The tense competition among grades that occurs during spirit week is the driving force of the fully-fledged school spirit that arises in every Magnet student. Undoubtedly, the powerful school pride begins with the mere mention of battling with other grades. With last spirit week’s antics, the staff at Magnet hopes to calm down the ferocious competition and bring less chaos for Coming Home.

Unity Day: A new theme for spirit week that hopes to create a unified student body by wearing Magnet attire. The big question, though, is if this one day dedicated to the union of all grades will have any effect on lessening the competitive spirit of the school. Will simply wearing Magnet merch bring everyone together peacefully? And will this particular day become a new tradition for the school? Hopefully there will be positive effects, but as of now, it appears that the teachers are more excited for this day than the students.

Another notable moment from last spirit week was the fact that Wall Day caused quite a bit of controversy, but faculty hopes to prevent any more unplanned incidents with this spirit week. One of the problems from last time was that cleanup for Wall Day was unfortunately not carried out completely by the students who initially put up the decorations. This brought up the issue that the materials used to make up most of the Walls, including paper and tape, are all items that can’t be reused and are going to waste. There is some truth in saying that all these materials are being wasted since they are only used for a couple of hours and then immediately thrown away, but Wall Day only happens twice every school year and should be an exception for this waste. Faculty have also suggested that each grade’s Wall Day theme should correlate with a community service project so that the students will be able to give back for the all of the things that the used up for their Walls. At first, this may seem to take away from the fun of spirit week, but its original purpose does tie into the principles of spirit week since it incorporates students’ school pride into the community. And there’s never anything wrong with giving back to others who don’t go to our school.

It’s easy to say that students are at least going to try to be more careful this time around. Hopefully we’ll all be more mindful of cleaning up after the festivities so that we won’t leave the school’s janitors to pick up our mess, and some grades are at least planning on doing community service along with their wall theme. It’s hard to say if the competitiveness levels will actually be more manageable this week, but it’s important for all of us to keep in mind that we should make good choices on Friday. Of course we shouldn’t forget that competition drives the very essence of spirit week, and that there’s no harm in having a little fun by competing with other grades.