The magazine's editor----Lily Xia,
This episode's editor---- Jason Wu from Students' English Editorial Office
A journal by juniors who pay attention to the wrong things.
"For those of us allergic to answers."
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Compiled by the staff, who were technically supposed to be studying.
MONDAY: The library's copy of The Bell Jar has a dried flower pressed between pages 64 and 65. Nobody knows who put it there. The librarians have decided, by unanimous silent agreement, to leave it.
TUESDAY: Someone has been rearranging the magazines in the common room by color, creating a perfect gradient from the yellow of National Geographic to the deep red of The New Yorker. Security footage has not been checked. Nobody wants to know.
WEDNESDAY: The chemistry lab's fume hood has been turned into an impromptu art installation by the AP Studio Art class. It now contains a single half-burnt candle, a paper crane, and a note that reads: “This is also chemistry.”
THURSDAY: A pigeon has taken up residence on the windowsill outside Room 204. It appears to be listening to Mr. Harrison's lecture on the Industrial Revolution. It has not blinked in forty minutes.
FRIDAY: The vending machine on the third floor has started dispensing two items for the price of one. The administration says this is a “mechanical anomaly.” The students say it is a miracle. Both are probably correct.
SATURDAY: The janitor's closet has been converted, temporarily and without permission, into a darkroom by the photography club. The hallway smells like developer fluid and rebellion.
SUNDAY: Nobody is at school. The building is quiet. The walls, according to one especially sensitive junior, are “definitely humming.”
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Illustration: 'A Fractal, Not a Flaw'
By Tina, 11th Grade
The first lesson was war. For fifteen years, my hair has been a chaotic rebellion against every brush, every weather forecast, every authority figure that tried to smooth it down. My mother called it “unruly.” My grandmother called it “a sign of character.” My science teacher, Mr. Chen, was the first to call it “a teachable moment.”
He once wrote on the board, during a unit on fractals: “Observe the geometry of nature. A coastline. A snowflake. Tina's hair.” The class laughed. I laughed too, because what else do you do when your hair becomes a whiteboard example? But that moment stayed with me.
Because he was right. My hair is fractal. It is chaotic. It is, in its own way, an equation that refuses to be solved.
I grew up in a humid city, where the air itself seems to conspire against straight lines. Every morning I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror with a hair straightener, a weapon of daily surrender, and try to iron out the curls that had re-formed overnight like some kind of botanical uprising. My hair had its own agenda. It always did.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from fighting your own reflection. I remember being twelve and crying in the bathroom because no matter how many YouTube tutorials I watched, my hair refused to look like the girls in the videos. It refused to be “sleek.” It refused to be “effortless.” It was, in a word, itself.
“My hair was the first thing I ever had to negotiate with. Not my parents. Not my teachers. My hair.”
Eventually, I made a deal with it. I stopped straightening. I started scrunching. I learned the vocabulary — leave-in conditioner, diffuser, plopping — and somewhere in that process, I discovered something unexpected: the girls in the videos had curly hair too. They weren't trying to flatten it. They were trying to understand it.
Mr. Chen was right about the fractals. Each curl is a spiral, a miniature nautilus, a Fibonacci sequence you can hold in your hand. When you stop fighting the frizz and start looking at it, really looking, you see that what you thought was chaos is actually structure. It's just a structure that doesn't apologize for taking up space.
I still have bad hair days. Humidity remains undefeated. But I no longer cry in bathrooms. I have learned that some battles are not worth winning, and some wars are actually just conversations waiting to happen. My hair taught me this: the things we fight hardest are often the things we should simply learn to live with, perhaps even to love.
Last week, Mr. Chen passed me in the hallway and said, “Your hair looks particularly fractal today, Tina.” I smiled and said, “Thank you, sir. I've been working on my Koch snowflake.” He nodded, satisfied, and walked away.
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By Sophia, 11th Grade
On the Brazilian jiu-jitsu mat, I have been taken down more times than I can count. This is not a metaphor. I am literally on the floor, with another person's weight on my chest, trying to remember the four-step escape sequence my coach drilled into us last Tuesday. Step one: frame. Step two: bridge. Step three: shrimp. Step four: recover guard. I usually forget step three.
I joined the jiu-jitsu club in September, mostly because my mom thought I needed a “structured physical outlet” and partly because I had watched one too many YouTube videos of small women throwing large men across rooms. The reality, I discovered, is less cinematic. The reality is: you spend eighty percent of your time on your back, sweating into a mat that smells like everyone else's fear.
But there is a philosophy here, and it took me six months to find it. Jiu-jitsu is the only sport I know where the central teaching is: “You will lose. Now what?” Every roll ends. Someone gets tapped. The question is not who wins. The question is: can you stay calm while losing? Can you think clearly with someone's elbow on your windpipe?
My coach, a thirty-year-old engineer named Daniel, says: “The day you stop being afraid to lose is the day you start learning.” He says this while demonstrating a submission hold that looks illegal in at least three countries. He is smiling. He is also choking me. I tap. He releases. “Good,” he says. “You tapped early. That's wisdom.”
“Jiu-jitsu is the art of losing gracefully until you suddenly, accidentally, win.”
There is a concept in physics called “minimum energy path.” It describes how a system will always find the path of least resistance. Water flows downhill. Electricity follows copper. And, apparently, a 160-pound training partner will always find the exact angle that maximizes your discomfort. Jiu-jitsu is the study of these paths, how to redirect them, how to use them, how to make your opponent's energy work against them.
My coach says this is also a life philosophy. I think he might be right. In school, I used to fight every obstacle head-on. Bad grade? Study harder, sleep less, cry quietly. Jiu-jitsu taught me a different approach: when someone pushes, you don't push back. You move. You create space. You let their force carry them past you, and then you reposition.
The most important word in jiu-jitsu is not “attack” or “defend.” It is “tap.” You tap the mat, or your opponent's body, when you are done. When you have had enough. When you need to stop. Tapping is not quitting. Tapping is honesty. It is saying: I know my limit, and I respect it.
I used to think tapping was failure. Now I think it is the most sophisticated move in the entire sport. Because it requires self-knowledge. It requires you to pay attention to your own body, your own breath, your own breaking point. And then it requires you to communicate that boundary, clearly, to another human being who is currently trying to strangle you.
I have tapped thousands of times. I will tap thousands more. Each tap is a small lesson in humility, in communication, in the difference between surrender and self-awareness. My mom says the jiu-jitsu is finally paying off. She says I argue less at home. She is not entirely wrong.
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Illustration: 'Steam as River Delta'
By Yuki, 11th Grade
The first lesson Madame Suzuki taught me was not how to whisk matcha, though we did that too, in a room with tatami mats that smelled like grass and old wood. The first lesson was this: “You must learn to wait for the water to forget it was boiling.” I was fourteen. I had never waited for anything in my life.
I had come to Tokyo for a semester abroad, sponsored by a program my school called “Global Immersion,” which sounded impressive until you realized it mostly meant sitting in a foreign classroom trying to parse a language you'd studied for only six months. I was lonely. I was tired. I missed my dog, my room, and the specific blue of the sky above my hometown.
Madame Suzuki's tea house was a small room behind a temple in Yanaka, a neighborhood that felt like it had been accidentally preserved by time. We entered through a low wooden gate. She made me crouch. “Bend your knees,” she said. “The body must apologize before the mind can open.”
She taught me to read steam. Not metaphorically, actually read it. “Watch where it rises. Watch where it disappears. The path of steam is the map of the room's breath.” I thought she was being mystical. Then I realized she was being practical. The steam rises, meets cold air, vanishes. It is the simplest possible demonstration of a system in transition.
“Tea, she said, is the only beverage that requires you to apologize to the cup before you drink.”
I learned to whisk matcha in a motion that is, essentially, a wrist exercise disguised as a religious ritual. You hold the chawan at a forty-five-degree angle. You move the chasen in a zigzag pattern, not a circle, never a circle, and you count. One, two, three, four. You do not look at the foam. You look at the wall. The foam will form itself.
The strangest part was the silence. Madame Suzuki did not fill silence with instruction. She let it sit there, like a third person in the room. At first I panicked and chattered. She waited. Eventually I learned to be quiet. Not the quiet of boredom. The quiet of attention.
When I returned home, my friends asked what I had learned in Japan. I told them about the temples, the bullet trains, the vending machines that sold hot corn soup. I did not tell them about Madame Suzuki. Some lessons are too small to translate.
But last Sunday, I made tea for my mother. I boiled the water, then let it sit for three minutes until it forgot it was boiling. I poured it slowly. I did not speak. My mother looked at me strangely and said, “What's wrong?” I smiled and said, “Nothing. I'm just reading the steam.”
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By Nadia, 11th Grade
She left in 1983 with three children, a bag of seeds, and a handkerchief embroidered with olive trees. The handkerchief was her mother's. It is now mine. The stitches are so fine that, under a magnifying glass, they resolve into a landscape: a house with a blue door, a well, a fig tree, a road that curves out of frame.
My grandmother cannot read or write. She signs documents with an X. But she can stitch a border so straight it could be measured with a ruler, and she can reproduce any pattern from memory after seeing it once. She has embroidered tablecloths for weddings she was not invited to, pillowcases for grandchildren she has not met, and handkerchiefs for daughters who live on three different continents.
There is a book in our house, a hardcover notebook from the 1960s with a faded green cover. It contains no words. Instead, it holds hundreds of tiny pencil drawings, cross-stitch patterns copied from tablecloths, rugs, wedding dresses. Each pattern has a name: “The Olive Branch.” “The Well at Night.” “The Bride's Window.” My grandmother draws them. My aunt labels them. My cousin in Toronto photographs them and uploads them to a blog called “Stitching Home.”
“The handkerchief is not a souvenir. It is a map you can fold small enough to hide in your pocket when the soldiers come.”
I asked my grandmother once why she never learned to read. She looked at me as if I had asked why the sky never learned to be green. “I read,” she said. “I read fabric. I read thread. I read the news in the way a sleeve is sewn to a shoulder.” She was right. Every stitch she made during the war was slightly tighter, slightly closer to the next. You can read 1983 in her embroidery. You can read 1990. You can read the year my uncle died: the patterns from that year are all water, all blue thread, all waves.
I am learning to embroider. My stitches are clumsy. They lean. They pucker. My grandmother watches me without comment, then reaches over and unpicks the ones that are wrong. She does not tell me which are wrong. She simply removes them, and I am left to figure out what she fixed.
This is how knowledge is transmitted in my family: not through lectures or textbooks, but through the quiet correction of a hand that has been working for seventy years. I will never be as good as her. But I will have a handkerchief of my own one day, with stitches that tell the story of a girl who grew up between two countries, fluent in the language of needles.
Last week I added a new pattern to the green book. I drew it from memory: the view from my grandmother's window in the camp, with the concrete wall and the single olive tree someone planted in a tire filled with soil. I titled it “The Olive Branch, Version 2.0.” My grandmother saw it and nodded. “Not bad,” she said. “For a beginner.”
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By Lin Wei, 11th Grade
During my first month on exchange in London, I was rushed to the ER with a panic attack that felt like the city itself was pressing against my chest. The doctor asked if I had asthma. I said no. She asked if I had anxiety. I said, “Only about architecture.” She did not laugh. She prescribed an inhaler anyway, which I carried for three months and never used, but its presence in my coat pocket was oddly comforting, like a tiny abstract of permission to breathe.
I had come to London to study literature. I had not come to London to develop a complicated relationship with glass. But the city is, fundamentally, a negotiation between stone and transparency. Every building is a wall that wants to be a window. Every window is a wall that has given up. I found this paradox everywhere, in the Victorian facades with their massive plate-glass intrusions, in the Gherkin's organic curves that somehow feel both futuristic and ancient, in the humble corner shop with its security grill that turns sunlight into prison bars on the floor.
I started keeping a notebook of walls. Not the famous ones, not the Tower, not Buckingham Palace, but the small, overlooked walls of the city. A brick wall in Hackney with a handprint fossilized in its mortar. A glass wall in Canary Wharf that reflects the sky so perfectly you cannot tell where the building ends and the weather begins. A concrete wall in the tube station with a hairline crack that travels diagonally for six feet, like a sentence waiting for its verb.
I began to think of walls as a kind of slow journalism. They record what touches them. The brick wall in Hackney has absorbed a century of London rain, each droplet leaving a mineral signature in the mortar. The glass wall in Canary Wharf has witnessed every cloud that crossed the financial district since 2004. The concrete in the tube station has felt the vibration of a million rush-hour feet and translated that vibration into a single, patient crack.
“Walls are not barriers. Walls are the longest-running documentary project in human history.”
My literature professor, Dr. Okonkwo, once said: “Every text has a surface grammar, the things it says, and a deep grammar, the things it cannot say.” I think walls are the same. A wall says: “I am here. I am solid. I will outlast you.” But its deep grammar says something else: “I am cracking. I am listening. I remember every sound that has ever echoed against me.”
In my second month, I discovered that if you press your ear to certain walls in London, you can hear the past. Not metaphorically. Literally. Old buildings have thick walls, and thick walls have acoustic memories. The Victorians built their institutions — hospitals, prisons, schools — with walls so massive that sound waves became trapped in the masonry, emerging decades later as faint, ghostly echoes. Standing in the corridor of a 19th-century hospital in Whitechapel, I pressed my ear to the wall and heard, or imagined I heard, a child's cough from 1893.
The most beautiful wall I found was in a garden in Kew. It was an old brick wall, south-facing, covered in moss. The moss was not green, not the green we see, anyway. A sign explained that the wall was home to seventeen species of moss, each thriving in a different microclimate created by the wall's orientation, its texture, its age. What looked like a uniform green carpet was actually a diverse ecosystem, visible only to those who bothered to look closely.
The sign also mentioned that some of these mosses glow under ultraviolet light, a spectrum invisible to human eyes but perfectly visible to bees. I thought about this for a long time. A wall that appears one way to me appears entirely different to a bee. The bee sees a garden of ultraviolet navigation beacons. I see moss. We are standing in the same place, looking at the same wall, inhabiting entirely different worlds.
I returned to my home city three months later with a new habit: I touch walls. I run my hand along them. I press my ear to them in elevators, in libraries, in the corridors of my own school. My friends think I have lost my mind. Perhaps I have. But I am also listening to something they cannot hear, the slow, patient language of surfaces, speaking in the only tense they know: the continuous present.
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A city hangs in the air, framed by nothing and watched by three.
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Famous passages, annotated by people who should be studying for finals
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“Sometimes being offered a hand is the heaviest thing.”
→ Marginal note: true, especially when you're trying to carry three textbooks and a half-eaten granola bar.
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“I write entirely to find out what I think.”
→ Marginal note: I write to find out what I was supposed to do for homework.
Ted Hughes, Thistles
“They are like pale hair / And the grit of man.”
→ Marginal note: also an accurate description of the locker room floor after PE.
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
“I am a red balloon tied to an anchor.”
→ Marginal note: relatable, except my anchor is precalculus and my balloon is Diet Coke.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot.”
→ Marginal note: Holden Caulfield would have been a great high school blogger.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
→ Marginal note: also true of the group project essay you haven't started.
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By Book Club
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky ★★★★☆
A book about standing on the edge of things — parties, friendships, growing up — and realizing that the edge is actually the best seat in the house. Chbosky wrote this as a letter to his younger self, which is the most generous thing an adult can do.
Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson ★★★★★
Melinda stops speaking after a traumatic event, and the novel unfolds in the silence that follows. It is a masterclass in what is left unsaid. Required reading for anyone who has ever been the quiet person in the room.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon ★★★★☆
Christopher Boone is fifteen, loves math, hates being touched, and decides to investigate a neighbor's murdered dog. The result is a detective story that is also a profound meditation on how different minds navigate the same world.
Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson ★★★★★
Woodson's memoir in verse moves between Ohio, South Carolina, and New York, tracing a young Black girl's growing awareness of her voice as a writer. Every poem is a small doorway. Walk through all of them.
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Short Poems for Long Hallways
By Various
calculator dead
my brain follows shortly after
see you next May, Ms. Lee
walked slow on purpose
because the hallway smelled
like someone's vanilla perfume
and nothing else had gone right
a crumpled essay
a friendship bracelet, frayed
a dried flower, a photograph
a pencil stub, a small mirror
all the selves I was today
the clock in Room 204
is seven minutes fast
or I am seven minutes slow
either way, I am arriving
at a different time than myself
the walls of this school
have absorbed more adolescent panic
than any structure should legally hold
and yet they stand
patient, plaster, unmoved
better therapists than any of us
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What we would write if the Common App didn't have a 650-word limit or a judgmental committee
By Staff
The Common App, If We Were Honest
• My greatest strength is: closing 47 tabs without losing the one I actually needed.
• A leadership role I held: successfully organizing three consecutive “who's picking up the food” group chats.
• The person who influenced me most: the stray cat near the cafeteria dumpster who taught me that dignity is a state of mind.
• My favorite word is: “whatever,” because it is the Swiss Army knife of responses — it can be agreement, defiance, surrender, or philosophy, depending on the tone.
Admissions officers, please do not take this personally. Or do. We can't tell.
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Snack-sized wisdom from people who can explain things in eighteen minutes or less
Trevor Noah, Commencement Address
“I used to think being a teenager meant you were just a beta version of a person. Then I realized adults are just teenagers who own printers and have given up on asking why the sky is blue.”
→ Honestly, fair.
Hailey Hardcastle, Why Students Should Have Mental Health Days
“We don't let students take a day off for their mental health, but we expect them to show up and perform at their best while anxious, depressed, or burnt out.”
→ Petition to make this required reading for every school board meeting.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story
“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”
→ Consider this next time someone calls you “the quiet one” or “the smart one.” You are at least seventeen stories, minimum.
Meg Jay, Why 30 Is Not the New 20
“Twenty-somethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.”
→ Except at seventeen, your plane is still being built. Also, you lost your boarding pass. Also, the airport is on fire.
Susan Cain, The Power of Introverts
“There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”
→ A formal apology to every group project I've ever been in. I should have let the quiet person speak first.
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Cartoons & Doodles
Study Group: “I'm a great group partner. Very low maintenance.”
The Mirror Test: Junior year is a long dress rehearsal for a job you haven't been hired for yet.
Library Shadows: Students reading. Their shadows morph into book characters.
Hallway Pastoral: Two students walk. Their shadows stretch in opposite directions.
Desk Archaeology: A school desk from above.
The Daydreamer: Thought bubble contains a library, a flying fish, and a teapot.
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Who Made This, and How
By Staff
Tina: Writes from the bathroom floor. Has strong opinions about humidity. Currently growing out her bangs for the third time.
Yuki: Spent a semester in Tokyo learning to apologize to inanimate objects. Recommends it. Will trade tea whisking tips for algebra help.
Nadia: Embroiders in the margins of her notebooks. Claims this is “note-taking.” Her grandmother remains unconvinced.
Sophia: Gets choked out twice a week and calls it “training.” Has tapped out of more group projects than she can count. Not sorry.
Lin Wei: Talks to walls. The walls, reportedly, talk back. Is currently investigating whether school corridors hum in B-flat or just existential dread.
The Bookworm: Official mascot. Wears tiny round glasses. Has read every book in the library and most of the cafeteria menus. Currently working on a dissertation about footnotes.
The Senior Thesis (Quietly) is set in Times New Roman, because we don't have the budget for Adobe Caslon. The paper is whatever we could find in the recycling bin near the chemistry lab. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the school administration, which has not read this and probably won't. © 2026 The Senior Thesis (Quietly). No rights reserved. Except the tea bowl.
Cover art: Mixed media collage. Visuals: Student photography/art combined with AI-assisted mockups for layout prototyping.
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A pencil, taking root.
you're doing fine
even if you forgot your chem homework again.