One of these climbers is junior Cameron Ennis, who began his rock climbing journey in middle school after his dad brought him to a climbing gym on the Stanford University campus. Ennis shares his personal journey of improvement using the V scale, where the difficulty of climbs increase from V0 to V14.

“(At first), I didn’t take (rock climbing) that seriously,” he said. “Then when COVID hit, I stopped entirely. About a year ago, I got back into climbing, but this time, a lot more seriously. When I started, I could only climb V1’s and occasionally V2’s. The progression that you get from working your way up the grades was really motivating for me. A year later and I’m climbing V5’s and V6’s.”

According to Ennis, rock climbing is especially appealing to students due to its inclusivity regarding one’s physique and skill level.

“A lot of sports are significantly easier for people who have a specific body type that’s optimal for that sport, like basketball with tall people,” he said. “Climbing, on the other hand, is a lot more accessible since people of any height or weight can climb and have fun. Climbing gyms are made to be for everyone, and the community is super supportive, so you don’t have to feel embarrassed about not being able to climb stuff that really experienced people can.”

Sophomore rock climber Annika Kulawik echoes Ennis’ points about the inclusivity of the rock climbing community, saying that accessibility is one of the many common misconceptions that deter participation in the sport.

“Some people think in order to rock climb you have to be super strong and need a ton of special equipment,” she said. “You don’t. Gyms make climbing way easier and more accessible now, and you are unlikely to hurt yourself falling.

According to Ennis, many people, especially those afraid of heights, believe that rock climbing is dangerous. In reality, many safety precautions are taken before even one begins climbing.

Sophomore Joshua Rene-Corail believes that the importance of rock climbing comes from the necessity of perseverance and character building.

“Rock climbing is for everyone, because it can be both an individual and team sport, and you don’t need a lot of experience to start out,” he said. “It’s all about setting goals and challenging yourself.”

Rene-Corail has been rock climbing for five years, during this time, he has achieved a healthy balance and between his schoolwork and sport.

“(Rock climbing) definitely removes a lot of pressure and stress that I have with different classes or assignments,” he said. “It’s an easy way to escape work sometimes.”

To Kulawik, although rock climbing takes up a lot of time, she believes that its benefits greatly outweigh its costs.

“I’ve met friends at the gym and it can be fun to work on climbs together,” she said. “It does take a lot of time. Sometimes I spend three hours from when I leave my house to when I get back, which gives me less time to do homework, but it’s worth it.”

Rock climbing at Gunn embodies the spirit of community and resilience, welcoming all students to challenge themselves and find solace in a sport that transcends mere physical activity. As rock climbing continues to establish itself in the Gunn community, it fosters student connections and inspires individuals to pursue their own unique paths.

According to Ennis, Gunn’s Rock Climbing Club readily invites those who are curious about or interested in climbing.

“If you’re thinking about trying out rock climbing, I’d recommend getting in contact with climbers at Gunn, such as people who go to Climbing Club,” he said. “We do regular meetups at the nearby climbing gyms, and we’re totally down to introduce you to climbing and give advice.”

One of these sailors is junior Bosco Zhang, who is in the Penninsula Youth Sailing Foundation. Zhang was introduced to the world of sailing by a family friend, who was his first coach. After coming to the United States, he joined a sailing team in order to improve and meet new people.

“I have been sailing for 8 years,” he said. “My mother’s friend was a former world champion, and he asked me if I was interested in sailing during a summer vacation. I wanted to try it, and I liked it. The reason why I joined (the sailing team) is that I want to continue to improve my skills.”

PYSF coach Juan Pablo Del Solar Goldsmith, who coaches Gunn’s team, also began sailing at a young age, and through his commitment and perseverance was able to compete at international competitions.

“I have sailed since I was six years old, I lived right around the sea,” he said. “So as a young kid, I started sailing, I competed at the World Championships and I went to the Olympics three times as a coach. I’m very competitive in any sport.”

According to senior Gunn sailor Naomi Lowenthal, the unique appeal of sailing and what makes it different from other sports can be summarized in a quote by sailing coach Dave Perry, a five-time national match racing champion.

“I think Dave Perry said it best: ‘Sailing is the most complex sport in the world (because) it requires split-second decisions based on a variety of strategic and tactical considerations.To execute successfully, you need to gather the right information, evaluate your options, and communicate clearly,’” Lowenthal said. “(Sailing) also teaches you how to control what you can in unpredictable situations. We can’t control the weather, but we can learn to adapt
to (it).”

Goldsmith believes that more high schoolers should consider sailing as a sport due to the important values and qualities it can develop in the athlete.

“If you were on a soccer field or a rugby field, quitting is very easy, where you just walk out and you’re out,” he said. “When you’re on the water, you cannot just quit. It’s just like life. When you make a mistake, you need to rethink and learn from it. And just by doing (sailing), it kind of teaches you that right away.”

Zhang believes that the allure of sailing comes not from the learning, but from the excitement and enjoyment it brings.

“(Sailing) is the one (sport) that allows me to relax and just focus on doing this one thing,” he said. “And it doesn’t have the constraints of the venue. I can go anywhere I want. It’s more free, and I just like the feeling of not being bound.”

Like Zhang, Goldsmith finds that sailing gives him a sense of liberation that could not be otherwise obtained.

“When you’re sailing, it’s like living twice,” he said. “I enjoy being in the water and competing against others.”

While sailing is still mostly unexplored at Gunn, to the students it does reach, sailing is a large portion of their lives. From reducing stress to teaching life lessons, sailing offers a unique experience that extends beyond the confines of traditional sports. It fosters a sense of freedom and strategic thinking that resonates deeply with those who partake in it.

Whether it be walking through the halls or sitting in a busy classroom, it is clear that the change in weather impacts student style.

According to junior Kamran Khan, when the temperature changes, he feels obligated to alter the type of clothes he wears in order to stay comfortable. Although the temperature in Palo Alto doesn’t ever become too extreme, he still checks the weather app daily to choose an outfit for school.

“In the winter, I try to dress with a lot more layers just because it’s so cold,” he said. “(And in the summer), I wear a lot more T-shirts, tank tops, shorts and sunglasses.”

Khan also finds that he has fewer outfit choices in the summer compared to the winter.

“(Style in the) summer feels definitely more restricting than winter because you have to wear shorter or thinner stuff just so you don’t overheat,” he said. “In the winter, unlike the summer where you’re just wearing T-shirts and shorts, you can still wear those if you just have a long sleeve layer underneath or with other layers on top.”

However, sophomore Gianna Tuffley, believes that winter weather puts more restrictions on her style due to the fewer opportunities to wear unique outfits.

“When I’m in the winter, I feel like I don’t do as much shopping because I end up covering what I’m wearing with a hoodie,” she said. “I feel like I get to express myself more when it’s hot out because I can wear what I actually want to wear.”

Evolving color palettes is another aspect to consider when it comes to style changes in relation to the weather. According to Tuffley, some colors work better than others in certain seasons.

“In the winter, I tend to focus more on cooler toned colors — I graduate more towards blacks and grays and browns and navies,” she said. “When it comes to summer I like to wear (more) vibrant colors (such as) reds, pinks and greens.”

This contemplation of warm and cool colors extends beyond clothing and into accessories.

“In the winter I tend to gravitate more towards silver, and then summer feels more like gold,” Tuffley said. “I think gold is such a great way to elevate a good summer look because it’s such a timeless piece (and) the way gold reflects in sunlight is so pretty.”

But the weather and colors are not the only thing that determines what students wear. Personal opinions and attitudes towards the time of year can also be a significant contributor to popular style. Khan finds himself putting more effort into his summer style through planning outfits and going shopping to switch things up.

“I’m tired of the winter — I want to branch out and change it up,” he said. “I might put extra effort to (plan what I’m going to wear) for the next couple of days because I’m excited to wear something different.”

Tuffley echoes Khan’s observation on the excitement surrounding the novelty of summer clothing and senses a collective attitude shift around campus.

“The general vibe around school is that everyone is putting more effort (into their outfits) and everyone actually cares now because we only have a month of school left,” she said. “I feel like everyone’s starting to treat it like it’s summer already.”

However, in the process of creating these plots and themes, the media industry inadvertently creates many stereotypes, such as the “dumb jock” and “unpopular nerd.” These stereotypes cause cliques to form where individuals with similar traits separate into exclusive groups. Consumers of this media internalize these stereotypes, even though in reality, they are little more than fiction.

According to Visual and Performing Arts teacher Kristen Lo, these stereotypes must be established in the beginning of a play in order to kickstart the main plotline.

“(High School Musical) starts out (with) everybody in their little cliques, and it’s like, ‘Don’t get out of the status quo,’” she said. “And so, when everybody is coming up on stage, you basically have the four different cliques that you have established.”

These stereotypes in media depict jocks as large, muscular bullies with little intelligence, but popular for their prowess in sports, and nerds as thin, unfashionable and unsociable, picked on by the jocks. The girls are also portrayed similarly, with popular, pretty and unkind girls bullying those seen as social outcasts. These stereotypes almost always have a defining quality as well, such as jocks only playing basketball or nerds being weak and thin. This forms the belief that certain traits are mutually exclusive to a designated social group.

The light in which stereotypical cliques are portrayed is also of paramount importance in terms of influencing the way teens act. Whether or not these actions in movies enable teens to replicate them in some form or another is a key factor in evaluating the impact of this genre of high school movies.

“This is always the (issue): ‘Does art influence people in bad ways?’” Lo said. “Do people see things take place in art and they say, ‘I’ll do the thing that they did in Mean Girls?’ That is the catch with art – can that happen?”

The messages portrayed in media significantly influences students’ perceptions of high school cliques: Some imply that students should stay in the roles given to them by their community, while others present the idea that students can be anything they want to be and do anything they want to do.

The idea of students striving for popularity can be seen in “Mean Girls.” In this movie, students are either a part of “The Plastics” – the group of popular and pretty girls – or social outcasts. The expectations of their actions portrayed by these cliques create a stigma around the average high schoolers’ acts. For instance, The Plastics “banish” one of their own after they wear sweatpants because it was a violation of one of their rules. This scene conveyed the message that students should stay within their cliques’ ideals and that having different personal beliefs is unacceptable.

However, other examples of media offer an exception to these characterizations, such as in the movie “High School Musical,” where a jock falls for a nerd and they both end up auditioning for a musical together. This plot broke stereotypes by bringing individuals of different social groups together.

It is important to promote the creation of pieces of media such as these, as they act as examples for students to act in accordance to their own feelings rather than how others believe they should. Encouraging the embrace of individuality makes space for an expansion of interests past what society deems acceptable for a certain person to do. This will not only help enrich a teen’s personal growth but also promotes a more inclusive culture that values authenticity within the high school community.

Unfortunately, however, movies that feed into stereotypes are still extremely prevalent. According to theater performer Connor Engstrom, in certain films, these stereotypes may not be apparent, but can still be implicitly involved.

“I feel like, to an extent, Harry Potter did perpetuate stereotypes,” he said. “It’s like the jocks (are) the Quidditch team, and then other characters are nerds. I think it’s more tamped down in terms of stereotypes than (other) movies.”

These forms of media are also not as free in expression, according to Engstrom.

“I think other mediums of art are a lot more stringent with the rules that they apply in terms of who you can be and what you can do,” he said. “I think of movies and TV shows as being very restrictive of stereotypes. For instance, (in) “Modern Family,” you’re either a nerd or you’re popular.”

Even though these forms of media can have wholesome themes, many of these movies seem out of touch with present high school norms.

“I feel like the stereotypes are a thing of the past in most cases, or at least a thing of twenty years ago,” Engstrom said. “People are still cliquing up, and they’re hanging out with others who have similar interests to them. But I think those interests are more broadly spanning than before.”

Gunn also defies these long-standing stereotypes with a culture that applauds individuals for striving for intelligence rather than popularity. This value breaks the stereotype that prioritizing academics automatically means that being unathletic and a target for bullies.

“Gunn is a really special place,” Lo said. “I have worked at three different schools, and Gunn is the one that bucks stereotypes the most, mostly because it is extremely cool to be intelligent here. Everyone here is being pushed towards wanting to go to an elite college, and so the stereotypes don’t really fit here.”

Gunn students participating in a diverse amount of extracurriculars also decreases the hostility that some characters feel in high school movies when attempting to cross their group’s boundaries into another: The feeling of belonging to more than one group is not frowned upon, perhaps even normalized at Gunn.

The perpetuation of stereotypes can play a role in forms of media besides on-screen entertainment. Although many stereotypes may stem from plays and other theater productions, theater offers a way to defy these stereotypes. The ability to do other activities, like sports, while also being in drama, is a direct contradiction to the portrayal of only being able to do one at a time.

“I don’t think my basketball teammates think any less of me because I do theater,” Engstrom said. “They’ve seemed relatively supportive and have asked interesting questions, like ‘What do you do during rehearsal?’, which is indicative of a good school space in my opinion.”

To break out of this representation of high school as an exclusive landscape where each person is automatically sorted into a group that is completely polarized from another, literature and media creators should seek to catch up to the current high school culture. Staying in the past creates a division between teens’ perceptions in media and their true identities.

Sea bathing began to rise in popularity in the 1700s. Women typically wore loose bathing gowns, while men either wore boxers or, occasionally, swam in the nude. It was deemed unseemly for women to immerse themselves completely in the water, and in order to prevent the bottoms of their gowns from floating up, they were weighed down at the hemline with lead. As the popularity of swimming grew in the 1800s, women’s swimwear grew even more restrictive, especially in England. The Victorian Era had a strong influence and conservative rules on women’s clothing, especially bathing suits. In order to adhere to the restrictions on what to wear, the typical swimwear for a woman consisted of a lightweight and light-colored dress, drawers and stockings. Together, these clothing items ensured that most skin remained covered. The whole outfit was made of absorbent materials such as wool or cotton, and when they were saturated with water, any sort of physical exertion was very difficult.

Around this same time, due to the recent ban on nude swimming in England, men’s swimwear consisted of boxers. As the 1800s progressed, however, the “prison-striped” mens swimsuit grew in popularity, which covered both the upper and lower body. Also in the mid to late 1800s, the United States, which was less impacted by Victorian values than England was, developed a one-piece swimsuit known as the Princess Suit. This suit consisted of a calf-length skirt attached to a blouse, along with trousers underneath the skirt. Although the Princess Suit was still impractical, as if allowing minimal arm movement and was still made of absorbent materials, it was a small step away from the complex swimming outfits popular in the Victorian era.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, swimming became more recognized as a sport, and in 1896, men’s swimming was added to the Olympics. Although this new interpretation of swimming required swimsuits to be more hydrodynamic and less absorbent, swimwear remained restricted for both men and women. There still remained concerns about the modesty of women wearing the swimsuit, however, as the fabric behaved in unpredictable ways when wet. By the 1930s, though, most competitors, both women and men, wore one-piece swimsuits that exposed the arms and legs. These one-piece swimsuits remained the norm until 1946.

One of the most ground-breaking developments in swimwear was the invention of the bikini in the 1940s. It was a huge change from the full-coverage standards that had previously been prevalent dominated women’s swimwear.

Another swimsuit known was the athletic swimsuit made by swimwear brand Speedo. Speedo unveiled their first nylon men’s swimming shorts at the 1956 Olympics, and this new material’s elasticity and hydrodynamic properties made it revolutionary. Soon, women’s swimwear utilized the same technology.

By the 1970s, Speedo had found a combination of elastane and nylon that significantly improved swimsuit performance. The 2000s has brought with it more developments in both the leisure and athletic swimsuits. In 2008, Speedo unveiled the world’s fastest swimsuit, the LZR Racer, which led to such high athletic performance that regulations had to be put in place to limit the length of swimsuit. These modern swimsuit regulations starkly contrast the coverage-based regulations of previous centuries. While more swimsuits are being created all the time, one wonders what other expectations around swimsuits are soon to be rewritten.