| Steven: | Your website is more organized. I don't have to run around looking for stuff. Never saw that Masterman crap before. Central students have been complaining about Masterman (using similar arguements) for years. Now we don't care. Our main competion comes from Marple Newtown, Council Rock, and Radnor |
| Editor: | He's referring to one of my previous articles, entitled My High School. In it I discussed some of the shortcomings of Masterman. I still stand by that article, but would also like to point out that I have become a better person because I went to Masterman and I did enjoy my time there, more or less. |
| Scarius: | because you can't compete with us. Masterman will kick your butt on any test, but you guys will win almost every activity (sports, etc). It just works out that way, and always will unless one or the other dramatically alters admissions policies |
| Editor: | Historically this has been a statistical fact with rare exceptions. That's why everyone (including the mass media, school district officials, and local politicians) call Masterman, and not Central, the "Jewel in the Crown" of the Philadelphia School District. |
| Steven: | Naw, we kicked your @$$ at the Atlantic Pacific, ATMOPAV, and Public Parochial. We now compete against suburban schools. We beat 200 schools at the Lehigh Valley Math contest. Lost to Council Rock and Radnor. Don't see your team there |
| Editor: | And our Mock Trial team beat out some 200 schools across the state and are at this very moment competing in the national competition. Central was but a wee speck who did poorly in the city wide competition. |
| Scarius: | exactly, because we don't have enough students to sustain teams, except for the few we already have. I meant tests everyone takes. SATs, 2, APs, etc |
| Editor: | His last message basically made my point for me. Masterman just doesn't have enough students with enough interest to participate in competitions such as he's describing. He doesn't bring it up here, but Central does have a much better web page than Masterman. Why? Because they have so many people in the school that they could afford to devote an entire homeroom student grouping to working on the web page. They recieve time during the school day to work on it. Why? Because it's such a large school and has enough students, teachers and money to do things like that. It's a completely unfair comparison but they make much wind about it. It's kind of sad actually. |
| Steven: | No comment on SATs. This year, we have a perfect 1600, six people with at least 1500 (unless you are talking about SAT-9) |
| Scarius: | I meant both. We have those same scores, but we're a smaller school, so those numbers still appear on our averages, whereas they don't on yours |
| Editor: | A statistical fact, which is why he doesn't argue with it in his next comment. Since Central is so much larger, it has a much larger slice of the bell curve. This means that its test scores get dragged down a bit. Unless Masterman keeps relaxing its admissions policies, it'll always have a smaller slice of the curve so its average scores stay higher. |
| Steven: | Yeah, well Masterman is a school full of inbreds (from MS). |
| Scarius: | now there's an argument worthy of Central's debate team |
| Steven: | I will admit it, Masterman is a superior school (if they compete against Philly schools). WHy don't you compete against suburban schools? They are a lot more challanging than your (we are #1 against Olney, Fels, Bok Tech, etc.) |
| Editor: | If I were a lower person I would point out that Central is still a Philadelphia district school and that he just admitted Masterman was better. But... I won't. |
| Scarius: | compete in what? almost anything you mention, we don't have enough students to sustain it. you just couldn't find enough people to commit enough time, because the school is so small |
| Editor: | My mind turns instantly to the Masterman gymnastics and swimming teams, both of which are formed from several schools' students because Masterman had so few participants. Why? Because we're so small. Does this point sound familiar? I hope so! It's only because there were other schools in this same plight who joined with us that we manage to field these teams at all (and quite successfully, too). What about our completely non-existant football team? Why don't we have one? Because we don't have enough people in the high school to keep it running. Some football teams have over 50 kids on them. That's almost an eighth of our high school! |
| Steven: | For Lehigh and Millersville, you just need four people per school. |
| Scarius: | but compete in what? are you talking about the math competition? |
| Steven: | math, science, history, general questions (non-athletic) |
| Scarius: | like the national academic league they do in middle school?
I honestly don't think you could find more than 4 students who'd want to do that, and you'd have to find a sponsor... all the teachers that would do it are already too busy, so it's a no go |
| Steven: | We go by ourselves (parents drive us). Anyway, enough of that. |
| Editor: | Steve apparently gave up here, realizing he was not getting anywhere because I was obviously right and he was just being a typical Central snot. |
