie was not supposed to be released until Thanksgiving, but some-one “took the turkey out of the oven early,” and it was released two days before.
I am a huge Jurassic
Park fan. I’ve loved it
since I was a child, so when my brother showed me the trailer the first day it came out, I was ecstatic. I told my mom that we have to get tick-ets for the midnight premiere, and that it looks like a movie we have to go see more than once. When I got back to school I told everyone and their mothers how awesome the movie looks. When I got to bi-ology class that morning I asked Mrs. Lawler, who is also a big Jurassic Park fan, if we could watch the trailer in class so everyone could see what I was huffing and puffing about that morn-ing. My classmates agreed that the movie looks pretty neat and is worth going to see.
It seems as though the movie Jurassic World
seems spectacularly cool, so, as Dr. Arnold said in the original Jurassic Park, “hold on to your
butts,” at least until June 12, when you can go see it in theaters.
By Ricky Schiff
utes of shoes, like pro-tection, while leaving behind all of the bad ones. “Since purchasing my Five Fingers...my legs and lower back have gotten stronger and my posture has im-proved,” said Patrick W. Unfortunately some people only care about being fashionable. Well, good news for them: 78% of our study group (the backstage workers in theater class) think that toe shoes look good!
Some people might tell you that toe shoes
are uncomfortable and they are probably right. However, any shoes dif-ferent from the pair you’re used to wearing are probably going to cause discomfort simply because your feet aren’t used to them. From per-sonal experience I can say that it takes about a week to get used to the feel of separated toes but after that week regular shoes feel strange.
Wear whatever shoes you like, but next time you’re looking for a new pair, consider checking out the toe shoe.
