The first two alarms were set off by some kind of smoke — potentially from foods like popcorn that have activated the sensors in the past — while the cause of the third alarm remains unknown. According to Assistant Principal of Safety Dr. Mycal Hixon, the new fire panel — which was installed over the summer to provide a safety upgrade to the previous out-of-date system — is being investigated as the potential cause.

“We’re trying to work with the fire department to see if this is either a faulty alarm, a box that’s going off or if there was an actual pull,” he said. “Unlike the other days, we weren’t able to identify smoke (on Thursday), so we’re really trying to figure it out.”

These interruptions, even with the adjusted bell schedule accommodations on Thursday, impacted both student agenda and instruction time. According to history teacher Laurel Howard, she’s had to adapt to the incident in order to ensure her periods learn the same amount of content at the same time.

“(The fire alarms are) impacting my class periods in different ways,” she said. “If I’m trying to keep my classes on track with each other and one has a 20-minute evacuation, then I have to make adjustments so (the delayed class) doesn’t fall too far behind.”

Although a definitive reason for the three alarms this week is still under investigation, administration is considering whether they may be due to a potential smoking problem on campus. Hixon explained that possible administration responses may include increased student resources, increased campus security and utilizing camera footage.

“We want to make sure that we can accurately identify what the problem is so we can accurately work together collaboratively to come up with solutions,” he said. “If it’s going off because somebody’s intentionally smoking in the bathroom, that’s one thing. If there’s somebody actually doing something, we want to find what support we can provide them to help them understand that (it) is not okay.”

For English teacher Diane Ichikawa, the ambiguity of the faulty fire alarms’ has added to the confusion that undermines the trustworthiness of the campus’s safety systems.

“Because we get so many (fire alarms) that end up being either false or people perceive them to be false, they don’t take an actual emergency (seriously),” she said. “It’s kind of a ‘boy-cried-wolf’ situation.”

In response to the lack of information available, Hixon highlighted the administration’s efforts to rectify these issues.

“We will work with the company that installed the fire alarms to ensure we are trained on everything it does and why,” he wrote in an email. “We will also be more alert to our surroundings, making sure that if we see something, we say something so that we can safely get things taken care of. We will also be getting an updated security camera system.”

However, despite the disturbances these fire alarms have caused, Science Instructional Lead Dr. Heather Mellows emphasized the importance of taking evacuation seriously.

“(Evacuating) is still important because we don’t know which alarms are real,” Mellows said. “And as a science teacher, I know that sometimes the fire alarm is because of what happens in my room, and I need it to be real when that happens.”

Currently, the evacuation drill scheduled for Thursday, August 29 will continue as planned.

“I am sure students have done a great job, but just in case, there are still a few things that we need to work on and (the drill) gives us that opportunity to do it,” Hixon said.

—Written by Kaylee Cheng, Anne Dong, Sylvie Nguyen and Ya-An Xue. Additional reporting by Gwen Domine.

Asian American Literature, a semesterlong English elective offered for juniors and seniors after successful completion of English 9 or 9A and English 10 or 10A, will focus on Asian American experiences ranging from immigration to discrimination. English teacher Diane Ichikawa, who proposed and is leading the implementation of Asian American Literature, says that the English department lacks books about Asian Americans, although Gunn’s student population is 46.4% Asian, according to the Gunn 2023-24 school profile.

“We don’t really treat Asians as people of color on this campus, so I think it’s important that we see that Asians actually are people of color,” she said. “We need to find a space for those discussions, and this could be a class where you could have those conversations.”

The curriculum will draw from texts such as Thi Bui’s memoir “The Best We Could Do” and essays from Eric Liu’s “The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker.” Students will practice writing memoirs and understanding the use of figurative language in non-English languages.

Sophomore Joyce Wong, who is interested in taking Asian American Literature, considers it an opportunity to gain insight into issues that Asian Americans face.

“Reading literature written by Asian Americans (can) offer a really refreshing perspective on controversial or historical events,” she said.

In addition to Asian American Literature, Gunn will also be offering AP Physics 2, a yearlong algebra-based physics course for juniors and seniors who have successfully completed AP Physics 1. The course provides a nonvisual approach to electricity and magnetism, in contrast to its mechanics-focused prerequisite, AP Physics 1.

According to physics teacher Christina Norberg, the science department decided to add the course for students who wish to continue learning physics after AP Physics 1, but may not want the rapid pace of calculus-based AP Physics C. The yearlong mechanics course will no longer be offered, but students can still take AP Physics C: Mechanics and AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism as semesterlong classes.

The curriculum, based on the College Board’s AP Physics 2 Unit Guides, features units on thermodynamics, electricity, geometric optics and atomic physics, which are not covered in AP Physics C: E & M. According to Norberg, students will use skills such as scientific argumentation, collection of evidence and experimental design to build a mathematically rigorous perspective.

“When you talk about electricity and magnetism, a lot of those different topics you need to be able to model effectively in a way that you can’t actually see,” Norberg said.

Junior Daniel Zhang, who is currently in AP Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism, is considering taking AP Physics 2 next year.

“I’m thinking of taking AP Physics 2 because it covers the sound unit, which seems really interesting,” he said.

With the addition of AP Physics 2, Gunn will now offer all of the College Board’s AP Physics courses. Students who are in or have taken regular, college-preparatory physics may take AP Physics 2 with approval from the science department.

Asian American Literature and AP Physics 2 will only run if there is enough enrollment. Students can learn more about these courses by reading the 2024-25 course catalog or contacting Ichikawa or Norberg.

Asian American Lit Books

• Thi Bui’s “The Best We Could Do”
• Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko”
• Kathryn Ma’s “The Chinese Groove”
• Eric Liu’s “The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker”

AP Physics 2 Topics

• Fluids
• Thermodynamics
• Electric forces
• Electric circuits
• Magnetism and electromagnetic induction
• Geometric and physical optics
• Quantum physics

The Board elected current Vice President Jesse Ladomirak as Board president and current Board member Shana Segal as vice president for next year, as per the Board’s rotating-leadership system. In this system, the vice president becomes president the following year, and the member elected to the Board earliest becomes the new vice president. If two candidates were elected in the same year, the candidate with the larger share of the vote when elected becomes vice president. The Board president’s job is to create the meeting agendas with the Superintendent and the vice president, look over Board-approved committee assignments and talk to attorneys and the media. 

Following the election, Addison Elementary School Principal Jeffrey Downing presented an update on its PAUSD Promise equity goals, including developing better student-centered supports. In order to create an environment that better meets each student’s needs, Addison plans to conduct reading and math interventions and develop monthly life skills and Zones of Regulation, among other measures. 

“Zones of Regulation helps students develop language to describe feelings that they may have,” Downing said. “Naming these feelings and having strategies about how to deal with them helps students learn to self-regulate and minimize behavioral outburst.” 

These life skills will be featured on posters in every classroom and discussed in school assemblies, according to Downing. December’s life skill was generosity. 

The Board also approved two new high school courses for next year: Asian American Literature, proposed by Gunn English teacher Diane Ichikawa, and Advanced Placement Physics 2, proposed by Gunn Science Instructional Lead Laurie Pennington. With the addition of AP Physics 2, Gunn students will now have access to all available AP Physics courses. 

During the discussion, Board President Jesse Ladomirak noted that a lack of advanced humanities classes could compel students to take STEM courses that they don’t enjoy. 

“The reality is all of our students, not just the ones who thrive in STEM, are under an enormous amount of pressure to pack their high school transcripts with AP and honors courses in order to look good on college applications,” she said. “An unintended impact of that imbalance is that many students who enjoy and feel more confident in humanities classes can feel like they have no option but to forgo those classes and instead take more math and science because that’s where the AP and the honors courses are.”

Finally, during Open Forum, Jewish students and parents expressed concerns about antisemitism and exclusion or misrepresentation of Jewish experiences in the soon-to-be-required ethnic studies course. Two PAUSD students, including Paly sophomore Ella Segev, shared their personal experiences.  

“It was only three weeks after Oct. 7,” she said. “I was walking out of my class and some kid came up to me and said to my face ‘F the Jews, free Palestine.’ For the rest of that day, I was in utter shock that an incident like the ones I’ve seen on the news had personally happened to me. I have faced firsthand antisemitism for the first time in my life here at Paly.” 

Parents suggested adapting the ethnic studies course to include more Jewish-American history and urged the Board to give them a more active role in shaping the curriculum. PAUSD parent Linor Levav hopes to work with the Board to find a solution. 

“Along with others in our community, we are committed to working with the Board and administration to ensure the Jews are represented accurately and respected in our classrooms,” she said during the meeting.

The next school-board meeting will be on Jan. 16, 2024.

The year she was hired, Ichikawa said around 30 new staff members were brought on. The next year, another 30 were hired, Lyons included. “Most of us were of the same age, so many of us bonded very quickly.” Ichikawa said. “About half of the current teaching staff were hired within those first two years of my career, and my friendships with those people are pretty tight.”

Lyons attributes the camaraderie between the two in part to the layouts of the classrooms at the time. “When I first got here, the English department and social studies department were in the same building, and we shared offices, so everybody knew each other pretty well,” he said. “Back then, we were all pretty young, so we would socialize on the weekends—people would sometimes go out to get dinner or to bars.”

As time has passed, weekend get-togethers have taken more planning. “Things have definitely changed a lot—people get older and get married and have kids, like myself.” Lyons said. The departments of social studies and English have since been separated, with the English department moving to the N-building and social studies to the F- and C-buildings. “I try to make a point to leave my classroom and walk around the school to visit their classrooms and say ‘hi,’” Lyons said.

Ichikawa and Lyons both grew up in the Bay Area and share a mutual friend group. The two teachers are also UCLA alumni and enjoy catching up on updates from their alma mater, such as the college’s qualification for the NCAA Sweet 16 during March Madness. “Sadly, UCLA lost by three points last night,” Ichikawa said.

The two also share similar personality traits. “He’s kind of a quieter person, an introvert, and I am too, so I think some of the times when we don’t talk in big groups, people tend to think: ‘oh well they’re snobby,’ and I think maybe he and I had the same reputation,” she said.

Over his years in the district, Lyons has witnessed numerous changes, including in administration. “Everyone comes in with a new vision for what they want changed,” he said. The continuity of Lyons and Ichikawa’s friendship is something he’s especially appreciative of, given both teachers’ long history with the school. “It’s nice to know people who have an institutional memory of this place: the way it used to be and of how it’s changed over time,” he said.

Lyons also admires Ichikawa’s professional approach and her intelligence, while Ichikawa appreciates the deep conversations that she can share with him, characterizing Lyons as a fount of knowledge. She also thinks he is warmer than most may think. “He’s also a really loving father, and it’s fun to see him with his kids,” she said. “He’s funny and can really make you laugh. He’s also a decent dancer when it comes to ’80s music. If you throw on some OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark), he might start busting some moves. He gets a reputation for being really harsh—after all, his last name is Lyons—but I think he’s way more of a kitten than people realize.”

Lyons and Ichikawa continue to set aside time to spend with each other, maintaining their friendship through hikes in their free time or just spending time together when available. “We do set aside time to go out to lunch together, if we ever have common preps,” Ichikawa said. Both teachers look forward to their friendship in the future, especially after retirement. “It can only get better as we get older and have more time in our lives,” Ichikawa said.

The artificial intelligence chatbot developed by the startup OpenAI was originally launched as a prototype in November 2022. Since its official release in February, its popularity has skyrocketed. ChatGPT’s ability to output detailed responses to almost any question has made it appealing to some students as a completely automated homework-completing machine.

The Gunn student handbook defines what does and does not count as academic dishonesty: “Allowing others to complete your course work or to take your quiz, test and exams is considered cheating and could result in a review by your teacher followed by consequences.” English teacher Diane Ichikawa believes that using ChatGPT to complete school assignments violates that honor code. “I showed my freshmen a story where a man bought a painting from an artist, and then interviewed the artist saying that ‘I bought this under the idea that you had painted it, but it turns out it was AI.’ And the artist said, ‘Well, but I put the prompt in for the AI,’” she said. “All the students laughed at it, and I said, ‘If you put the prompt in for an essay, and it spits out an essay, did you write it?’ I think it’s clear to students that it’s not actually their own work—we all know that it’s a shortcut.”

Computer science teacher Joshua Paley compared students using ChatGPT to do schoolwork with the online school experience of the 2020-2021 school year. “During the pandemic, students didn’t have ChatGPT, but they did have Discord,” he said. “So imagine you’re a teacher and you’re giving a test during the pandemic. How long do you figure it will take for the test to be visible by all students on Discord and for them to be chatting about it?”

English teacher Justin Brown is still considering what to do about the rise of ChatGPT usage among students. “Right now we’re just in the stage of trying to get to know the technology and what it can and can’t do, as well as worrying about how much we should really change what we currently do,” he said. “The important thing we’re trying to figure out is how we can use (ChatGPT) to enhance what we do rather than have it be an obstacle that’s a problem for us.”

Ichikawa has done several activities with her students involving ChatGPT, with the goal of demonstrating the gap between human- and machine-generated work. “I had students write about ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ for about 20 minutes,” she said. “Then I had them plug the same prompt into ChatGPT. We compared the two responses and saw quality and depth differences.” Ichikawa did another activity with her freshmen students to highlight faults in the AI. “My freshmen plugged in some poetry prompts, and even with very specific prompting to not rhyme or meter the lines, it still continued to rhyme and meter everything, so they could see some of its limitations,” she said.

Although faults do exist with the software, junior Om Mahesh believes that ChatGPT can be a useful tool for students with specific questions. “If you’re trying to search for something like a synonym for some word, ChatGPT is pretty good at that,” he said. “I think it’s just a better way of Googling.”

That being said, Mahesh understands that ChatGPT is far from all-knowing and struggles to be helpful in many cases regarding schoolwork. “There was one time when I tried to ask a math question like, ‘What is the prime factorization of one?’ and it gave me a wrong answer,” he said. “ChatGPT is just really bad at math. If you try to do five-digit addition with it, it just can’t.”

Ichikawa agrees that the technology can be helpful for students when used with caution. “The ability to ask (ChatGPT) for prompts, like ‘What should I write about?’ or (when) it’s used as a brainstorming generative tool could be helpful,” she said.

Others, such as freshman Meilin Hansen, believe that using ChatGPT for schoolwork causes more harm than good. “If you’re relying on it to do your homework, then that’s a very strong dependence on a computer that you can teach two plus two is five,” she said.

Still, she expects many students to attempt to be academically dishonest on assignments by using ChatGPT to complete them. “I anticipate students using this to cheat on all sorts of things,” Hansen said. “I’ve had to resist strong temptation to not.” Mahesh echoed her thoughts. “Cheating on essays is definitely spreading and becoming more and more common,” he said.

Despite the potential for academic dishonesty, Paley doesn’t plan on adjusting his classroom routine to accommodate for the existence of ChatGPT. “At the end of the day, if you use ChatGPT to do the programs in my class, fine,” he said. “Have fun on the tests that are on paper.”

Paley also believes that, like him, other teachers won’t make any drastic changes to their classes to prevent academic dishonesty stemming from ChatGPT. “I don’t think that there are many teachers out there who are interested in policing ChatGPT,” he said. “Nobody wants to deal with that, and I know I don’t want to deal with that.”

ChatGPT’s computational power, precision and accuracy can only grow over time as its developers continue to improve it. Ichikawa accepts that academic dishonesty from ChatGPT and similar applications will be an ongoing issue for many years to come. “It’s only going to get better and more sophisticated, so I don’t think that we should bang our heads against the wall trying to stop it,” she said. “There should be ways that we can try to work with it. I don’t know what they are just yet.”

Regardless of whether or not overarching Gunn policies or individual classroom policies change as a result of ChatGPT, its existence will most likely be permanent. While Paley doesn’t see himself enforcing policies regarding AI in his classes at all, he still advises awareness of the issue. “The important thing to understand is that ChatGPT isn’t going to go away,” he said. “That’s the world we’re all stuck in.”

So wrote school board election candidate Ingrid Campos of  “Stamped, Antiracism and You,” a book by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds discussing the racist principles and institutions embedded in America’s history and present-day institutions. In the same post on her website, titled “When has Scholastic Books become deviant publishers?” she denounced Scholastic Books for promoting a “deviant lifestyle” by including LGBTQ+ perspectives in literature for students.

Backed by the Silicon Valley Association of Republican Women, whose president started an effort to recruit members to run for November’s school board elections, Campos ran upon a platform of “traditional family values,” advocating for the end of what she perceived as critical race theory teaching in Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) schools and for the removal of texts with LGBTQ+ characters and themes from school bookshelves. (Critical race theory, as defined by Encyclopedia Britannica, is an organized framework of analysis based on the ideas that race is a social construct and that racism is inherent in American institutions. It is generally affiliated with higher education.)

Although Campos didn’t win the election, she did garner 9.5% of the vote, providing a local example of a nationwide trend with her increased focus on race and gender in school curricula: Fewer than two weeks after PAUSD’s school board elections, the Keller Independent School District in Texas elected to ban books introducing the concept of gender fluidity from school libraries. Moreover, in January of this year, the Florida Department of Education sought to block College Board’s new Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies class from Florida schools on the grounds that the course was contrary to Florida law and lacked educational value—officials took issue with topics like intersectionality and reparations.

Conversely, people have also tried to remove works that could potentially offend historically underrepresented groups. In late 2020, the Burbank Unified School District removed five novels from its curriculum list, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” due to concerns about racist language and depictions. This year at Hamline University, adjunct professor Erika López lost her job for showing an image of the Prophet Muhammad, though she had taken multiple precautions before doing so—officials deemed her action Islamophobic.

It is clear from examples like these that discussions of minority groups and narratives in curricula have become increasingly politicized, and Campos’ campaign demonstrates that Gunn is not far removed from the issue. Further investigation into Gunn’s history and its current approaches to race and gender in curricula is therefore necessary in order to trace the roots of our current culture wars; in looking at how attitudes have shifted over the decades, we can better understand our current paradigm and predict what the future might hold.

The turbulence of the 1960s

When Gunn opened as a three-year high school in 1964, it had only two years’ worth of students. With a small school and the freedom of a fresh start, the English and history departments worked together to create a coordinated curriculum. According to retired English teacher Karen Myers, who taught at Gunn beginning in 1964, students all took the same humanities classes in any given year—all students would take American history and literature in one year, for example, and rotate to the next pair of classes the following year. “The intention was to integrate other arts—music, movies, theater—to make it a humanities curriculum,” Myers said. “That was the most exciting curriculum Gunn has ever had.”

The curriculum of this era was shaped by the social upheaval of the time, including the civil rights and antiwar movements. “(The administrators) very much wanted us to reflect the changes of the ’60s, which were monumental,” Myers said. “I graduated high school in the ’50s, and our curriculum did not include anything about peaceful protest, which happened in the ’60s, or about gender issues or about racial issues. I grew up in Oregon, and I didn’t know about the Japanese internment camps that were happening in my own state. (In 1964), we felt we were cutting-edge.”

According to Myers, education on these social issues was accomplished through inquiry-based learning, which gave students the freedom to research the issues they were interested in. While there was no specific scaffolding for social justice within the curriculum, students could choose to pursue it as a topic of study. 

As teachers shaped this new curriculum, Myers noted that parents had a hands-off approach to their children’s education, contrasting sharply with today. “It’s really interesting to me that when we got to plan the curriculum in ‘64 in preparation for the year ’64-’65, the community basically turned that job over to the professionals,” she said. “Parents and politics have a lot more influence now than they did then.”

As the 1960s went on, efforts to reshape curriculum moved alongside those to racially integrate PAUSD’s high schools. On May 20, 1968, PAUSD Superintendent Harold Santee drafted a proposal for a multicultural education program which aimed to provide “a range of opportunities at all levels to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary for (students) to develop those attitudes essential for the building of a truly free and open society for all people.” The program involved adding new instructional units and courses, acquiring new instructional materials and allowing for increased interaction between PAUSD students and those in the “larger community.” 

As in the present day, this proposal to alter the curriculum generated a fair amount of discussion. According to board documents from May 20, 1968, Julie Stoneburner wrote a letter on behalf of the Ohlone School Parent Teacher Association Board in support of the program, noting that children needed an education preparing them to live as members of a multicultural world. On the other hand, former teacher then acting as a substitute at Palo Alto High School (Paly) Louise Champion said she hoped “that Anglo-Saxon values would also remain in the schools—that it must be a two-way street.”

Still, a push to diversify the curriculum was clear, as evidenced by several messages from community members to the board regarding representation of minorities in curriculum. Records from the meeting note that Robert King, then a junior at Gunn High School, felt that he “found it hard to identify as an American” in the elementary schools in the district, given that “there was no mention of any Negro in the history books and one somehow gathered the impression that the Negro had been here all these years just sitting around and not doing anything.” 

The diversification of the 1970s

In 1975, in order to save money for the district, Gunn—along with Paly and Cubberley—became a four-year high school. From an administrative standpoint, this change meant shifting the curriculum to encompass a whole new year’s worth of learning. Although it is difficult to say whether this change definitively diversified the curriculum, it is likely that with an added year of instruction, more room would be available for students to learn about different groups or to take elective courses on different groups. According to an article from a 1976 issue of The Oracle, students had even suggested the addition of an ethnic studies class by this time.

More formative to the curriculum’s development, though, was increased attention to the growing diversity of the student body. An emphasis was placed on helping limited- to non-English-speaking students succeed in schools, partially in response to a series of state laws regarding bilingual education (including California law AB 1329 of 1976, which mandated that students unfamiliar with the English language receive instruction in a language they were familiar with, and that the district provide them with equal educational opportunities).

According to Myers, teachers shifted their approach in the classroom to accommodate a wide assortment of needs and learning abilities; they attempted to find texts and activities that would better reflect the needs of a more cosmopolitan student population. “(There was a focus on) designing alternatives for coursework that met the needs of people who couldn’t be just straight down the middle, with (that) slightly old-fashioned approach to education,” she said. 

Expanding the debate: the 1980s

The ’80s, characterized as a decade of increased conservatism nationwide, actually showed a continued commitment toward including minority voices in the curriculum at Gunn. Myers, upon her return to Gunn after a decade-long hiatus, marked the efforts of the English department to make the texts used in English better represent Gunn’s student population.“I remember (during) most of the ’80s—at least, the mid ’80s—in the English department, (we were) searching for reading materials that met the cultures of the people we that were in Gunn then,” she said. “The ’80s was a much more global approach to the whole world—(the approach) to immigration, California, especially, it had just changed quite a bit from 20 years earlier when I started teaching.” 

In pursuit of better representation, the late ’80s saw the addition of several new books to the curriculum, including “The Joy Luck Club,” “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” “‘Master Harold’…and the boys” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” English Instructional Lead Paul Dunlap, who began working at Gunn in the ’90s, was pleased to see the improvements but worked to add yet more underrepresented voices to the curriculum. “I joined a group of mostly women teachers, and we created a women writers elective,” he said. “But even then, we knew that there was a flaw in that thinking: If you have to have a course of just women writers, you’re probably not having enough women writers throughout all the (core) classes.”

Such progress wasn’t necessarily seen in the history department. In the late ’80s, the current social studies course progression came into existence—one year of World History, a semester each of Contemporary World History and U.S. Government for sophomores, a year of U.S. history for juniors and a semester of economics (plus one social studies elective) for seniors. This change created fewer elective slots for students, decreasing their ability to explore new narratives—electives such as Far East History and Sociology were rendered obsolete. Moreover, the Social Studies Department Supervisor at the time, John Attig, saw the new framework as favoring textbook learning over “learning by doing and primary sources,” according to a 1986 issue of The Oracle. 

Conservative attitudes nationwide also informed student concerns at Gunn. A 1982 The Oracle article by Geoff Minter titled “Educational white-washing” noted the continued reliance on a “perfect America” narrative, especially at the elementary and junior high school levels. “Elementary and junior high school teachers seldom have students do reports on the unpleasant sides of America: racism, sexism, poverty, crime, the Vietnam War, the 3/5 of a Man Clause in the Constitution, the fact that women on average earn 59¢ to every dollar a man makes and so on,” he wrote. “Even some states, including the heavily populated Texas, have started to pass laws which will eventually leave only the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ series available in school libraries for students to read.”

This clash of ideals and values was also central to Stanford University’s Western Culture debate, which erupted in 1988. The argument was centered around a proposal to drop fifteen required texts—all Western classic works—from the curriculum, abandoning the core list in favor of greater flexibility and the option to include voices of women and minorities. This decision garnered backlash, most notably from United States (U.S.) Secretary of Education William Bennett, who criticized the proposal, according to a Los Angeles Times article from 1988. “They are moving confidently and swiftly into the late 1960’s, and why anybody would want to do that intentionally I don’t know,” he said. 

The debate, recognized nationwide, rocked the boat of its local school district, if only through prompting students to reconsider their own curriculum. The debate around Western Culture and its ensuing curriculum changes made their way onto the front page of The Oracle in 1991, marking the seeds of culture wars in decades to come. 

An era of new and old: the 1990s and early 2000s

The ’90s and early 2000s saw the rise of a new interdisciplinary program at Gunn: American Studies. According to retired social studies teacher and former American Studies teacher Lynne Navarro, the program was begun by teachers Elizabeth Darby and Suzanne Aldridge in order to teach American literature and American history side by side—a callback to the humanities blocking system of the 1960s. “They just really felt like those two subjects, American literature and American history, taught together work really well,” she said. “For example, while you’re reading ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in your English class, if you’re studying the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl at the same time, both of them make more sense.”

The program, which ran every other year because of the nature of the English curriculum, wasn’t designed to be a social justice course. Even so, there was more room for different narratives because of the interdisciplinary approach, according to English teacher and former American Studies teacher Diane Ichikawa. “It did have much more of a social lens to things for the history portion of it,” she said. “We didn’t look at (the history) in terms of dates—whereas in Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH), you definitely have to memorize dates and a lot of different facts. Of course, we get facts in there, but it’s more about ‘What were the social aspects (of) the time in America, starting from Reconstruction and (moving) forward?’”

Still, teachers encountered some backlash. Navarro recalled one of the aspects of the program that didn’t sit well with some students. “When we first added a unit on women’s history in our American studies class, we got some pushback from students,” she said. “(There was criticism) especially from young boys saying, ‘Why do we have to study this?’ (I said,) ‘Well, look at the rest of history. Look at the rest of what you’re studying—where are the women?’”

While the American Studies program continued throughout the ’90s and into the 2000s, it was eventually discontinued. Scheduling issues, as well as student interest, played a role—some students shied away from the program because it would mean losing the opportunity to take APUSH. While the Social Justice Pathway later incorporated a smidge of American Studies’ interdisciplinary nature through pairing research with history, and interdisciplinary electives such as Women’s History have run intermittently, no such alignment of English and history classes has consistently existed at Gunn since.

Nevertheless, initiatives like American Studies did little to change the fundamental Eurocentrism of the core curriculum. Social studies teacher Laurel Howard, who graduated from Gunn in 2011, noted that most of her work in her freshman year World History course was textbook-based, and that the textbook in question hardly expanded the traditional Western narrative. “It (told) a straightforward story of ‘We went from the Renaissance through the Scientific Revolution and then the Enlightenment, and then we had the French Revolution. Then we had imperialism, and that was really bad, and the wars (were bad), and then things got better,’” she said. “I don’t have a strong memory of learning about anything that happened outside of Europe my freshman year, other than if it was relevant to Europe.”

Howard also noted that the attitude toward the textbook as a source shaped how students thought about diversity in the course. “When we watched movies, when we read the textbook, it wasn’t presented as ‘Here are a bunch of different sources, and you’re going to wrestle with them and figure out what you think happened,’” she said. ‘It was more (like), ‘Here’s the history.’ So we read it with a different lens, and that meant it was also a little bit less representative.” 

Growing political tension: the 2010s

In 2013, the English curriculum underwent a major reshaping. Teachers added a number of texts and renamed courses to “acknowledge and honor the diversity of the Gunn community and to provide students with effective choices,” according to school board documents detailing the change. This was the last time alterations were made to the English curriculum at a district level. Among the texts added to the curriculum were “The Kite Runner,” “In the Time of the Butterflies” and “Bless Me, Ultima.”

While most English courses retained their main characteristics, including their names and themes, the 11th- and 12th-grade courses English Masters Honors and British Literature became World Classics Honors and World Literature, respectively. This marked a shift away from the Eurocentric curriculum of the past decades. While a Shakespeare play remained a required text in both courses, books from women and people of color figured into the curriculum much more strongly than in previous years. 

Still, as the 2010s continued, the issue of race in curriculum became increasingly controversial, a shift Howard observed as she began work at Gunn.  “(The issue) was something that really started to come up around the 2016 election, in my recollection, and we’ve had to have endless conversations about it,” she said. “When is it a viewpoint (where) there are reasonable people who could think about it differently? And when is it a viewpoint that is (harming) some of my most vulnerable students?”

Current policies, initiatives in the English department

Increased flexibility has been key to diversifying the curriculum in the past few years in English classes. In the English department, the pandemic played a major role in shaping a new approach to the curriculum. During this time, review of the English curriculum at a departmental and school level intensified in response both to the reenergized Black Lives Matter movement and the demands of remote teaching and learning, according to Dunlap. “In 2020, when it was shelter-in-place, everyone was at home and school was crazy, with George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we thought, ‘Let’s go ahead and take advantage of this and try everything we can because things are not working,’” he said. “From that point on, people have felt more freedom to try different titles and to try to be a little bit more inclusive and try things like ‘The Poet X.’ I think we’re happy with that. We don’t have the standard (list of what everyone should read), but I think we’re doing a lot more to think about how we can celebrate different voices in literature.” 

Although this diversity allows teachers greater flexibility in adding to the curriculum, it also means that students’ exposure to different narratives can vary depending on which teachers they have. Some teachers might be more inclined to pilot new texts and authors, while others might prefer to stick closer to traditional, “canonical” texts, according to English teacher Virginia Moyer. 

This seems to be true—student experiences vary from teacher to teacher and from course to course. Senior Jayni Ram noted that while her courses in most years included few women or authors of color, her junior year proved to be different. “I think in most of my classes it has definitely been white authors and male authors,” she said. “But then last year in (English teacher Shaina) Holdener’s class, she had us read ‘Things Fall Apart’ and (‘Like Water for Chocolate’).”

Junior Vivien Chen’s experience followed a similar trend. “I think in ninth grade and 10th grade, it’s more traditional English curriculum, like Shakespeare and ‘Lord of the Flies,’ (though) I think they do a good job of incorporating books that are from all places (and are) diverse,” she said. “In the class I’m taking right now, American Classics, they focus a lot more on American culture and diversity.”

According to Dunlap, the goal is to include texts students would be able to see themselves in and those that would require empathy to immerse themselves in. “The balance is what we call window texts and mirror texts,” he said. “A window (text is one) you look through and you learn about somebody else’s world. A mirror (text is one) you look at and you see yourself. Too much of one or the other is not the balance that we’re looking for.”

Maintaining such a balance can be difficult, and this quandary is akin to that of the Western Culture debate—teachers must weigh the merits of classics against those of newer texts. Howard described this trade-off between window and mirror texts in her experience as a Gunn student. “I’m glad I read those classics (in English class) because they helped me out a lot—as a history person, I recognize references, and I have a frame of reference for that world,” she said. “(The classics) prepared me for living in academia, but didn’t necessarily help me see and understand the world I lived in at that moment.”

Ichikawa noted that this issue—finding a balance of classics and fresh voices—has only been compounded by the post-pandemic bell schedule. Because classes are meeting fewer times per week, reading can be assigned fewer times per week, and it takes longer to get through each book—limiting the number of texts per semester overall. 

Not only that, but it’s often difficult for teachers to truly be able to experiment with new electives or texts. Support fluctuates with administrators and funding, and it’s often difficult to get new courses or books approved. Teachers often have to jump through hoops to acquire the resources they need, according to English teacher Terence Kitada. “It’s funny, because I think the money exists in many places, but it’s just a matter of, ‘Who should pay for this?’” he said. “I’ve heard from several teachers in the department as they try to get new books to pilot that it’s been a very big nightmare.”

Overall, however, most teachers and students agree that there’s room for more narratives. Senior Tra Nguyen advocated for greater inclusion of Asian American voices. “I think I would’ve liked to see more Asian American literature (in my English classes at Gunn) because I don’t think I’ve really encountered that at all, which is a little disappointing,” she said.

Still, there’s a fine line between uplifting underrepresented voices and tokenization—something Kitada emphasized. He also noted that teachers must focus on the types of narratives from minorities they bring in. “If you bring in stories that are by African American authors, but the stories (only) deal with trauma or gun violence and a whole bunch of students read that, it’s just reinforcing those stereotypes of ‘Oh, this is the Black American experience,’ and  I don’t want students to feel like that that is the case,” he said. “As a student, I always hated it. I read one book about Asians in high school when I was in high school 20 years ago, and it was about Chinese Americans working on the railroad. It was (about) things like Chinese foot binding. (I remember) reading this and (thinking) ‘Oh, this is weird.’ And I was the one Asian kid just feeling, ‘Oh my gosh, this is not my culture. This is not right.’” 

Current policies, initiatives in the history department

Although core texts might not be as central to curricular development in the history department, given that textbooks aren’t used heavily in most courses, it certainly makes up part of the issue. According to Howard, the very nature of high school textbooks is flawed: Many are ghostwritten and don’t have footnotes, making it difficult to assess their sources, and their presentation of history can also be problematic. “(Some textbooks) present history as if it’s all solved and done, and we understand it all, because that’s just not (true)—history is this vibrant, dynamic, interesting field,” she said. Howard added that ideally, she’d have students learn mostly from secondary and primary sources.

Because textbooks often prove insufficient for instruction, the onus of providing diverse supplementary materials is often left on the teachers, again providing for variation across classes and courses—an issue Gunn graduate Thomas Li pointed out in his 2020-2021 Advanced Authentic Research project on Indigenous representation in PAUSD K-12 social studies curricula. “Much of the effort to bring in more Indigenous stories is supplementary to the main curriculum, so there could easily be inconsistencies across the school district where some teachers do not highlight Indigenous Peoples to the same extent as our interviewed teachers,” he wrote. “The lack of higher-level direction or professional development for teachers to learn about Indigenous history could mean that teachers themselves are not fully aware of the complexities of Indigenous history.”

Another issue Li mentioned in his paper was that of the deficit narrative—one that defines a group of people solely by the problems they’ve had in the past or the oppression they’ve experienced. Li noted that just as it is important to learn about the horrors of imperialism and slavery, so too is it important to learn about those who fought back.

Similarly, when learning about non-Western cultures, students have found that these groups are only explored in relation to the West, according to Student Equity Committee Board of Student Leaders member junior Sofia Hussain. “Whenever we look at things, it’s through a Western lens—(so when we’re) learning about the Middle East or Asia, it’s ‘What did the British have to do with it?’” she said.

One method currently employed in the department to address these issues is weekly Professional Learning Community (PLC) meetings, as well as department meetings. According to Social Studies Instructional Lead Jeffrey Patrick, during PLCs, teachers from a certain course gather to discuss goals, objectives and supplementary materials, which aids in minimizing teacher-to-teacher variation. “There does tend to be a dominant narrative for history and people (teach) the narrative they are familiar (with),” he said. “Over time, as we’re having those discussions in our PLCs and in the department, people will get a chance to hear the counter narrative and think about ways to include that.”

Teachers have found creative ways to incorporate underrepresented groups into historical narratives. Howard uses warm-up activities as a way to incorporate primary sources featuring minority groups into otherwise textbook-heavy courses like APUSH. “A few years ago, I changed (my curriculum) so that every source you read during the American Revolution comes from a woman,” she said. “I’m not sure that students actually noticed that, but it is the kind of thing that I pat myself on the back for because you have to read between the lines to get those sources, but they’re out there, and they’re really fun to talk about.”

Those in the history department also occasionally use resources from the Stanford History Education Group, as well as Brown University’s curriculum from its Choices program, which provide supplements for history classes. 

In some United States History courses, teachers have begun to employ thematic teaching. Rather than going through the history in chronological units, teachers group together movements and trends across history into related categories, like “Movement of People” and “Culture.” According to Navarro, such an approach fosters a more open curriculum. “The thematic approach does make it a lot easier to include a lot of different voices,” she said. “You can have a whole civil rights unit where you’re looking at all of the different civil rights movements that have happened, whether you’re talking about African Americans or women or (the) LGBTQ (community). It’s easy to look at all of those things and do a lot of compare and contrast.”

However, students like Chen have found this method of teaching difficult to follow. “There is no chronology, just because each unit skips around and only has the events that are related to the unit theme,” she said. “You’re not really understanding how American history is progressing, but you get to understand these certain events that had an effect on the history.”

There are also opportunities for exploration through electives and other programs. The Social Justice Pathway, which began during the 2019-2020 school year, provides a three-year course of study for students particularly passionate about social justice, integrating present-day research alongside history. Ethnic Studies, currently an elective but slated to become a graduation requirement in 2029, also offers an opportunity for students to explore different narratives.

(Re)opening the political conversation

As Gunn steps into the year 2023, it appears as though race in curriculum will continue to make up at least some part of the political discussion (judging from November’s school board races alone). Although Campos didn’t win the election, her appeal to some in the community has been undeniable: More than a few comments in support of her views were left on articles during her campaign.

“I’m voting for Ingrid. Enough with PAUSD pushing CRT and gender ideology, queer theory, intersectionality, and not teaching reading, writing and math,” read a comment left on a Palo Alto Daily Post article on Campos.

“I’m for having a diversity of voices on the school board. I also want focus on growth and achievement in reading, writing, arithmetics. This state is currently dumbing down, fast, in public education. I’ll vote for her,” another said, commenting on a Palo Alto Online feature of the candidate.

In a way, the election served as a wake-up call: If these debates around race in curriculum are reaching an area as liberal as Palo Alto, what might the future hold? Given the political climate, the issue has hit close to home for teachers. For some teachers, like Navarro, the situation has become disheartening. “I honestly don’t know what to do about it, and I’m really tired of people just throwing around terms like ‘critical race theory’ when they don’t even know what they’re talking about,” she said. “Critical race theory is a subject that’s taught at the college level, like gender studies. And if a kid in the fourth grade reads one book that’s about slavery, then people are saying things like, ‘You’re teaching critical race theory to fourth graders.’”

According to Navarro, changing the curriculum in any way is bound to garner backlash. “If you change anything too quickly or too radically, then people are upset, and if you don’t ever change, then a different group of people is upset,” she said.

Still, Li noted that the fact that representation in curriculum has become politically tinged doesn’t make it taboo. “If we avoid things that just happen to be political, then we avoid (issues) altogether, and then that means that we aren’t having these discussions about diversity and how to make curricula more inclusive,” he said.

This is especially true since PAUSD is far from an embattled district—there remains a commitment to diversity at some level, something teachers like Dunlap have expressed gratitude for. “(When) I taught ‘Beloved’ I held it up and I said, ‘I’m so glad to teach in a district that can teach you this and not feel like I might get fired, or I might hear parents protest,’” Dunlap said. “Because that’s one of the top (things) that people who don’t understand critical race theory say: ‘People should not read this book because it might make soft white people feel bad about our heritage.’ And so as a white male of privilege, it’s my responsibility to help other people feel more empowered.”

The issue, then, becomes not about what teachers cannot do, but what they can do. Most teachers agree that the best way to approach the current situation is through a lens of inquiry and exploration—a callback to the spirit of the ’60s. “I, ethically, don’t believe that I should ever be telling a student what to think or what to believe,” Howard said. “That said, I acknowledge that I’m in a position of power over my students, and I’m in the position where I get to choose what I bring before them, and that’s a big responsibility. So I try to ask open-ended questions.”

This holds for the English department as well. “I think everyone should have more questions than answers,” Dunlap said. “The more you can say ‘What is life like for you?’ instead of ‘Life is this way,’ I think that’s how we move forward.” 

Dunlap noted that this approach works well with the goal of literature as whole—to empathize. “That’s one of the things I love about teaching English—that we’re reading stories about humans,” he said. “I can read what it’s like to be a Black woman (though) I’ll never be a Black woman. I’ll never be an Indian woman, but I can read stories and say, ‘You know what? I feel that too.’ That’s human.”

Empathy between students and teachers is equally important, especially when it comes to these sensitive topics, according to Howard. “Sometimes, when I’m talking to other teachers, I say, ‘Maybe I wouldn’t (teach) it this way. Maybe this feels a little problematic,’” she said. “Teachers will say, ‘Well, most students have never said that to me.’ And I always have to say, ‘Would you have the words as a 16-year-old or a 17-year-old? Or would you just know something’s off and not be able to say why?’”

Student involvement and initiatives

Although students at Gunn may not be able to vote, there are a variety of actions students are taking to address the issue of representation in curriculum. Gunn’s Student Equity Committee, founded in 2020, currently has a curricular review subcommittee who has three main tasks for this year. The first is to revise the English and history curriculum through the lens of diversity and equity, an endeavor that will require an audit for which participants will need training. The second is piloting books in the English department at the high school level and the middle school level, and the third is helping to develop the Ethnic Studies curriculum. Throughout the process, the committee will be soliciting feedback from students, allowing their voices to be heard. 

According to Hussain, student engagement with those in power is what spurs change at a larger scale. “One thing that I’ve found (helps create change) is really getting involved in committees and talking to the people in power because when you set a requirement, when you persuade the head of the history department to (make a change), that means that all the teachers do have to do that,” she said. 

There are also opportunities for students to join textbook selection committees, which review and evaluate textbook candidates. At meetings, they can share their opinions on the texts, including their thoughts on diversity and representation. Li, who served on the 2018-2019 United States Government textbook selection committee, found the experience to be a positive one. “It was cool to work with teachers and admin in a more informal, casual manner, and it felt like I was contributing to something,” he said. 

Li added that going to the school board can also be an effective method for students to voice their opinions, as there are opportunities for public comment. Students who are interested can reach out to School Board Representative senior Daniel Pan.

Even simply talking to teachers can do a world of good, Dunlap said. “If you’ve read something on your own and you think your teacher might appreciate it, share the title,” he said. “When we are piloting titles, we’ll tell students, and so that’s where you say, ‘Hey, I want to try this title.’”

Although it’s often not always clear how much small things like these can help, they can lead to larger initiatives. Navarro has faith in the ability of the student body to enact change. “I hope that (this) generation can be smarter than the other generations,” she said. “Actually, if you look at the statistics, it is true that younger people have way less conflict over diversity and inclusion. Maybe there is hope.”

However, recent trends have shown a reversal to this growth. Out of the state’s 58 counties, 53 experienced a decline in student populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, with public school enrollment falling 2% since the 2019–2020 school year. According to the California Department of Education, Bay Area public schools have lost 6.5% of their students, with Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) seeing a 10.5% decrease in students since 2019.

Impacts on Enrollment

Pandemic-era learning has led some students and their families to reconsider public schools. Junior Ella Holsinger, a student at the Castilleja School, attended Gunn for her freshman year before enrolling in private school as a sophomore. “The distance learning that Gunn did [at the end of] my freshman year was pretty sparse,” she said. “We didn’t have to go on Zoom calls and the asynchronous work didn’t benefit me at all. Ultimately, my family and I made the decision to go [to Castilleja] together.”

According to Assistant Principal Courtney Carlomagno, public schools faced more barriers than private schools when it came to adapting throughout the pandemic. “Public schools are larger than most private schools so sheer size can cause protocols to be larger to manage,” she said.

Parents and students began to notice the different transition protocols offered by private and public schools, including their hybrid options and dates for full in-person instruction. “I went back to [in-person school] in Nov. 2020,” Holsinger said. “[At Castilleja,] we ended up going to a model where it was one week of online and one week of in-person which was amazing.” In contrast, PAUSD high school students were not offered a consistent in-person learning option until March 2021, in which they could choose to come on campus for two days of the week.

Other students such as sophomore Zefan Feng chose to move to private schools for reasons outside of pandemic restrictions. “The student-teacher ratio was quite important,” he said. “There are around 40 kids per grade [at the Pinewood School] so we have more individual attention from the teachers. I think that it’s easier to get better grades if you have more attention.”

Although private schools are a factor in declining public school enrollment, they themselves have also experienced dropping student populations, indicating that they aren’t the primary cause for the exodus from public education.

Another main contributor has been California’s overall decreasing population. According to the California Department of Finance, the state lost 117,600 people in 2021, with the San Francisco Bay Area population declining by 50,400 people. Although the region only makes up 19.4% of California’s population, it accounts for 42.9% of the decline statewide.

Many, including English teacher Diane Ichikawa, point to the area’s comparatively high costs of living and pandemic trends as the reason why people are leaving in record numbers. “There are a precious number of people who can actually afford [to live] someplace like Palo Alto, let alone any of the coastal regions in California,” she said. “The ability for people to work remotely made it so that people could live in places like Montana while still making the same kind of money that they would [make] if they were in California.”

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, most families have relocated out of the state for housing, jobs or family-related reasons. Junior Riku Sakai moved to Gilbert—a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona—during the summer of 2020. “[We moved] mostly because of my dad’s job and also our financial situation,” he said.

However, some, such as sophomore Julie Chen, have used moving as an opportunity to take advantage of alternative academic pathways. “We decided to move to Bellevue, Washington partly because of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program [offered there],” she said. The IB program is a rigorous, two year course of study that culminates in a student receiving an internationally recognized diploma. PAUSD currently does not offer an IB program at either of its high schools, and there are no plans to implement one in the near future.

Another trend amplified by the pandemic is homeschooling. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 5.4% of families reported choosing this option in the spring of 2020, compared to 11.1% in the fall of 2021.

Sophomore Justin Lee decided to try homeschooling instead of attending Greene Middle School for his eighth grade year. “My mom wasn’t working at the time so homeschool was eventually an option that we started to consider,” he said. “As an eighth grader, I was able to love learning again. If I had known at all how homeschool [was before], I don’t think I’d have ever chosen to go to public school just because I like it so much.”

Even before fully transitioning, Lee’s family had some experience with learning at home. “Almost every summer, my family would do a version of homeschooling, and I would follow a curriculum developed by the homeschool community,” he said.

Funding Consequences

The California state government establishes a funding goal—known as the Local Control Funding Formula—for how much money a district should receive per student enrolled. If the area’s property taxes are insufficient to provide the necessary funding, the state comes in to cover the shortfall. While most schools are funded through a combination of state and local revenue, around 8% of districts—including PAUSD—are considered basic aid. Basic aid districts are areas where property tax revenues exceed the funding threshold set by the government, meaning that they receive minimal state funding.

Because property taxes do not fluctuate based on how many students are enrolled, declining student populations have had few financial impacts on districts like PAUSD. However, those relying on the state for revenue have had to make some difficult choices, since their funding is determined by enrollment. According to district records, Alum Rock Union School District in San Jose decided to merge two middle schools after losing over 1,000 students since the 2019–2020 school year while West Contra Costa Unified School District currently faces a $24 million deficit and is looking to cut staff and student programs.

At Gunn, the decrease in students has still led to noticeable impacts, according to Social Studies Instructional Lead Jeff Patrick. “For the last couple of years, there’s been a steady decline of students,” he said. “The interesting thing is that it’s not just a smaller incoming freshman class, each of the grade levels are losing students. Next year’s 12th grade class is smaller than this year’s 11th grade class, meaning that not all of the students are coming back.”

Even though PAUSD doesn’t face the same dire consequences as other districts, Ichikawa points to initiatives that could help retain students. “PAUSD doesn’t even have to shrink in terms of its number of teachers and the resources that we have,” she said. “We have millions that are locked away in our reserves and we’re not going to go poor over everything that’s happening. We can use this as an opportunity to have smaller class sizes and more arrays of programs to find a really good fit for our changing population.”

Almost everyone—male-identifying or not—has been called “a guy” at least once in their life, whether it’s through the welcoming words of a teacher, an enthusiastic text or an obnoxious shout across the hall. To most, this word is just that: a common greeting.

It’s become so commonplace that many don’t even consider the genders of the people they’re referring to, and if they do, they find no issues with it. Others, however, disagree, citing the significant discomfort and exclusion it causes; for some, being frequently misgendered is nothing short of erasure.

Language undeniably impacts every aspect of our lives, even if we barely think about it that way. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to tell our parents that we love them (or gossip fruitfully with friends); we wouldn’t be able to complain endlessly about homework or make blunt jokes about others. While language is often used in the same way—to communicate—the manner of getting the message across varies at an immeasurable level.

It may seem trivial to focus on seemingly superficial colloquial phrasing and ancient gendered language systems; however, at the very least, it’s important to consider how much it impacts others. At its core, even the smallest differences in language can contribute to a variety of perspectives and meanings, many of which can be harmful or outright incorrect.

AAVE

The most profound—and possibly the most well-known—impact of language differences is made clear in African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a dialect commonly used by Black Americans that has recently been the subject of numerous cultural appropriation debates. With its distinct sentence structure and dropped consonants, AAVE has been around since the 17th century, stemming from Africans that were brought over from Africa, the Caribbean and South America, according to Stanford Linguistics Professor John Rickford. The dialect was formed in an environment of oppression—one with many speakers and very few teachers.

Rickford noted that, to African Americans, AAVE is a more informal, conversational dialect they may use when speaking to others in the same community. Non-African Americans, however, view AAVE differently. “People tend to think AAVE is careless and unstructured,” Rickford said. “But it’s just like any other language in that it has rules. You can’t just make things up.”

This faulty perception is undoubtedly harmful for AAVE speakers. According to Rickford, AAVE is often seen as “lazy” and “unprofessional,” making it harder for speakers to earn the credibility that they deserve. In his explanation, Rickford cited the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Black American Trayvon Martin in 2012, when Rachel Jeantel, the leading prosecution witness, gave her testimony in AAVE. The jurors dismissed her vital testimony and acquitted Zimmerman, likely because they could not “hear, understand, or believe her,” Rickford and linguist Sharese King wrote in a paper.

Naima Small, founder of the Instagram platform “Dear Dark Skinned Girls,” expressed a similar sentiment and argued that this skewed perception limits opportunities for AAVE speakers. “I think it harms the Black community largest because [of] that idea [that] you speak AAVE equals you can’t possibly be educated [or] have anything to say,” Small said.

Most recently, social media apps such as Twitter and TikTok have pushed many AAVE terms like “chile,” “finna” and “periodt,” as well as AAVE’s unique sentence structure, into the spotlight. These terms are now being used by everyone—not just African Americans. For instance, Asian American actress Nora Lum, more commonly known as Awkwafina, is notorious for having a “persona [that] has veered too close to black aesthetics for comfort,” according to Vulture Magazine.

Rickford, on his end, doesn’t find this adoption very problematic, yet noted that some AAVE speakers do. “[These speakers say,] ‘They are taking our language without paying their dues,’” he said.

Small echoed Rickford’s general indifference to the widespread use of AAVE terms, but added that it’s important for all users to understand the origins of these terms. What frustrates Small the most about the adoption, however, is that these terms are viewed as a “trend” instead of a lasting part of the dialect. “What really gets me mad [is] that people are like, ‘Who still says chile?’” she said. “Like, [chile] wasn’t just some kind of trend.”

Gendered Nouns

Of course, it’s not just dialects that can shift meaning—entire languages can be constructed around gender and perpetrate sexism. In most romance languages—French, Spanish and Portuguese, to name a few—nouns are assigned a gender and are preceded by one of the two definite articles: the feminine or the masculine. Usually, the gendering of nouns isn’t problematic; very few complaints have been raised about the femininity of a cup, for instance. When it comes to professions or descriptions, however, the negative effects of this foundation become clear. In languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, there are multiple options used to refer to an occupation. But when referring to groups of people—or someone whose gender is unknown—the masculine form becomes the norm. For example, a group of actors and actresses is “los actores” in Spanish, even though an actress is “la actriz.” “If there’s a convention of picking the masculine form as default, then you’re reinforcing a notion that the normative person in this profession is male, and you only go out of yourway to say, ‘Oh, this is a female author or a female teacher or a female doctor’ when that’s true,” University of Washington Computational Linguistics Professor Emily Bender said.

This clear lack of lingual representation may perpetuate harmful stereotypes about the gender compositions of professions that are outright false or discourage women, who frequently hear these masculine forms being used, from pursuing certain careers. “[Women] can feel sort of out of place,” Bender said.

Furthermore, romance languages have recently faced extensive criticism due to their lack of non-binary pronouns. The Spanish language, for example, contains only two pronouns: el, the masculine, and ella, the feminine. This system only functions if there are only two genders; these pronouns don’t describe non-binary or genderqueer people, or people whose genders lie outside the gender binary, according to Stanford Youth Development Manager Ana Lilia Soto, who works in the mental health field. “It can be super problematic for young people who might not identify [with the gender binary] or are more fluid with how they describe themselves, and it can be off-putting,” she said. “It’s kind of like asking somebody, ‘Well, where’s my community if I don’t identify with this or with that?” To adapt, many Hispanics have adopted the pronoun “elle,” or the plural “elles,” as a gender neutral option.

Similarly, for people of Latin American descent, the all-inclusive term “Latinx” was coined to replace “Latino” and “Latina.” Yet according to Pew Research, even though one in four Latin Americans have heard of the term, only 3% use it. World Language Instructional Leader Liz Matchett, who teaches Spanish, noted that making changes in favor of inclusivity will always be difficult—no matter what, not everyone will agree. “There [are people] that say, ‘Don’t do it because the people in charge of language say that you just need to do this, and language doesn’t make any kind of political or gender judgment statements,’” she said. “It’s just saying that this is [how it is]. And then there’s the people who say, ‘Don’t even tell me how to do this because you aren’t even part of my culture. I don’t want to be told by anyone what the right way is.’”

English teacher Diane Ichikawa brought up another concern that comes with adapting these languages: fluidity. “It’s a necessity to take care of everybody who’s in our community and in our society,” she said. “And at the same time, linguistically, [a] roadblock to that is that [it’s not] fluid to say ‘Latinx’ like that. How do you even say that in some languages, right?” In response to the somewhat confusing pronunciation of “Latinx,” some Spanish speakers have adopted “Latine” as a more fluid alternative.

To address these recent debates over the romance languages, Gunn’s Languages department has encouraged teachers to be more gender-neutral. According to Matchett, a steering committee is currently developing a plan to bring to the district in hopes of establishing more inclusive practices in the language departments. “I haven’t ever done anything formalized with my department, but I have said in passing to teachers and especially teachers who may have non-gendered students in their classes or transgender students [to] find a way to be inclusive,” Matchett said. “I don’t care what it is, I don’t care what you follow, but make sure you find a way to be inclusive.”

Matchett acknowledges, however, that there isn’t one correct way to address the issue of inclusivity. “I’m not going to advocate for one way to do it because there isn’t an agreement in the language world about the right way to do it,” she said.

Colloquial Terms

Gendered language also rears its head in colloquial terms such as “you guys” and “dude.” Though frequently used to refer to people of all genders, both of these terms have masculine roots. “The singular word guy is definitely masculine,” Bender said. “If you say, ‘I met a guy the other day,’ most English speakers are going to imagine a male-presenting person.” Using these terms to refer to non-male individuals may lead to discomfort and exclusion, among other things. In a video for Makers.com, author and activist Alice Walker argued that the continued use of these masculine terms, especially by women themselves, is only due to a “fear of feminism” or a desire to ignore any sentiments of feminism. Others raised concerns that these terms may only exacerbate any underlying sexism from earlier centuries. For transgender people specifically, these masculine terms may misgender them, serving as an unwelcome reminder of a past they’re looking to forget.

Ichikawa noted, however, that these terms aren’t problematic to everyone. “You can make a lot of arguments that it’s fine [and that] we need to be okay with that and not so thin-skinned,” she said.

These terms are so strongly embedded into our everyday language that it makes any awareness of their impacts—and tangible change—rather difficult. “Our language has become so colloquial that we don’t really think about it,” Ichikawa said. Still, many people are looking for change and have adopted gender-neutral terms such as “folks” and “y’all.”

Gunn, meanwhile, is trying to make inclusive practices the norm. On March 21, the Student Executive Council, along with Adolescent Counseling Services and Outlet, hosted a Pride Week Livestream where they provided a list of more inclusive alternative words to refer to relatives and friends. The list included terms such as “partner” in place of “husband” or “wife,” “folks” and “everyone” in place of “you guys,” and “sibling” in place of “brother” or “sister.”

Mental Health

Language’s impacts, of course, don’t stop there; mental health—something Gunn has been striving to address—is widely affected, particularly in regards to terminology surrounding suicide. In colloquial language, mental health presentations and informational articles, we often refer to someone “committing suicide,” a phrase Soto and countless others have pushed back on. “When we think of ‘commit suicide,’ there’s this criminal act that happens, like people commit murder [and] people commit burglaries,” Soto said. “It’s a criminal thing.”

Instead, medical and mental health professionals have shifted towards using “died by suicide” whenever possible—a change that emphasizes that suicide is a public health issue and a change that, according to Soto, others should follow. “I think it’s really about acknowledging that this person died by suicide because of things that they were going through and [that] this is an action that was taken,” Soto said.

Soto also notes that referring to suicide attempts as “successful” or “unsuccessful” has been problematic. These terms, according to the Mental Health Center of Denver, imply that suicide is something to be accomplished. “Is there a really ‘congratulatory’ [or] a ‘successful’ suicide?” Soto said.

Instead, people should opt for using more direct language like “suicide attempt” in place of “unsuccessful attempt” and “died by suicide” in place of “successful attempt.” This language, Soto added, helps make dialogue about suicide and other mental health issues much less ambiguous. “I think the more direct that we can be with getting people who do have suicidal ideation [to engage] in their own decision making, as well as [demystifying] that to the general public, I think it’s helpful,” she said.

From the exclusion fostered by starkly gendered romance languages to faulty, damaging misconceptions of AAVE, language’s deeper implications—although sometimes difficult to recognize—assert themselves in meaningful ways.

Thankfully, some progress is being made. Linguists are adopting new words and phrases to minimize the exclusionary effects gendered language has, and are increasing general awareness of language’s effects through numerous articles and social movements.

Gunn’s teachers, in particular, have attempted to make the classroom more welcoming by altering their language. “As a teacher, I will accept you for whatever you decide to use as your pronouns and the way to speak about it, and I’m not going to force you to choose a pronoun that doesn’t feel right to you,” Matchett said.

Despite these recent efforts to make language more inclusive and direct, there is still more work to be done. “It is [clear] that a lot of our social world is constructed through language,” Bender said. “So in that sense, [the] categories we experience and the way we understand that people in relationships around us is very much influenced by not only what we name and how we talk about things, but also [language] variation.”

Prom askings don’t always go according to plan, and English teacher Diane Ichikawa’s was no exception. For Ichikawa, having a date was mandatory to attend Prom. “I did not get asked my junior year and I did not know anybody to ask, so one of my good friends and I went to a movie and dinner [instead of Prom],” she said. “My senior year I had a boyfriend who went to a different school across town. I wanted to see if we could go to my prom, so I asked him.”

Ichikawa planned out a big asking at a beach in Carmel. “We packed a picnic, I wrote a note and attached it to I think it was a stuffed animal, and he opened up the note and he looked at me and was like ‘Uh, I’ll think about it’,” Ichikawa said, “I thought it was going to be an ‘I’ll think about it, yeah of course’, but it wasn’t—he actually really needed to think about it.”

Her boyfriend’s vague response lead to an awkward remainder of the picnic, but they ended up at Ichikawa’s prom, which took place on the wharf in the Double Tree Hotel in Monterey.

Ichikawa felt that her high school prom experience was fairly mediocre. “It was just a dance; it was not nearly as nice as the ones that you guys have,” she said.