This we remember, but want to forget; classes lament their bouts of bad luck New Building! Class of 2015 not invited... - Julie Nelson and Amy Wells Monday, April 23, 2012 By Christina Petlowany Advertising In the world of The Hunger Games trilogy, one’s life is almost completely determined by luck. You are lucky if you live in the wealthy Capital. You are lucky if your family can afford to buy food. You are incredibly lucky if your name isn’t drawn to participate in the deadly Hunger Games. Their lives can be summed up in one sentence that is repeated throughout the book: “May the odds be ever in your favor.” But some SCDS classes say that the odds are never in their favor. The class of ‘15 seemed to be on its way to becoming the unluckiest class in the school’s history. They missed the new lower school buildings by one year; they missed iPads in the middle school by one year; and, until Feb. 21, they were going to miss the new MacBooks. However, the inauspicious freshmen got a rare stroke of luck when the Board of Trustees reversed its decision and gave both the freshmen and sophomores laptops for the next school year. Previous to this change, the freshmen complained that their class “misses everything new that the ’16 class gets,” freshman Tori Pefferle said in an Octagon poll. But other classes also feel that they are unlucky, although some, such as the class of ’14, attribute their ill luck mostly to the weather. “It was freezing and raining on our class trip (Oct. 5-8 at Camp Lotus on the American River) and we had bad weather last year too,” sophomore Maya Kuppermann said in the poll. “In the Marin Headlands in 5th grade it was drenching rain the entire trip. In 6th grade in Sequoia it was insanely cold,” sophomore Patrick Talamantes said. “In Yosemite it had snowed the year before and we really wanted it to snow but it didn’t.” “In 8th grade we had crazy turbulence on the plane. There were some girls who were screaming.” And now, Kuppermann and Talamantes’s class is the one who will miss the MacBooks. But, in truth, every class can identify some way in which they have been “screwed.” “Every class will find something to complain about,” said Michael Lewis, ’08. For instance, the class of ’13 will have a new college counselor. Some students are worried that the new counselor Jane Bauman will not be as experienced as 18-year college counselor Patricia Fels. And the class of ’11 was the first to tackle the sophomore project. “As guinea pigs, the project was probably more burdensome for us than it (was) for following classes,” said Damien Blake, ’11. Case Nichols, ‘11, remembers “expectations constantly changing throughout this yearlong project.” “We didn’t exactly know what kind of effort was required,” he said. And although some, such as Chris Thompson, ’11, believe that the project wasn’t “actually a very big deal in hindsight,” others, such as KJ Park, ’11, think it made their class really unlucky. “Our class got really screwed,” Park said. “I wish I didn’t remember (the project).” Other injustices the class of ‘11 experienced include missing out on cutting the lunch line as seniors and the renovation of the high-school quad. So what causes this phenomenon? According to psychologist Carol Rivero, teenagers’ development involves “individuation, establishing one’s identity and striving to find a place in the mainstream or the periphery of one’s peers.” “It doesn’t surprise me then that those at different levels of matriculation seek to be like one another and at the same time they are looking for unique aspects to their class or age group,” she said. Rivero believes that this phenomenon is created by the “unbridled passion that many (teenagers) have in solving the world’s problems. “Part of this passion is fueled, I think, by a craving for fairness,” she said. “One class receiving certain privileges while another one does not will seem incredibly unjust to fairness-minded teens,” she said. The class of ‘12 would agree with her. They had to deal with the fact that their “crazy intelligence levels led us to have consistently low to zero curves on Baird tests,” according to senior Cabot Jackman in a poll. Additionally, this class will miss out on the changes to the AP Biology and AP Latin curricula. However, some classes’ suffering was caused directly by another. Nicky Mehtani, ‘07, said that her class is unlucky because the class before did an offensive senior prank, so her class’s senior prank privileges were on probation. Her class had a planned prank where they “kidnapped” headmaster Stephen Repsher and brought him to breakfast at the International House of Pancakes. “When I tell my college friends what we did for our senior prank, they can’t take me seriously. But, honestly, it was much preferred to having no senior skits at graduation, which was the alternative to having the planned senior prank,” she said. But some say that the hardships their class faced in high school actually ended up being beneficial. Francie Neukom, ’04, attributes her current go-getter attitude to her class’s bad luck. “Our class was screwed in probably the worst way possible—we had 30 girls, 10 boys,” she said. “There were never enough boys to go around, and some were picked off by the girls in the class above us (which was an unusually pretty class).” Neukom and her female classmates adapted to this “by absolutely dominating in the classroom,” she said “All eight of the students in our grade inducted into Cum Laude were girls,” she said. “By being in this girl-heavy class but by still going to Country Day, I received the advantages of going to an all-girls’ school and a coed school at the same time with none of the attendant drawbacks of either.” Neukom believes that this has made her more ambitious. "I don't wait around for things to happen to me--I make them happen," she said. "I feel that too many of my friends have put their dreams on hold or compromised them altogether to follow their boyfriends, and I don't want to be like that." But maybe not every class has something to complain about. Take the class of ‘16. By the end of their time at Country Day, they will have benefited from the new elementary school, a renovated middle-school quad, laptops and iPads. “Our class is really lucky,” eighth graders Aidan Galati and Emma Belliveau said.

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